Part Two, then, is arguably a sequel that need not rely on Part One to be understood. As early as 1746, John Upton insisted that ‘these plays are independent each of the other. … To call [them], first and second parts, is as injurious to the author-character of Shakespeare as it would be to Sophocles, to call his two plays on Oedipus, first and second parts of King Oedipus’.8 Certainly the earliest editions of Part One made no mention of an anticipated sequel: they billed the play simply as The History of Henrie the Fourth, a title which it retained up to the publication of the Folio in 1623, when it was called The First Part, and which would be used in reversion in the 1639 Quarto.9 Leah Marcus argues that the ‘unifying’ terms Part One and Part Two used in the Folio, just as with the three parts of Henry VI, mark the beginning of an attempt to transform ‘the playtexts from records of performance to a form of literature in its own right’ (Marcus, 26). In other words, the impulse to view the two plays as one was literary in origin but had little bearing on how they might have been viewed by early audiences. As an instructive counter-example, David Kastan cites the way in which the two parts of Tamburlaine were marketed and published in the 1590 Quarto as one work ‘divided into Two Tragicall Discourses’ (1H4, 21–2). Quarto publications of the two Henry IV plays, on the contrary, remained entirely discrete enterprises, suggesting that they were not seen as one work divided into two parts. There is no evidence that they were ever printed together prior to publication of the Folio.

  Nonetheless, Part Two bears so strong a resemblance to Part One that it could never have been written without it, leading Samuel Johnson in his 1765 edition to object,

  Mr Upton thinks these two plays improperly called the first and second parts of Henry the fourth … [yet they] will appear to every reader, who shall peruse them without ambition of critical discoveries, to be so connected that the second is merely a sequel to the first; to be two only because they are too long to be one.10

  Nine years later, Edward Capell ventured further that ‘both these plays appear to have been plan’d at the same time, and with great judgement’.11 Granted, the historical events chronicled in the two plays are sequential, and some of the episodes and characters in Part Two are undoubtedly enriched by knowledge of those in Part One. Any justification for the new King’s rejection of Falstaff, for example, looks back most searchingly to their relationship in Part One, in which the Prince’s close bond with Falstaff formed the emotional core of the play. Without a knowledge of that relationship, audiences at Part Two find Falstaff’s rejection less explicably motivated and less poignant. Furthermore, why would Part One have included an otherwise extraneous scene of the Archbishop’s attempt to reinforce his ‘confederacy’ late in the play (4.4) had Shakespeare not been planning a sequel featuring continued rebellion in the kingdom? And why would the King, in his final speech (5.5.35 –8), determine to send Prince John and Westmorland to York to thwart that rebellion?

  In 1943, John Dover Wilson, citing Dr Johnson, speculated that the two plays must have been planned together with ‘unity and continuity’ in mind, since Part Two, clearly ‘a continuation of the same play … is itself unintelligible without Part I’.12 Just a year later, E.M.W. Tillyard, advancing a providential reading of English history which he termed the Tudor Myth, contended in a highly influential study of Shakespeare’s English histories as a cycle of plays that the two Henry IV plays are so intertwined, and their significance so dependent on events dramatized in the two plays that bookend them (Richard II and Henry V), that they cannot be properly understood unless read together as one history (Tillyard, 234 – 44, 264).13 The work of Dover Wilson and Tillyard has been enormously influential on subsequent criticism, so much so that since the mid-twentieth century, Part Two has almost never been written about or performed without Part One.

