Henry IV, Part 1
Henry IV, Part 1 opens with a king haunted by the throne he stole. Written by William Shakespeare, probably in the mid-1590s and first published in quarto in 1598, the play was composed in the later years of Elizabeth I's reign, when questions of succession and political stability were never far from anyone's mind. On one side stands a monarch desperate to consolidate his usurped power. On another, a coalition of rebels who once helped him seize the crown and now want it back. And at the center of it all, a young prince who drinks with thieves and knights while the fate of England waits for him to grow up. What makes this play remarkable is not just its political drama, but a fat, cowardly, brilliant knight named Falstaff, whose very presence forced Shakespeare to rename a character, anger a powerful English lord, and reshape the entire play to keep audiences returning. The questions the play plants from its first scene are deceptively simple: what does it mean to be a king? What is honour worth? And can a prince who consorts with criminals become the ruler his country needs?
King Henry IV's troubles cluster around three distinct worlds, each with its own loyalties and logic. The king himself sits at the center of the first world, troubled by the knowledge that he took the throne from Richard II and has never fully escaped that shadow. His hope of atoning through a crusade to the Holy Land is blocked by Welsh and Scottish rebellions on his borders. His personal disquiet runs alongside a political one: the Percy family, who helped him rise to power, are growing increasingly hostile, and Edmund Mortimer, Richard II's chosen heir, stands as a constant reminder of rival claims to legitimacy.
The rebel coalition forms the second world. Thomas Percy, Earl of Worcester, leads the charge, joined by his brother the Earl of Northumberland and his nephew the fiery Harry Percy, known as Hotspur. Owen Glendower brings the Welsh rebels, the Earl of Douglas the Scottish forces, and Edmund Mortimer rounds out an alliance determined to depose what they call "this ingrate and cankered Bolingbroke." Their grievance is sharp: King Henry refused to ransom Mortimer from Glendower, and Hotspur withheld Scottish hostages against the king's orders after the Battle of Homildon Hill, sparking a public rupture between the crown and its former allies.
The third world belongs to Prince Hal and the Boar's Head Tavern in Eastcheap. Hal spends his days among figures like Bardolph, Peto, and Ned Poins, and his closest companion is Sir John Falstaff, a knight who is cowardly, drunken, and quick-witted in equal measure. King Henry himself laments watching "riot and dishonour stain the brow of young Harry." Yet Hal, in a private soliloquy, reveals that his tavern life is a calculated performance. He plans to return to court at a moment of his own choosing, calculating that a sudden transformation will make him more impressive to the nobility than if he had behaved conventionally all along. The plan costs Falstaff dearly in the short term: Hal and Poins rob Falstaff after a highway robbery, then rob him again in disguise, all to enjoy hearing Falstaff invent elaborate lies about the attack afterward.
Shrewsbury is the point where all three worlds crash into each other. As the Percy rebellion grows, Prince Hal reconciles with his father and is given command of an army, vowing to kill Hotspur personally. Falstaff is handed a commission to recruit foot soldiers, a responsibility he turns immediately to profit by taking bribes from men who want to avoid military service. His recruits are the desperately poor, and he withholds even their wages.
The battle itself turns on single combat. Hotspur is described throughout the play as wild and gifted in war, personally leading the rebel army. King Henry is numerically superior, but the outcome is not certain: if the rebels hold, other forces under Northumberland, Glendower, Mortimer, and the Archbishop of York stand ready to join the fight and shift the balance. Hal fights and kills Hotspur in a duel, a moment the play presents as the prince's first genuine act of noble virtue. The king is simultaneously hunted on the battlefield by the Earl of Douglas.
Falstaff's contribution to the battle is to fake his own death to avoid Douglas, then revive once the danger passes. Finding himself alone with Hotspur's body, he stabs the corpse in the thigh and claims credit for killing him. Hal, who witnessed the real duel, allows Falstaff to take the honour. Falstaff then declares he intends to "live cleanly as a nobleman should do," a resolution the audience has every reason to doubt. The play closes not with a clean victory but with an incomplete one: Worcester is executed, Douglas is freed without ransom by Hal's order, but the Archbishop of York and Northumberland continue the rebellion, pointing directly toward Henry IV, Part 2.
Act 5, Scene 1 contains one of Shakespeare's most unusual philosophical moments. Falstaff steps forward and delivers a soliloquy that scholars now call Falstaff's Catechism, a formal cross-examination of the concept of honour conducted entirely by Falstaff himself, question and answer. He asks whether honour can heal a wound, restore a limb, or take away pain. The answer each time is no. He concludes that honour is a word. The word is air. The man who holds it is the man who died last Wednesday. "Therefore," he announces, "I'll none of it. Honor is a mere scutcheon."
Professor Clifford Davidson drew a direct parallel between this passage and a 1582 treatise by Philippe de Mornay, De la verité de la religion chrestienne, which had already been translated into English by the time Shakespeare was writing. De Mornay's text reduces honour to "winde, which cannot fill us, nor scarcely puffe us up," asking what value rank brings when a wicked man can hold it just as easily as a virtuous one. Both texts use the same catechetical structure, both land on the same metaphor of air and wind for honour's substance.
