William Shakespeare (Henry IV, Part 1)

Shakespeare presents Prince Hal as a strategically intelligent figure whose apparent dissolution is, from the very first soliloquy, a planned performance — and the play asks the audience to decide whether to admire, distrust or simply observe him. From his disclosed strategy in 1.2 to his magnanimity over Hotspur's body at Shrewsbury, Hal is shown as a prince who never quite lets us settle the question of who he is.

From his first solitary speech, Shakespeare gives Hal the play's most important piece of privileged information. In the soliloquy at 1.2 — 'I know you all' — Hal tells the audience that his tavern life is a deliberate performance and his eventual reform will look the more brilliant for the contrast. This is method as much as content: by placing the strategic disclosure before any 'fall' has happened, Shakespeare positions us as Hal's confidant from the start. We do not watch a prince waste his youth; we watch a prince perform a wasted youth, knowing what the performance is for.

In the tavern, Shakespeare matches Hal to the prose register of Eastcheap — and matches Falstaff move for move. The trick of robbing Falstaff after the Gad's Hill robbery, the way Hal lets Falstaff invent his comic lies and then exposes them with the truth, the play extempore in which both take turns playing the King: all of these show a Hal who can speak Falstaff's language fluently. Shakespeare makes him bilingual. He is the only major figure in the play who has both registers, which is the linguistic precondition for ruling a realm that contains both worlds.

The play extempore (2.4) is the play's clearest piece of evidence about Hal. Falstaff, playing the King, defends himself with 'Banish plump Jack, and banish all the world'. Hal, now playing the King, replies 'I do, I will'. Shakespeare uses the parody to rehearse the play's whole political future in advance. Three words, flat, in prose, with no softening — Hal commits to the rejection long before the audience sees him perform it. After the 1.2 soliloquy, this is the second piece of textual evidence the audience cannot put down.

At court, Shakespeare switches Hal into verse. The reconciliation scene with his father (3.2) is delivered in the formal cadences of the kingdom; Hal pledges to redeem himself in blood and to defeat Hotspur. Whether this scene is calculated or genuine is exactly what the play refuses to settle: it has both the rhetorical authority of a real vow and the strategic shape that 1.2 has trained us to suspect.

At Shrewsbury, Shakespeare gives us the actions and lets us read them. Hal saves his father's life from Douglas; he kills Hotspur in single combat; he speaks over Hotspur's body with chivalric courtesy ('Fare thee well, great heart'); he then lets Falstaff claim the kill — a politically generous gesture from a man who no longer needs the credit. A reading that wants Hal cold has the soliloquy and 'I do, I will'; a reading that wants him sympathetic has Shrewsbury and the courtesy. Shakespeare presents him, finally, as a figure in whom strategy and courage are not opposites. The play is the making of a king — and it is honest about what the making costs.

Hal's soliloquy at the end of 1.2 is the play's interpretive bomb, and the moment that conditions everything the audience will see afterwards. By having Hal disclose his strategy in private to us, Shakespeare positions the audience as Hal's confidant from the start — we are not allowed the illusion of watching a prince fall. We are watching a prince perform a fall and being told, in advance, what the performance is for.

The first thing to notice is the form. Shakespeare withdraws Falstaff and the others; Hal speaks alone, in verse, to us. The shift from the tavern's prose to the soliloquy's verse is itself a piece of staging: the moment Hal is left alone, Shakespeare switches his linguistic register, as if to remind the audience that the tavern Hal we have just been watching was speaking another language entirely. The form announces the duality before the content does.

The content is unusually frank. Hal does not promise reform; he plans it. He tells us he knows his companions ('I know you all'), that he is using their darkness to make his eventual sun the brighter ('glittering o'er my fault'), and that his redemption will arrive precisely when no-one expects it ('Redeeming time when men think least I will'). The vocabulary — knowledge, calculation, the deliberate management of public expectation — is the vocabulary of strategy rather than the vocabulary of repentance. Shakespeare gives Hal the language of a tactician.

The method matters because of where the moment sits. Shakespeare places this soliloquy in 1.2 — before any tavern scene has done its proper work, before the play extempore, before the reconciliation, before Shrewsbury. The architecture is decisive: the audience is told the strategy at the start, and then made to watch the strategy play out. This is dramatic method as positioning. The audience cannot afterwards 'discover' that Hal is calculating; the discovery has already been forced on us.