  A theory of composition advanced by Harold Jenkins in 1955 comes close to effecting a reconciliation between the opposing views of Upton and Johnson. He proposes that Shakespeare set out to write one Henry IV play and was quite far along in drafting it – into Act 3 of what is now Part One – when, realizing that he had too much material for one play, he decided to divide the material into two plays, allowing the Battle of Shrewsbury to conclude the first and thereby saving the consequences of Prince Harry’s reformation – his deathbed reconciliation with his father, his coronation as Henry V and the repudiation of his tavern companions – for the second. Such a division would allow Shakespeare to increase the scope of the comic scenes in both plays and to foreground the exploits of Falstaff, who had grown ‘out of all compass’ in his early draft (1H4 3.3.20; cf. Wilson, ‘Origins’, 15). The merit of Jenkins’s theory is that it helps to explain inconsistencies between the two plays that otherwise remain inexplicable. It explains, for instance, why there is so little chronicle history dramatized in Part Two, where, if Shakespeare had planned two plays from the outset, he surely would not have envisioned a history play in which so little of political significance happens and in which more than half the lines are taken up with unhistorical and episodic comedy.

  It also helps to account for the anomalous setting of Justice Shallow’s farm in Gloucestershire. Falstaff would presumably recruit soldiers along the Great North Road, a coaching route between London and York that today is followed by the A1, if he were marching to meet Prince John in Yorkshire; and a reference to Stamford fair at 3.2.38 suggests that Shakespeare might once have had Lincolnshire in mind as the location of Shallow’s farm. But repeated references to people and places in the West Midlands – to Will Squele, a Cotsole (i.e. Cotswold) man (3.2.21); Thomas Wart (137); Hinckley Fair (5.1.23); and two litigants with Gloucestershire roots, William Visor of Woncote and Clement Perkes a’th’ hill (5.1.36 –7) – confirm that Falstaff’s request to return to London from York via Gloucestershire at 4.2.79 –80, however incongruous, is not an error: he has indeed marched through Gloucestershire to recruit soldiers for wars in the north. If scenes at Shallow’s farm had originally been intended for inclusion in the play now known as Part One, however, this apparent inconsistency becomes suddenly explicable, for Falstaff’s stopping to recruit a charge of foot in the West Midlands on his march to Shrewsbury would have made perfect sense. Furthermore, three of the men he enlists in Part Two – Shadow, Wart, Feeble – are humorous incarnations of the ‘scarecrows’ and ‘slaves as ragged as Lazarus’ whom Falstaff admits to recruiting in Part One after he has allowed the more able, affluent, but cowardly ‘yeomen’s sons’ and ‘contracted bachelors’ to bribe their way out of military service (4.2.13–37). In other words, as Kristian Smidt suggests (111–12), by transferring Gloucestershire scenes from the original draft of a single Henry IV play to a second part less driven by chronicle sources, Shakespeare gained the space to develop Falstaff’s recruitment of soldiers and exploitation of Justice Shallow as an independent plot, even if he failed to adjust the location of Shallow’s farm northward; and he replaced the recruiting scene he had written to precede the Battle of Shrewsbury with a much shorter soliloquy in which Falstaff cynically confesses to having ‘misused the King’s press damnably’ (Part One 4.2.12–13).

  In his 1966 Arden edition of the play, A.R. Humphreys counters Jenkins’s theory by arguing that, given the parallels between Prince Hal and Hotspur upon which Part One is structured, Shakespeare must have planned Hal’s victory over Hotspur at Shrewsbury as the climax of the play (xxiv). Humphreys argues less persuasively that Shakespeare intended from the outset that the Prince’s coronation and his rejection of Falstaff should conclude a second play: in other words, that the two parts were planned together as distinct but co-ordinated plays. It is possible to reconcile Jenkins’s and Humphreys’s positions, however, by examining the possibility, as Samuel Johnson was the first to do,14 that while the first Henry IV play was always planned as the play that came to be called The First Part in the Folio, the second play Shakespeare originally envisioned would have begun with the King’s death, the Prince’s coronation and the rejection of Falstaff (at that point called Oldcastle), and then proceeded to dramatize events in the reign of Henry V, as is done in Shakespeare’s chief dramatic source, a hybrid-history called The Famous Victories of Henry the Fifth.