Scholars disagree about Shakespeare's intent. Some read the catechism as a genuine philosophical counterweight to Hotspur's reckless valour, a critique of the way martial society glorifies self-destruction. Others read it as a comic exposure of cowardice: Falstaff is afraid of dying and is rationalising his fear in elaborate rhetorical terms. Davidson notes the tension directly, quoting: "Who will pursue the 'shadow' of reputation rather than the 'body' of virtue?" Falstaff, by this reading, rejects both. Yet at the battle's end, he eagerly accepts praise for killing Hotspur, suggesting the catechism was armour for a coward rather than philosophy for a sage. The soliloquy also stands apart stylistically: Falstaff's usual prose is dismissive and quick. This moment is structured, relentless, and precise, a different register that gives the speech its lasting resonance.
When Henry IV, Part 1 first appeared on stage in 1597, the knight drinking with Prince Hal was not called Falstaff. He was called Oldcastle, and the choice nearly destroyed Shakespeare's company. John Oldcastle was a real historical figure, a proto-Protestant martyr with powerful living descendants in Elizabethan England. Those descendants were the Lords Cobham: William Brooke, the 10th Baron Cobham, who died on the 6th of March 1597, and his son Henry Brooke, the 11th Baron Cobham.
The elder Lord Cobham had already made himself an enemy of Shakespeare's company, the Lord Chamberlain's Men. The troupe had been formed in 1594 under the patronage of Henry Carey, the first Lord Hunsdon, who served as Lord Chamberlain. Carey died on the 22nd of July 1596, and the post went directly to William Brooke, Lord Cobham, who withdrew the company's official protection. Without it, the players fell under the authority of London's city officials, who had long sought to expel the acting companies from the city. A contemporary letter by Thomas Nashe complained that the actors were "piteously persecuted by the Lord Mayor and the aldermen" during this period. The pressure lasted only until Cobham himself died less than a year later, after which Henry Carey's son George, 2nd Baron Hunsdon, took the post and restored the company's standing.
The evidence that Oldcastle was the character's original name is extensive. A speech prefix in the quarto text of Henry IV, Part 2 mistakenly reads "Old." instead of "Falst." A line in that same play identifies Falstaff as having been a page to Thomas Mowbray, Duke of Norfolk, which is historically true of Oldcastle, not Falstaff. In Henry IV, Part 1, Prince Hal calls his companion "my old lad of the castle." And an iambic pentameter line in the play scans correctly with "Oldcastle" but not "Falstaff." The Epilogue to Henry IV, Part 2 even includes an explicit disclaimer: "for Oldcastle died a martyr, and this is not the man."
The replacement name came from Sir John Fastolf, a historical figure with a reputation for cowardice at the Battle of Patay, whom Shakespeare had already used in Henry VI, Part 1. Fastolf died without descendants, making him available in a way Oldcastle was not. Shortly after the name change, a group of rival playwrights responded with a two-part play called Sir John Oldcastle, published in 1600, presenting Oldcastle as a hero. In 1986, the Oxford Shakespeare edition restored the original name in its text of Henry IV, Part 1, though no other published edition has followed that choice.
The first recorded performance of Henry IV, Part 1 took place on the afternoon of the 6th of March 1600, when the play was acted at court before the Flemish Ambassador. Court performances followed in 1612 and 1625. But the play had almost certainly been running in public since 1597, given how many early allusions and references to the Falstaff character appear in the record. It was entered into the Register of the Stationers Company on the 25th of February 1598 and printed in quarto that same year by the stationer Andrew Wise. New editions followed in 1599, 1604, 1608, 1613, 1622, 1632, 1639, and 1692.
For most of its performance history, the starring role was considered to be either Falstaff or Hotspur, not Prince Hal. Popular actors including James Quin and David Garrick preferred Hotspur. The title page of the first 1597-98 publication advertised only the presence of Henry Percy and Falstaff; Hal was not mentioned at all. It was only in the twentieth century that readers and directors began treating Hal's coming-of-age as the central story.
The Dering Manuscript complicates the play's early history in an interesting way. It is the earliest surviving manuscript of any Shakespeare play, and it combines Henry IV, Part 1 and Part 2 into a single text. Scholars generally believe it was prepared around 1623, possibly for family or amateur performances, by Edward Dering (1598-1644) of Surrenden Manor in Pluckley, Kent, where the manuscript was found. The manuscript is now held at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C. A minority view holds that the manuscript suggests the two parts were originally one play, which Shakespeare later expanded to capitalise on Falstaff's popularity.
Among the play's less expected contributions to the English language: the phrase "the game is afoot," made famous by Sherlock Holmes, originates in Act 1, Scene 3, spoken by the Earl of Northumberland. Shakespeare reused the phrase in Henry V, giving it to the king himself before the charge at Harfleur.
Orson Welles built his 1965 film Chimes at Midnight around the Henry IV plays, compiling both parts into a single storyline while adding material from Henry V, Richard II, and The Merry Wives of Windsor. Welles played Falstaff himself, with John Gielgud as King Henry, Keith Baxter as Hal, and Margaret Rutherford as Mistress Quickly.
