Henry announces in elaborate and somewhat convoluted language the ending of civil strife in England and the launching of a crusade to the Holy Land. The opening scene seems designed to get the audience leaning forward, straining to follow. The local effect of some of the political scenes also works against the general impression of neatness: they twist and turn. But the title page, while advertising the battle of Shrewsbury, also advertised “the humorous conceits of Sir John Falstaff,” and it is Falstaff and his world, restricted to equal time with the public action through most of Part 1, who break out in a dramatic version of urban sprawl in the sequel, Henry IV, Part 2. When the play was first published in the quarto of 1598, it was simply The History of Henry IV, with no reference to its being the first part of a two-part play. It is a moment that generally gets a startled and explosive laugh from the audience it draws on a tradition of comic resurrections in mummers’ plays, an old form of rough popular drama current in England long before Shakespeare and it tells us that Falstaff, and what he represents, cannot be disposed of so easily. Then Falstaff pops up from the ground he was not dead at all. At Shrewsbury there is a telling stage picture as Hal stands over the bodies of Hotspur and Falstaff, pays a carefully measured tribute to each, and then leaves them lying there, going off to start his new life having dispatched his great enemy and seen the last of Eastcheap. Falstaff appears at first to fit into the neat story pattern I have been describing: he is the living symbol of what Hal rejects when he leaves the taverns to prove himself in battle. One large complication is of course Falstaff, the great comic character who dominates the tavern scenes. Seen this way, Henry IV, Part 1 sounds like a tidy play, a structured action building to a carefully prepared conclusion. Who never promiseth but he means to pay” ( 5.4.42–43 ), promises his father to redeem his reputation by killing Hotspur, and he does. Hal, on the other hand, “the Prince of Wales . . .
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Promises, however, are not kept: a number of rebel leaders fail to show up, and the rebel party goes into battle at considerably less than its full strength. If promises be kept on every hand” ( 3.2.172–73 ). Sir Walter Blunt warns the king that the rebels are a “mighty and a fearful head . . . Various themes come together at the climax, of which the most important is promise-keeping. Central to this battle is a combat between the rebel leader Hotspur and the king’s son Prince Hal, who emerges from the taverns of Eastcheap, where he has apparently been wasting his time, to prove his true worth by killing Hotspur. A party of rebels challenges King Henry his forces defeat them in a single battle at Shrewsbury. The story appears to develop along clear lines to a decisive conclusion. Henry IV, Part 1 both tells a story and examines a society.