'The better part of valour is discretion; in the which better part I have saved my life'
Falstaff, getting up from playing dead at Shrewsbury
Shakespeare · Histories
Henry IV, Part 1
c. 1596–97
History — the second play of the second tetralogy, and the first Falstaff play
The usurper of Richard II is now on the throne and beset by rebels, while his heir wastes his time in an Eastcheap tavern with a fat, lying, cowardly and irresistible knight. The play cuts between court, tavern and rebel camp, setting the prince's tavern-father against his real one, and ends at the Battle of Shrewsbury in 1403, where the prince kills the rebel Hotspur and the knight plays dead, then stabs the corpse and claims the credit. It is the play that made Falstaff the most popular comic character on the Elizabethan stage.
How to spot them
- ▸The Boar's Head Tavern in Eastcheap, and a highway robbery at Gad's Hill
- ▸A fat knight who lies, drinks sack and disposes of honour in a catechism
- ▸A prince who tells the audience in Act 1 that he intends to reform
- ▸A Welsh magician, a Northumberland firebrand and a map of England divided in three
- ▸The Battle of Shrewsbury, 1403
Scenes, characters & lines
'I know you all, and will awhile uphold The unyoked humour of your idleness'
The prince's first soliloquy, promising a redemption he has already calculated
The robbery at Gad's Hill, and the growing story of the men in buckram
Two becomes four becomes seven becomes eleven, all in one speech
'I can call spirits from the vasty deep' — 'Why, so can I, or so can any man'
Owen Glendower's boasting punctured by Hotspur
'What is honour? A word. What is in that word, honour? What is that honour? Air'
The catechism on the battlefield
'Banish plump Jack, and banish all the world'
From the tavern scene in which the knight and the prince take turns playing the king
Three rebels divide England between them on a map, and quarrel about the course of a river
The Archdeacon's house in Bangor
A knight offers a dead rebel's body as his own kill, having stabbed the corpse in the thigh
'Lord, lord, how this world is given to lying!'
Key ideas
- The play gives the prince two fathers, a king and a tavern knight, and the whole sequence is about which one he must destroy
- Hotspur was historically older than the king himself; Shakespeare makes him the prince's contemporary so that the two can be rivals
Quick-fire facts
- •Falstaff was originally called Sir John Oldcastle, and was renamed after protests from Oldcastle's descendants, the Cobham family; traces survive in the phrase 'my old lad of the castle' and in the epilogue to Part 2, which insists 'Oldcastle died a martyr, and this is not the man'
- •Hotspur is Henry Percy, son of the Earl of Northumberland; the Welsh rebel is Owain Glyndŵr, Shakespeare's Owen Glendower
- •The Battle of Shrewsbury was fought on 21 July 1403; in the play the prince kills Hotspur in single combat, which is not historical
- •The tavern is the Boar's Head in Eastcheap, kept by Mistress Quickly; Falstaff's companions are Bardolph, Peto and Poins
- •It was among the most popular of Shakespeare's plays in his lifetime, going through seven quarto editions before 1640
- •Orson Welles's Chimes at Midnight (1965) splices the Falstaff scenes of both parts, Henry V and The Merry Wives into one film, with Welles as Falstaff
- •Gus Van Sant's My Own Private Idaho (1991) transposes the prince-and-Falstaff relationship to street hustlers in Portland
- •The BBC's The Hollow Crown (2012) cast Jeremy Irons as the king, Tom Hiddleston as the prince and Simon Russell Beale as Falstaff
Drill it — 9 cards
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Sources
- Folger Shakespeare Library — Henry IV, Part 1
- David Scott Kastan (ed.) — King Henry IV Part 1 (The Arden Shakespeare, Third Series)