Shakespeare's breakthrough in Henry IV

The control of lyricism, the mixture of light and dark, and the realism of lowly characters.

In the first stage of his career, Shakespeare wrote plays like The Taming of the Shrew, the three parts of Henry VI, Titus Andronicus, and Richard III. There are many good works here, but nothing that makes him the centre of the English canon. In 1593, a plague outbreak closed the theatres. Shakespeare wrote poetry—Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece. It was a poetic time. The lyrical mode was ascendant in that particularly Elizabethan sort of luscious, florid poetry.

When the theatres re-opened, this lyricism flowered through Shakespeare’s plays. Works of energy and youth like Romeo and Juliet, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and Love’s Labour’s Lost mark a new phase in his writing. The conventions and tropes of 1590s poetry are mocked, adopted, parodied, and reinvented. Writers like John Lyly and Philip Sydney are imitated and superseded. It wasn’t just Marlowe who Shakespeare out-competed.

But The crush of language in these plays is still not quite the quality Shakespeare discovered in his later works. There is too much complexity, prolixity, and profusion; he is ornamental, playful, rococo. The terse magnificence of Hamlet, Lear, The Tempest, Twelfth Night is not yet arrived. The genius of Shakespeare is to excel in all modes of writing.

The next turning point was in 1596, with the writing of Henry IV, part one, his most popular play. We can see three significant changes. The control of lyricism, the mixture of light and dark, and the realism of lowly characters.