BBC television returned to the play three times. In the 1960 mini-series An Age of Kings, Sean Connery played Hotspur opposite Tom Fleming as Henry IV and Robert Hardy as Prince Hal. The 1979 BBC Television Shakespeare version cast Anthony Quayle as Falstaff and Tim Pigott-Smith as Hotspur. In the 2012 series The Hollow Crown, directed by Richard Eyre, Jeremy Irons played Henry IV, Tom Hiddleston played Hal, and Simon Russell Beale took the role of Falstaff. A 1995 BBC Television adaptation combined the two parts into one, with David Calder as Falstaff and Rufus Sewell as Hotspur.
Gus Van Sant's 1991 film My Own Private Idaho drew loosely on Henry IV, Part 1 as well as Part 2 and Henry V. In 2014, playwright Herbert Sigüenza set the story in a post-apocalyptic Chicano future, adapting it as El Henry and placing the action in "Aztlan City, Aztlan, formerly San Diego" in the year 2045. In 2016, Graham Abbey combined Richard II and Henry IV, Part 1 into Breath of Kings: Rebellion, staged at the Stratford Festival in Stratford, Ontario, with Abbey himself playing Henry IV.
Netflix released The King in 2019, directed by David Michôd and starring Timothée Chalamet as Hal, Robert Pattinson, and Joel Edgerton. In spring 2024, Robert Icke adapted both Henry IV plays as Player Kings, starring Ian McKellen as Falstaff, Toheeb Jimoh as Hal, and Richard Coyle as King Henry IV. The production ran at the Noel Coward Theatre in London's West End before touring the United Kingdom, adding one more chapter to a play that has never really stopped being reinvented.
Common questions
When was Henry IV, Part 1 by Shakespeare first performed and published?
Henry IV, Part 1 was almost certainly in performance by 1597. The earliest recorded performance took place on the afternoon of the 6th of March 1600, when the play was acted at court before the Flemish Ambassador. It was entered into the Register of the Stationers Company on the 25th of February 1598 and first printed in quarto that same year by stationer Andrew Wise.
Who is Falstaff in Henry IV, Part 1 and why is the character significant?
Sir John Falstaff is a cowardly, drunken, quick-witted knight and Prince Hal's closest companion in the play. He is significant both dramatically and historically: the character was originally named Oldcastle, based on a Protestant martyr with powerful living descendants, and had to be renamed after political pressure. The character's popularity drove multiple printings of the play and is believed by some scholars to have prompted Shakespeare to expand a single Henry IV play into two parts.
What was the Oldcastle controversy in Henry IV, Part 1?
When Henry IV, Part 1 first appeared on stage in 1597, the comic knight was named Oldcastle, based on John Oldcastle, a Protestant martyr with powerful living descendants including William Brooke, 10th Baron Cobham, and his son Henry Brooke, 11th Baron Cobham. Political pressure forced Shakespeare to rename the character Falstaff, after Sir John Fastolf, a historical figure with a reputation for cowardice at the Battle of Patay who died without descendants.
What is Falstaff's Catechism in Henry IV, Part 1?
Falstaff's Catechism is a soliloquy delivered in Act 5, Scene 1, in which Falstaff questions whether honour can heal wounds, restore a limb, or provide any tangible benefit, concluding that honour is merely "air" and "a mere scutcheon." Professor Clifford Davidson identified a parallel with Philippe de Mornay's 1582 treatise De la verité de la religion chrestienne, which uses similar language and a catechetical structure to reduce honour to wind.
What is the Dering Manuscript and how does it relate to Henry IV, Part 1?
The Dering Manuscript is the earliest surviving manuscript of any Shakespeare play. Scholars believe it was prepared around 1623 by Edward Dering (1598-1644) of Surrenden Manor, Pluckley, Kent, where the manuscript was discovered. It combines Henry IV, Part 1 and Part 2 into a single text and is held at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C.
How has Henry IV, Part 1 been adapted for film and television?
Notable adaptations include Orson Welles's 1965 film Chimes at Midnight, which combined both Henry IV plays with material from other Shakespeare works, and three BBC television productions in 1960, 1979, and 2012. The 2012 Hollow Crown series starred Jeremy Irons, Tom Hiddleston, and Simon Russell Beale. Netflix released The King in 2019, directed by David Michôd and starring Timothée Chalamet. In spring 2024, Robert Icke's stage adaptation Player Kings, starring Ian McKellen as Falstaff, ran at the Noel Coward Theatre in London's West End.
All sources
10 references cited across the entry
- 2journalFalstaff Gets the SackDerek Peat — 2002
- 3journalFalstaff's Catechism on HonorClifford Davidson — 1971
- 7webMatt Sax's Hip-Hop Musical 'Clay' Plays KC Prior to NYCKenneth Jones — Playbill On-Line — 27 August 2008
- 8bookLatinx Shakespeares: Staging US Intracultural TheaterCarla Della Gatta — University of Michigan Press — 2023
- 9webPast Productions
- 10newsPlayer Kings review – Ian McKellen's richly complex Falstaff is magneticArifa Akbar — 2024-04-11