For the wider play, the significance is structural. Every later scene — the trick on Falstaff at Gad's Hill, the play extempore's 'I do, I will', the courtly vow to defeat Hotspur, the chivalric courtesy over Hotspur's corpse, the gift of credit to Falstaff — has to be read in the light of these lines. The providentialist reading of Hal as a sympathetic apprenticing king has to explain what it is doing with this soliloquy; the Machiavellian reading takes it as its strongest textual evidence. Shakespeare does not write the soliloquy to settle the question. He writes it to set the question — and to make sure no later scene can pretend the question is not there.

The proposition is partly true, but it is one term of a richer presentation: Shakespeare does not expose ONE definition of honour, he stages THREE — Hotspur's chivalric honour, Falstaff's anti-honour, and Hal's pragmatic, instrumental honour — and the play's interest is in setting them against each other, not in legislating between them. The question for AO5 is not whether the play 'exposes' chivalry, but what kind of examination Shakespeare conducts on the rival definitions, and which of them the play's design quietly privileges.

Hotspur's honour is the play's most articulate chivalric voice. Shakespeare gives him a verse register of leaping images — honour as something to be plucked, like 'bright honour from the pale-faced moon' (1.3) — and a temperament that treats reputation as the substance of life. Lady Percy's complaint that her husband cares more for his horse than for her is the play's domestic measure of what this honour costs. Shakespeare presents Hotspur's chivalry with admiration: he is brave, he is generous, he is brilliant. But he also presents it as politically naive — the rebellion he leads is broken in part because chivalry cannot count its allies. The proposition's 'exposure' has some textual support here.

Falstaff's anti-honour catechism (5.1) is the play's most famous critique. Shakespeare gives the deepest argument against chivalric value to a fat knight in prose on the eve of a battle in which a chivalric boy will die. 'What is honour? A word… honour is a mere scutcheon… therefore I'll none of it.' The method — prose, on the field, in the mouth of a coward — both empowers and complicates the critique. The carnival reading takes the catechism as the play's deepest moral perception; the moral reading takes it as rationalised cowardice. Both are right. Shakespeare is staging an argument his most disreputable figure happens to win, on the merits, against the most admirable.

Hal's honour is the third definition, and the one the play actually carries forward. He vows in 3.2 to redeem himself in blood and to take Hotspur's reputation 'into my own'. At Shrewsbury he does so. But he then lets Falstaff claim the kill — a piece of political generosity that shows Hal's honour is not about credit but about power. The chivalric definition asks 'who looks the bravest?'; Hal's asks 'what can I use this for?'. Shakespeare's quietest move is to put the pragmatic version at the centre of the king-making.

The death of Hotspur is the play's collision of all three. Hotspur's dying 'thoughts, the slaves of life, and life, time's fool' reduces chivalric honour to dust; Falstaff, nearby, stabs the corpse and claims the kill; Hal stands over the body with chivalric courtesy ('Fare thee well, great heart') and then walks away. In a single scene Shakespeare brings all three definitions on stage at once and lets us watch them sort themselves out: chivalry dies, anti-honour survives, instrumental honour wins.

I would therefore partly agree with the proposition: Shakespeare does expose what chivalric honour cannot do, and Hotspur is the play's most beautiful evidence for that exposure. But the play is not a critique of honour as such — it is a comparison of three honours, and the prince it produces is the one who has learned to use the word without believing it. Shakespeare's examination of chivalry is the more sobering for letting the alternative win.

The Bangor scene is one of Shakespeare's quietest political diagnoses. The rebels are about to divide the kingdom between them, and the very act of meeting reveals why their rebellion will fail. Shakespeare uses the scene's domestic register, its constant friction, and the careful choreography of who quarrels with whom to show that the rebellion is doomed by its own internal politics — and to set Hotspur, the play's most admirable rebel, against the limits of his own temperament.

The scene's chief method is staged friction. Shakespeare keeps the rebels arguing — about the map, about Glendower's mysticism, about Hotspur's manners. Worcester has to rebuke Hotspur for his bluntness; Hotspur cannot help mocking Glendower's claims of supernatural power; Glendower's daughter (who speaks no English) and Mortimer (who speaks no Welsh) sit in a love-scene conducted in translation. The dramatic effect is one of unmanageable difference. The rebels are united on paper and divided in person. Shakespeare presents the rebellion not as a moral evil — its case against Henry IV is real — but as a political impossibility.

