Abstract
The issue of the ‘structural problem’ of the Henry IV plays seems still to attract the attention of critics. In a recent article, Paul Yachnin has taken up the subject once again, remarking that those critics who have argued for the unity of the two plays have normally not developed ‘the idea of sequence into an interpretive approach’.1 Starting from what are considered discrepancies in the sequence (Hal’s two reformations being the main one), Yachnin adopts an interpretative model which, far from viewing change as an element producing discontinuity, ‘includes change as the central condition of the production of meaning’2 and in the second play shows a revisionist attitude which, he holds, works as a critique and even as an undoing of the first.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
P. Yachnin, ‘History, Theatricality and the “Structural Problem” in the Henry IV Plays’, Philological Quarterly LXX (1991), 163–79, p. 164.
Recently, the ‘structural problem’ has been discussed also by S. Hawkins, ‘Structural pattern in Shakespeare’s histories’, Studies in Philology LXXXVIII (1991), 16–45.
In the wake of Dover Wilson (ed.), 1 Henry IV (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1946) and Tillyard (op. cit.), Sherman Hawkins has restated this claim, speaking of ‘a premeditated second part’ (’Henry IV: the Structural Problem Revisited’, SQ XXXIII [1982], 278–301, p. 281). In his later essay (’Structural Pattern’) Hawkins is less exvlicit on this noint.
H. Jenkins, The Structural Problem in Shakespeare’s ‘Henry IV’ (London: Methuen, 1956), p. 26.
This claim, like many others in this book, is certainly of the kind that would be challenged by Richard Levin as an ‘ironic’ reading. Levin’s article on ‘Performance-critics vs Close Readers in the Study of English Renaissance Drama’, MLR LXXXI (1986), 545–59, has raised in radical (although ironic) terms the serious question of the spectator’s perception as different from the reader’s. His conclusion against the extremities of both performance-critics and ironic readers, however, leaves the issue unsolved. Granted, as Anthony Dawson argues, that performances cannot deliver, and audiences cannot ‘absorb, the same kind of meaning that reading can produce’ (’ The Impasse Over the Stage’, ELR XXI [1991], 309–27, p. 317), one fails to see why criticism should not construct readers’ (ironic) meanings and why a performance should not use those — and other — hidden, implied, indirect or even possible meanings and convey them with its own communicative tools. On this topic, see H. Berger, Imaginary Audition (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989).
See M. Hunt, ‘Time and Timelessness in 1 Henry IV’, Explorations in Renaissance Culture X (1984), 56–66.
The editor of the Arden edition, A. R. Humphreys explains ‘squires … beauty’ as ‘Since we serve the night’s excitements, do not complain that we are inactive by day’; he also signals a possible pun ‘night— knight’: “’Squires of the body” were a nobleman’s attendants.’ But perhaps the most interesting passage of Falstaff’s speech is the possible topical allusion to Elizabeth—Diana, ‘our noble and chaste mistress, the moon’; Falstaff alludes to some form of royal protection in the play’s situation (’under whose countenance we steal’) and to its legitimation in the future when Hal will be king. Kastan comments on these lines, saying that ‘for Falstaff this is not a submission to authority but an authorization of transgressiori. “’The King has Many Marching in His Coat”: or, What Did You Do During the War, Daddy7’, in I. Kamps, (ed.), Shakespeare Left and Right (London: Routledge, 1991), pp. 241–58, 248.
E. P. Thompson argued that ‘in general, the populace has little predictive notion of time’. ‘Eighteenth-century English Society: Class Struggle without Class?’, Social History III (1978), 133–65, p. 158.
Certain editors also suggest that the connection may lie in ‘Francis’s busy-ness, or his limitation of ideas’ (Humphreys); or that ‘Perhaps, too, this thought of Hotspur is prompted by Francis’s feverish activity’. D. Bevington, Henry IV Part 1 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987).
Bevington suggests that ‘Like Francis, Hal is being pulled simultaneously in two directions, and has not devised as yet a better response than Francis’s own “Anon, anon, sir!” ’ (ibid., p. 60); interpretations of the passage are in M. Rose, Shakespearean Design (Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1972), pp. 50 ff.;
Sheldon P. Zitner, ‘Anon, Anon: or, a Mirror for a Magistrate’, SQ XIX (1968), 63–70; Tillyard, op. cit., p. 275.
Melchiori’s reading in the footnote to this passage in G. Melchiori, The Second Part of King Henry IV (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989).
The modern meaning is reported in the OED as first occurring after the 1688 revolution. As I have shown elsewhere (P. Pugliatti, ‘Shakespeare’s names for rebellion’, in C. Nocera Avila, N. Pantaleo and D. Pezzini [eds], Early Modern English: Trends, Forms and Texts [Fasano: Schena, 1992], 81–93), it seems that the transition from a conservative meaning, deriving from astrology and indicating a revolving movement leading back to the starting point, to the modern one indicating a sudden breach with the past, was achieved through an intermediary phase where the word started to mean a ‘change in condition’. In its five occurrences in Shakespeare’s canon (Hamlet, V.i.88, Antony and Cleopatra, I.ii.125, Love’s Labour’s Lost IV.ii.68, Son. 59.12 and the one I am discussing here), the word seems to me to be well on its way to the modern meaning. It is quite possible, therefore, that the semantic change in English is to be attributed to Shakespeare.
Christopher Hill has shown that the word acquired its modern political implications long before the 1688 revolution. ‘The Word Revolution’, in A Nation of Change and Novelty (London: Routledge, 1990), pp. 82–101.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Copyright information
© 1996 Paola Pugliatti
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Pugliatti, P. (1996). Time, Space and the Instability of History in the Henry IV Sequence. In: Shakespeare the Historian. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230373747_8
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230373747_8
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-39425-8
Online ISBN: 978-0-230-37374-7
eBook Packages: Palgrave Literature & Performing Arts CollectionLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)