  Entered in the Stationers’ Register in 1594 and printed by Thomas Creede in 1598 but performed by the Queen’s Men as much as ten years earlier, Famous Victories, even in the corrupted state in which it has survived, reveals a sure sense of how to animate the scattered materials of the wild Prince legend ‘through the medium of comic drama’ (Bevington, 20) which proved enormously influential on Shakespeare’s Henry IV plays. The first half of the play depicts the Prince as a wastrel who, with his boon companions Oldcastle, Ned and Tom, takes part in a robbery, visits his father with possibly parricidal intent, but eventually – and unexpectedly – repents. The Prince’s repentance is followed by a brief episode in which he takes the crown from his sleeping father and, pleading his innocence in doing so, earns the dying King’s blessing. Though this story of reformation is uncomplicated by any history of rebellion against the King (Corbin & Sedge, 22), it clearly provided the comic core for Part One and modelled tensions in the royal family for Part Two.

  The second half of Famous Victories dramatizes the reign of Henry V from his accession to the throne, rejection of his erstwhile companions and humorous response to the provocative gift of tennis balls from the ‘Lord Prince Dolphin’ (all in one scene), through his victory at Agincourt, to a peace accord with the French and the promise of Katherine’s hand in marriage. The play thus falls quite neatly into two discrete sections, one depicting the Prince’s madcap youth and reformation, the other his victory over the French; and given the apparently truncated nature of the text, it is conceivable that Famous Victories was itself originally performed as a two-part play, with the first part corresponding roughly to Shakespeare’s Part One with some overlap with Part Two; the second, in compressed form, to the final act and one-half of Part Two and to Henry V.15 Its most significant influence on Shakespeare seems to have been structural – on his decision to write an indecorous hybrid-history unlike the histories he had written before, mixing scenes of chronicle material with low comedy, and on his conception of a bipartite play in which to dramatize the evolution of Harry from prodigal prince to legendary king.

  My own view is that the original Henry IV play was always planned to end with the Battle of Shrewsbury, and that its sequel – perhaps to be called Henry V – was to have begun with events now dramatized in the last act and one-half of Part Two and continued through the reign of Henry V;16 but that the second play Shakespeare wrote took shape only when he realized that he had too much comic material to include in the first play, excised some of it, and then, when Henry IV proved hugely successful in performance, decided to write a sequel which would foreground the exploits of Falstaff and his followers, recuperate some of the excised material and conclude with the death of the King, the Prince’s accession to the throne and his rejection of Falstaff, leaving the reign of Henry V for a third play. Only at this point, I believe, did he mine Holinshed for another rebellion from which to fashion a political plot for Part Two and insert in Part One the anticipatory references to the Prelate’s Rebellion mentioned earlier. This theory explains what is otherwise nearly inexplicable: why, if Henry IV was originally conceived as a two-part play, Shakespeare saved so little chronicle history for the second part, deprived it of the narrative coherence of the first part, opted for a more discursive structure and echoed so many of the comic scenes and situations from Part One in a much darker and more cynical vein. It would be odd indeed for Shakespeare to have planned the two parts to be so different from one another in tone if he intended them to tell one story.

  Moreover, an unforeseen decision to write an opportunistic sequel focusing on Falstaff – a decision that caused him to abandon, or at least defer, the play about Henry V he had initially contemplated – would explain why, suddenly unencumbered by the prescribed history of the Prince’s reformation, Shakespeare chose to dramatize a minor rebellion in Holinshed whose quashing would illustrate an unsavoury political calculation alien to the chivalric ethos on display at Shrewsbury; why he found himself free to explore a wider spectrum of society than any chronicle source examined and to flesh out the play with characters and situations of his own devising; in sum, why he was at liberty to construct a truly original history play which foregrounds those marginalized groups that comprised the vast majority of Elizabethan society and whose actions could comically counterpoint events depicted in the play’s more sober scenes of chronicle history.

