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 Writers like John Lyly and Philip Sydney are imitated and superseded.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.

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The control of lyricism

Richard II, the previous history play, is entirely in verse, most of it rhymed. Henry IV is half in prose. This is a play of the vernacular. Falstaff’s prose speeches (prose poems, often) balance poetic lyricism and ordinary talk. Hotspur, as Frank Kermode says in Shakespeare’s Language, has the eloquence of an “anti-poet”. As with his contemporary John Donne, a new art was being made of roughness, hardness, concision. Hotspur hates “mincing poetry”—“I had rather be a kitten and cry mew/ Than one of these same metre ballad-mongers”. But he has a poetry all of his own.

Came there a certain lord, neat, and trimly dress’d,
Fresh as a bridegroom; and his chin new reap’d
Show’d like a stubble-land at harvest-home;
He was perfumed like a milliner;
And ’twixt his finger and his thumb he held
A pouncet-box

Hotspur turns lyricism to gruff masculine uses. He is ungentle but makes unforgettable feminine similes: fresh as a bridegroom, perfumed like a milliner. What was excessive in Love’s Labour’s Lost and sentimental in Richard II is now taut, terse, gem-like. The compact intensity of Hamlet beckons. Shakespeare no longer rattles off puns and metaphors for their own sake, but keeps the action moving, establishes and expands the psychological dynamic. With his control of lyricism, he has married form and content more perfectly than before.

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The light and the dark

Shakespeare was criticised for “mingling kings and clowns” and disobeying the rules of drama. In Henry IV, he goes further and writes a character we cannot decide how to read. In The Chimes at Midnight, Falstaff is a melancholy figure; in The Hollow Crown he is voluptuously comic. One reading has him and Hal bantering antagonistically from the start; another has them as the twin ministers of joy. Falstaff contains all of this. The more we read him, the more clearly we see that this spirit of life, this lord of misrule, has an essence of deep ambiguity.

Throughout the Henriad, this co-mixture is writ large. Hal takes a comic path, which resolves in his ascent to the throne and victory in battle; Falstaff takes a tragic one, dying, literally, of a broken heart. From now on, Shakespeare becomes a true master of problematic, tragi-comic plays. In Twelfth Night, the honest mockery of Malvolio has a troubling ending. Plays like The Winter’s Tale could end in multiple ways. It is notable that Henry IV was written at the same time as The Merchant of Venice and Much Ado About Nothing, two plays that resist classification.

With Shylock, Shakespeare makes us sympathise with a supposedly villainous character, before a dark, anti-Semitic ending. Benedick and Beatrice have a bantering relationship until the scene in the church, a chilling moment. This ability to blend the darkness and the light is a major breakthrough and seen most distinctly in Falstaff, a character we are compelled to love and hate, to sympathise with and to disagree with.

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Lowly realism

Finally, Shakespeare begins to write his minor, low-life characters most fully in this play. Think of the ostler, Poins and Bardolf, Mistress Quickly, and in part two, Doll Tearsheet. These are not types or cliches, but full realised characters, despite being small parts and people of low social status. So often in Shakespeare, an actor can have a great part with only a handful of lines. Think of Maria in Twelfth Night, Trinculo in The Tempest, Osric in Hamlet, Bianca in Othello. There have been such characters before, like the murderers in Richard III, but Poins and Bardolf and Pistol (from part two) become central to how we understand the Henriad, especially in Henry V, and they are fully realised individuals. As the Henriad moves on to Henry V, lowly characters and ordinary soldiers are given some of the most touching scenes, and bring out a side of Harry that isn’t seen elsewhere. Shakespeare doesn’t fence off his low lifes for comedy, but co-mingles then with his heroic king.