Hotspur is the scene's flashpoint and the play's most articulate rebel. Shakespeare gives him an unfiltered honesty that, in a wooing scene, would be virtue; in a council of rebels, it is a liability. He cannot conceal his contempt for Glendower's pretensions; he cannot disguise his impatience with the partition; he treats the meeting as a contest of wit and ends by alienating exactly the ally he most needs. The audience admires him and sees, simultaneously, that he is hopeless in the room he has chosen to occupy. Shakespeare uses the contrast between Hotspur's eloquence and the meeting's diplomacy to make a political point in dramatic form.

The Mortimer/Glendower's daughter sequence is the scene's structural commentary on the rebellion. The would-be king of a divided England cannot speak with the daughter of his most powerful ally; the song is in a language he does not understand. Shakespeare uses the moment to make literal the rebellion's incoherence. A kingdom about to be partitioned between leaders who cannot communicate is not a kingdom; it is a problem.

The scene's contribution to the play's larger presentation of the rebellion is decisive. Shakespeare does not stage the rebels as monsters; he stages them as quarrelsome, gifted, gallant and incapable of coordination. This is why the Tudor-orthodox reading of the play — the rebellion as wickedness justly punished — is too crude. Shakespeare lets the rebels be admirable AND lets the audience see why they cannot win, which is a more sophisticated piece of political dramaturgy than orthodoxy needs.

In the architecture of the play, then, 3.1 is the rebellion's portrait of itself. The court is anxious; the tavern is comic; the rebellion is brilliant and chaotic. By the time we reach Shrewsbury, where Northumberland is 'sick' and Glendower delayed and Hotspur fights short of his allies, we have already seen, in this scene, exactly why the missing allies were going to be missing. Shakespeare gives the audience the diagnosis before he gives them the death.

The proposition states one of the two major readings of Hal, and I will argue it is the more defensible — but not because Shakespeare presents Hal as pure cynicism. The Machiavellian reading is strongest not because it makes the play cold (it does), but because it is the only reading that simultaneously accommodates the 1.2 soliloquy, the play extempore's 'I do, I will', and the surgical use Hal makes of Poins and Falstaff. The growth reading must dismiss the soliloquy; the Machiavellian reading absorbs all of it. The honest version of the Machiavellian reading, however, must also explain the courage and the chivalric magnanimity at Shrewsbury — and the most defensible Paper 3 position is therefore the proposition's claim, refined: Shakespeare presents the making of a king as a process in which calculation and growth are not opposites, but the same activity seen from different sides.

The strongest single piece of evidence for the proposition is the soliloquy at 1.2. Shakespeare gives Hal an early, strategic, fully self-aware speech in which he announces, before any tavern scene has done its work, that his low life is a calculated performance and his eventual reform will be staged for maximum political effect: 'Redeeming time when men think least I will'. Method here matters: Shakespeare positions the audience as Hal's confidant from the start, so that we cannot afterwards 'discover' Hal's strategy — the strategy has already been disclosed to us. Any reading of the rest of the play must work WITH or AGAINST this scene. The Machiavellian reading works with it directly; the growth reading must override it.

The second anchor is 'I do, I will' (2.4). In the play extempore, Falstaff, playing the King, defends himself with the eloquent pathos of 'Banish plump Jack, and banish all the world'. Hal, in turn playing the King, responds in three flat words of prose. Shakespeare uses the parody to rehearse the play's whole political future in advance, and Hal commits to the rejection without softening. The growth reading must contend that this is theatrical play; the Machiavellian reading takes it as the seal on the soliloquy's promise. The flatness of the three words is decisive — Shakespeare gives Hal no rhetorical cover.

The third anchor is the use of Poins. Hal uses Poins to engineer the second robbery (robbing Falstaff after Gad's Hill) so that Falstaff can be exposed in front of the company; he uses Poins's friendship instrumentally, as a tool of public theatre. Shakespeare gives us, in Poins, a recurring small portrait of a man Hal will also, in time, leave behind. The Machiavellian reading takes this as evidence that Hal's relationships in the tavern are political assets to be managed; the growth reading has nothing to say about Poins.

A serious counter-argument acknowledges that Hal at Shrewsbury is genuinely brave. He fights Douglas to save his father's life; he meets Hotspur in single combat and kills him in a fair fight; he speaks the dying Hotspur's body with chivalric courtesy ('Fare thee well, great heart'); he lets Falstaff claim the kill. These are not the actions of an unfeeling tactician, and the play would be poorer if we read them as such. This is the strongest reason not to take the Machiavellian reading flat.

