INTRODUCTION

NOTE. In citations from Shakespeare's plays and nondramatic poems the numbering has reference to the Globe edition, except in the case of this play, where the reference is to this edition.

I. SOURCES

The ultimate source of all Shakespeare's plays which are based directly on English history, is that fervor of national enthusiasm which characterized the closing decade of the sixteenth century in England. It is significant that the serious Elizabethan drama began in patriotism and had a distinct political motive. The perils and difficulties of a nation rent asunder by bitterly opposing factions confronted Queen Elizabeth at the beginning of her reign, and when Thomas Sackville and Thomas Norton, both of them soon to be recognized as shrewd political leaders, wrote Gorboduc, the first regular English tragedy, their main object was to warn the English people of the danger in a kingdom divided against itself and to show the maiden queen the perils involved in uncertainty as to legitimate succession to a throne. The story material of Gorboduc was taken from British legendary history, and blank verse, destined to be the great national measure, was here used for the first time in an original English play. With the steady growth of national spirit developed the taste for chronicle plays dealing with the history of the nation in its formative period. The national

drama grew up with the increasing pride of nation. In the defeat of the Armada this national consciousness reached full tide, and when Shakespeare began to write for the stage, the chronicle play dealing with stirring moments in the story of Britain was the dominant type of serious drama. Alert and sensitive to contemporary influences, as a popular writer for the theatre must be, Shakespeare wrote ten history plays, which, beginning in imitation and collaboration, show steadily increasing power and originality till they culminate in a supreme trilogy-two plays on the reign of Henry the Fourth and one on that of Henry the Fifth, the hero king who won the battle of Agincourt.

THE POLITICAL ACTION

1. Holinshed's Chronicles.1 As in his other plays dealing with English history, Shakespeare derived the great body of his material for King Henry the Fourth from the Chronicles of England, Scotland, and Ireland, of Raphael Holinshed (Holynshed, Hollynshed, Hollingshead, etc.), first published in two folio volumes in 1577. A second edition appeared in 1586-1587, "newlie augmented and continued." In this second edition are many significant changes in the text, and the fact that Shakespeare adopts these strengthens the conclusion that this.

1 In W. G. Boswell-Stone's Shakspere's Holinshed are given all the portions of the Chronicles which are of special interest to the student of Shakespeare.

2 For example, 'pick-thanks,' used by Shakespeare in III, ii, 25, is found only in the second edition of the Chronicles. Boswell-Stone gives many proofs of this kind from the various plays in which Shakespeare takes material directly from Holinshed.

was the edition used by him. It is interesting to find that many of Holinshed's inaccuracies are repeated in the play. Among these may be mentioned the confusing of Edward Mortimer, the second son of the first Earl of March, with his nephew, the Earl of March, who was legitimate heir to the throne (I, iii, 84, see note), and the naming of the Earl of Fife as son to the conquered Douglas (I, i, 71–72, see note). Everywhere in King Henry the Fourth the source material is treated with much more freedom than in the case of the earlier history plays, such as King Richard the Second. Among the more striking deviations from the Chronicles are: (1) the change in the ages of King Henry and Hotspur, who for the purpose of dramatic contrast is made exactly the same age as Prince Henry; (2) the shifting of the reconciliation between the king and the prince (III, ii) to a much earlier period than Holinshed allows; (3) the representation of the prince as the rescuer of his father and the victor over Hotspur (V, iv); (4) the absence of Glendower and his Welsh adherents from the battle of Shrewsbury; and (5) the introduction of Prince John of Lancaster, Lady Percy, and Lady Mortimer, who are not mentioned by Holinshed in the narrative of the first part of the Percy rebellion. Some of these changes were probably due to the influence of Daniel, who in the fourth book of his epic poem, The Civil Wars (see below), traverses the same historical ground and arranges his matter as a poet would. Shakespeare's deviations from Holinshed and from the bald facts of history are in the interests of dramatic economy, dramatic time, and artistic effectiveness. The essential facts are not altered. He deals with source

material as Scott did in his historical novels, and as Turner treated the features of a landscape in his pictures of places. Shakespeare selects and arranges details to get the spirit of a movement and the imaginative truth of a series of events.

2. Hall's Chronicle. For not a few of the minor incidents and details of his historical plays Shakespeare draws on what is usually called Hall's Chronicle, the original title of which is The Union of the Noble and Illustre Famelies of Lancastre and York, by Edward Hall (Halle), first published in 1542. In at least one passage in King Henry the Fourth, Part I (III, i, 149-150), is obvious indebtedness to this source. While Holinshed reports “a vaine prophesie, as though King Henrie was the moldwarpe . . . and they three were the dragon, the lion, and the woolfe, which should diuide this realme betweene them," no mention is made of Merlin. In Hall's Chronicle is this passage: "a certayne writer writeth that this earle of Marche, the Lorde Percy and Owen Glendor wer vnwyśely made beleue by a Welsh Prophecier that king Henry was the Moldwarpe . . . by the deuiacion and not deuinacion of that mawmet1 Merlyne." Merlin is also credited with the prophecy in The Legend of Glendour in The Mirrour for Magistrates, 1559.

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3. Stow's Annals. Another of Shakespeare's source books in English history is Annales, or a General Chronicle of England from Brut until the present yeare of Christ, 1580, by John Stow (Stowe). Stow, one of the early editors of Chaucer, was a diligent historian and antiquary, and assisted in the continuation of Holinshed's Chron

1 Cf. II, iii, 91.

icles. In the Annals he gives some details of the "recreation" robberies in which Prince Henry indulged, and says: "accompanied with some of his yong Lords and gentlemen, he would wait in disguised aray for his owne receiuers, and distresse them of their money; and sometimes at such enterprises both he and his company were surely beaten and when his receiuers made to him their complaints how they were robbed in their comming vnto him, hee would give them discharge of so much money as they had lost; and, besides that, they should not depart from him without great rewards for their trouble and vexation." So in II, iv, 540-541, Shakespeare makes Prince Henry say in regard to the booty taken from the travelers on Gadshill, "The money shall be paid back again with advantage."

4. Daniel's Civil Wars. Entered in The Stationers' Registers, October, 1594, and published in the following year, was an interesting historical poem in ottava rima by Samuel Daniel, entitled The First Four Bookes of the Civil Warres between the Howses of Lancaster and Yorke. In the fourth book the subject is the reign of Henry the Fourth, and here Shakespeare's more noteworthy deviations from Holinshed, mentioned above, are anticipated. In a remarkable passage, too, Daniel refers to "wrongrevenging Nemesis" dogging the king because he is an usurper-a significant suggestion of the brooding fears which Shakespeare attributes to him (III, ii, 4-7) as the result of what in King Henry the Fourth, Part II (IV, v, 185-186), he is made to describe as the "by-paths and indirect crook'd ways I met this crown."