  THE PLAY IN PERFORMANCE

  Part Two as an autonomous play

  The history of Part Two in performance is bound up with the debate over its origins: whether one perceives Henry IV as two distinct plays, as one ten-act play in two parts or as two chapters in a larger cycle of plays. Can Part Two survive in the theatre as an autonomous work with its own special character, or must it be played as part of a longer historical narrative, a cog in the wheel of the Plantagenet family saga? There is no evidence that the two parts were performed consecutively – that is, on successive days – during Shakespeare’s lifetime (Crane, 291–5; Yachnin, 163–79); and the one piece of documented evidence that they were performed in proximity to one another, to celebrate the marriage of Princess Elizabeth to the Elector Palatine during the festival season at Whitehall in 1612/13, refers to them not as Henry IV plays but by the names of characters who had no doubt proved most popular in each one, The Hotspur and Sir Iohn Falstaffe,17 suggesting that the focus had been not so much on the plays’ historical continuity as on those flamboyant figures who had captured theatregoers’ imaginations. Tellingly, the title-page of the Quarto edition of Part Two (1600) provides evidence of the popularity of the play’s ‘humourists’ by advertising ‘the humours of sir Iohn Fal-staffe, and swaggering Pistoll’.

  While many in Shakespeare’s audience might already have seen Part One and thus been able to bring to Part Two the knowledge of a larger historical frame – a knowledge which of course can deepen one’s appreciation of both plays – Part Two in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries probably held the stage as an autonomous play. For although Part Two is essentially parasitic and, like any sequel, would not have been written without an original to serve as a template, it is not required that the two be played together for the sequel to be understood. Even a superficial knowledge of the history of Henry IV’s reign – his usurpation of Richard’s throne, his defeat of the northern rebels and his fraught relationship with the Prince of Wales – would have been sufficient to draw an audience into the action of Part Two; and while much has been made of the play’s beginning in medias res, with contradictory reports being brought to Northumberland about what has happened to Hotspur and the rebel forces at the Battle of Shrewsbury, Rumour’s abbreviated history of events would have sufficed to inform audiences what had occurred before the play, if such were necessary. Thus the opening scene would have proved no more confusing than the opening scene of Richard II, in which Mowbray’s complicity in the murder of Richard’s uncle Thomas of Woodstock, if not known beforehand, could be figured out by accusations levelled against him by Bolingbroke; or the opening scene of Part One, in which the causes of the conflict between Henry, his northern supporters and those who remained loyal to Richard may be gleaned from the dialogue between the King and Westmorland. The opening of Part Two should have proved no less penetrable: those spectators who had seen Part One would have recognized the ironies of the false reports brought to Northumberland; those who had not would have been in the same situation as Northumberland himself and learned with him to distinguish true from false report.

  All this suggests that Part Two could have been acted effectively without being paired with Part One, just as Part One often was performed on its own. There is no evidence that the two were ever performed together in a public theatre, on the same or on consecutive days, until the eighteenth century.18 Indeed, to the degree that Part Two held the stage at all until the twentieth century, it did so for the most part independently of Part One. When it was first revived after the Restoration, by Thomas Betterton in 1704, Falstaff had already assumed a life beyond the confines of his role in the histories. His evolution had begun early, with Shakespeare’s writing of The Merry Wives of Windsor to capitalize on Falstaff’s popularity by depicting him as an Elizabethan roué. During the closure of the theatres in the mid-seventeenth century, a short droll called The Bouncing Knight, excerpted from scenes in Part One, kept Falstaff before the public eye (Potter, 287, and Kastan, 1H4, 80 –1); and when theatres reopened after the Restoration, both Part One and Merry Wives proved immediately popular. Falstaff was becoming a legend in his own right. Betterton’s success in exploiting the humorous potential of the fat knight in Part One (he had earlier played Hotspur) no doubt inspired him to increase his profits by offering another star vehicle – Part Two – featuring ‘the Humours of Sir John Falstaffe, and Justice Shallow’ (The Sequel, title-page).