But — and this is the refinement the proposition needs — courage and calculation are not opposites in Shakespeare's hands. The Hal who lets Falstaff claim Hotspur's kill is doing exactly what the 1.2 soliloquy promised: managing public credit for political effect. The courtesy over Hotspur's body is real; it is also, in the play's design, the chivalric flourish a future Henry V will need. The political genius of Hal is that his courage is also his cunning. Shakespeare does not present the proposition as an alternative to growth; he presents it as a more honest account of what growth, in a Plantagenet prince in 1402, actually was.

My judgement, then, is to defend the proposition with this refinement. Yes, Shakespeare presents Hal as Machiavellian — but not cynically. The soliloquy, 'I do, I will' and the use of Poins are the textual evidence the providential reading cannot accommodate. The Shrewsbury courage and the gift of credit to Falstaff are not counter-evidence but a deepening of the Machiavellian portrait: this is what a successful Machiavellian prince looks like in Shakespeare. The play is, in its design, the making of a king — and it is honest enough to show that the making is a calculation as well as a courage. The Machiavellian reading, properly understood, is the more textually faithful and the more morally adult.

Falstaff's catechism on honour is one of the most argumentatively serious passages in Shakespeare, and what makes it so is the deliberate care with which Shakespeare frames a real philosophical argument inside a speech the audience also knows is self-serving. He gives the play's deepest critique of chivalric honour to a fat knight in prose on the eve of a battle in which a chivalric boy will die — and refuses to tell us whether to take the critique at face value. The result is a passage which, in performance, can be played as carnival wisdom, as cynical rationalisation, or as both at once — and the reasons it can be all three are inside the writing itself.

The first method to notice is form. Shakespeare casts the catechism in prose. He has given the play's chivalric voices (Hotspur, Henry IV) verse; he has even given Hal verse for his strategic disclosure. Falstaff alone gets prose for the play's most serious argument about honour. The choice is decisive. Prose strips Falstaff's argument of the formal cadences that chivalric verse uses to perform the value it claims. He is arguing about honour OUTSIDE the verse-form in which honour conventionally speaks. The method is the argument: chivalric honour is partly the rhetoric that defends it, and Falstaff has stepped outside that rhetoric.

The second is the catechism's logical structure. Shakespeare gives Falstaff a sequence of brisk questions and brisker answers. Can honour set a leg? No. Take away the grief of a wound? No. Hath it any skill in surgery? No. What is it then? A word. The questions are not jokes — they are real, and they are unanswerable from the chivalric position. Shakespeare lets the audience hear an argument that is logically clean. The carnival reading takes this seriously and treats Falstaff as the play's moral philosopher of the battlefield.

The third method is dramatic context. Shakespeare places the catechism on the eve of Shrewsbury. He has spent four acts giving Hotspur the eloquence of 'bright honour from the pale-faced moon'; he is about to give him 'thoughts, the slaves of life, and life, time's fool' as he dies. The catechism intervenes between these two — telling the audience, before the chivalric death scene, that the value the death is offered for is, on inspection, a word. Shakespeare uses staging to make the catechism the audience's lens for the battle that follows.

The fourth, and most decisive, is the speaker. Shakespeare gives the argument to the only major figure in the play who is going to survive Shrewsbury by 'discretion' rather than courage. Falstaff will play dead. He will stab Hotspur's corpse. He will recruit pitifully unfit soldiers and pocket their bounties. The audience knows all of this — and is being asked to accept moral wisdom from the same mouth. Shakespeare writes the moment so that the argument is too good to dismiss AND the speaker is too compromised to canonise. The moral reading takes the self-serving frame as the truth; the carnival reading takes the argument as the truth.

For a director and a reader, the interpretive choices these methods produce are real, not generated by modern reluctance. A carnival staging gives Falstaff the dignity of a real philosopher and lets the catechism stand against the chivalric deaths that follow. A moral staging plays the speech with quick, evasive comic timing and lets Falstaff's self-serving register undercut the argument as it is made. A double staging — perhaps the most honest — lets the speech be both, holding the philosophical seriousness and the self-interested context in the same scene.

My judgement is that the methods of the catechism support both readings and license neither alone. The prose register is too thoughtful for outright comedy; the speaker is too compromised for pure philosophy. Shakespeare gives the audience an argument that is right and a speaker who needs it to be right, and asks us to live with both. The deepest method of the speech is its refusal to let either reading own it — which is also the play's refusal to let any single definition of honour survive Shrewsbury intact.