Critical comments on 'henry the forth part one'play by shakespeare
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Henry IV, Part One has always been a controversial play, with much of that controversy focussed on the character that embodies contradictoriness, Sir John Falstaff. Because Falstaff--like most of the play's characters--also appears in Henry IV, Part Two, early criticism usually discusses Henry IV as if the two parts are one play. It is, in fact, impossible to describe the critical history of Henry IV, Part One without reference toPart Twoand debate about the relationship between the two plays has occupied many critics (see for example Jenkins 1956, Yachnin 1991, and Pugliatti 1996). To complicate matters, a significant proportion of twentieth-century criticism discusses Part One within the context of Shakespeare's other history plays, particularly those of the second tetralogy: Richard II, Henry IV Parts One and Two,and Henry V; or what has been dubbed the "Henriad":Henry IV Parts One and Two,and Henry V. Of necessity much of the following discussion will refer to Henry IV, Part One alongside these other plays.
One of the first printed critiques of Henry IV, Part One could be said to be another play: The First Part of the True and Honorable Historie, of the life of Sir John Old-Castle, the Good Lord Cobham. It was written by a group of playwrights for a rival company to Shakespeare's, the Admiral's Men, although, strangely, one of its quarto printings from 1600 states that it was "Written by William Shakespeare." Sir John Old-Castle was designed as a corrective to Shakespeare's portrait of Prince Hal's companion in the Henry IV plays. Sir John Falstaff was originally named Sir John Oldcastle, and the name was changed, purportedly because it had offended Oldcastle's descendants and those who thought of Oldcastle as a Protestant martyr (see Performance History). The prologue to Sir John Old-Castle asserts:
It is no pampered glutton we present,
Nor agèd counsellor to youthful sins;
But one whose virtues shone above the rest,
A valiant martyr and a virtuous peer (Prol. 6-9)
A similar corrective is presented in John Weever's poem The Mirror of Martyrs (1601) in which the ghost of Sir John Oldcastle narrates the story of his valorous life.
Shakespeare's gluttonous and less-than-valiant knight clearly did not please all of his contemporaries and the character has generated polarised critical responses ever since. In effect, though, both The Mirror of Martyrs and Sir John Old-Castle were critiquing Shakespeare's historiography not his characterisation, and these concerns were fuelled by the enormous and ongoing popularity of Henry IV, Part One. Many surviving comments on the play from the seventeenth century attest to its drawing power. A commendatory verse by Leonard Digges, published with a 1640 edition of Shakespeare's poems, compares Shakespeare with fellow playwright, Ben Jonson, and asserts that, while Jonson's comic characters might not always cover costs, "let but Falstaff come, Hal, Poins, the rest you scarce shall have a roome / All is so pester'd" (Vickers 1.28). One of the first commentators on Shakespeare's characterization, John Dryden, used Falstaff as an example of a character that was successfully composed of complementary qualities: "Falstaff is a Lyar, and a Coward, a Glutton, and a Buffon, because all these qualities may agree in the same man" (Vickers 1.258), and Gerald Langbaine, writing in 1691, noted that Falstaff "never fail'd of universal applause" (Vickers 1.420).
A consciousness of a possible down-side to Falstaff's popularity first appeared in responses to the two parts of Henry IV during the early eighteenth century. In 1709 Shakespeare's first editor, Nicholas Rowe, anticipated the direction of much future criticism when he wrote:
Falstaffis allow'd by every body to be a Masterpiece. . . . If there be any Fault in the Draught he has made of this lewd old Fellow, it is that tho' he has made him a Thief, Lying, Cowardly, Vain-glorious, and in short every way Vicious, yet he has given him so much Wit as to make him almost too agreeable; and I don't know whether some People have not, in remembrance of the Diversion he had formerly afforded 'em, been sorry to see his Friend Hal use him so scurvily when he comes to the Crown in the End of the Second Part of Henry IV (Vickers 2.195).