Henry IV, Part 2
Henry IV, Part 2 opens not with a king or a hero, but with a personified figure called Rumour, a character who sets the tone for a play built on deception, pretense, and the slow unraveling of men who have lived too long in the wrong world. Written by William Shakespeare somewhere between 1596 and 1599, this history play is the third part of a four-play sequence that begins with Richard II and ends with Henry V. It arrives after the rousing, battle-driven Henry IV, Part 1, and immediately the audience senses something different. The mood is elegiac. The king is dying. Falstaff, the great comic mountain who charmed audiences in Part 1, is older, sick, and surrounded by death's quiet shadow. And Prince Hal, England's future king, is barely present at all.
What makes this play strange is what it refuses to give the listener. The two great characters at its center, Hal and Falstaff, share the stage only twice, and both times only briefly. Instead of the rousing friendship of Part 1, there is distance, parallel decline, and a coming reckoning. The play raises a question it takes its whole length to answer: when Hal finally becomes king, what will he do with the man who raised him in the tavern? The answer, when it comes, is one of the most debated moments in all of Shakespeare.
Falstaff opens the play in characteristically deflating fashion. A young page, assigned to him by Prince Hal as a joke, relays the doctor's assessment of Falstaff's urine sample. The page reports, cryptically, that the urine is healthier than the patient. From this entrance, the play establishes what will become its persistent undercurrent: Falstaff is ageing and the body is keeping score.
His wit, though, remains intact. He delivers one of his most celebrated lines early in the first act: "I am not only witty in myself, but the cause that wit is in other men." He promises his page a suit of "vile apparel," then complains of his financial ruin, blaming it on "consumption of the purse." He concludes by vowing to find a wife "in the stews," the Elizabethan term for the local brothels. It is characteristic Falstaff: grandiose self-awareness wrapped in cheerful self-destruction.
The Lord Chief Justice pursues him, seeking answers about a recent robbery. Falstaff first feigns deafness to avoid the conversation, and when that fails, pretends to mistake the Chief Justice for someone else entirely. When the Justice finally forces the exchange, Falstaff pivots to lecturing him about the king's illness, then adopts the absurd pretense that he, Falstaff, is the younger man in the room. "You that are old consider not the capacities of us that are young," he tells the Chief Justice with a straight face. He then asks the Chief Justice for one thousand pounds to outfit a military expedition, and is flatly refused.
His social circle in Part 2 expands to include Ancient Pistol, Doll Tearsheet, and Justice Robert Shallow, each carrying a different register of comedy. When Pistol starts a brawl at the tavern, Falstaff ejects him. Doll, a prostitute, then draws Falstaff into a quiet moment that is almost tender, before Hal, listening in disguise as a musician, overhears Falstaff's derogatory remarks about him. The betrayal is minor, but Hal's cold response signals where things are heading.
King Henry IV does not cut a triumphant figure in this play. He is visibly failing, troubled by the rebellions that continue to plague his reign, and grieved by what he sees as his son's unsuitability for the throne. His court reassures him about Hal, but the king cannot shake his disappointment.
A second rebellion is launched against Henry IV during the play, but it ends without a climactic battle. Instead, Prince John of Lancaster, Hal's brother, defeats the rebels through what the play plainly calls duplicitous political machinations: he negotiates peace, then arrests the rebel leaders anyway once they have disbanded their forces. It is a deeply uncomfortable scene, and the play does not dress it up.
The king's death arrives with its own complications. Believing his father has died, Hal takes the crown and leaves the room. Henry awakens, sees the crown gone, and interprets this as proof that Hal has been waiting impatiently for the throne. The confrontation that follows allows Hal to explain himself, and Henry ultimately dies contentedly, but not before giving his son a final piece of political counsel. The advice is blunt: neutralize threats at home by keeping the nation occupied with wars abroad. Shakespeare gives Henry the line directly, "Be it thy course to busy giddy minds / With foreign quarrels."
Falstaff learns from Pistol that Hal has ascended to the throne, and races to London convinced that his old companion's rise to power means his own fortunes are about to transform. The London underworld shares his optimism. They expect, as the play frames it, a paradise of thieves.
What they get is the opposite. The new King Henry V appears and formally rejects Falstaff in front of the assembled court. He tells him that he has changed and can no longer associate with such people. The lowlifes expecting reward are instead arrested and imprisoned by the authorities. Critics have long debated how to read this moment. Some find it the play's most dramatically powerful scene, the necessary transformation of a prince into a king. Others view the structure that leads to it, with Hal and Falstaff barely sharing the stage in the preceding acts, as a dramatic weakness. The critic Harold Bloom placed the two parts of Henry IV, together with the Hostess's elegy for Falstaff in Henry V, among Shakespeare's greatest achievements.
The epilogue of Henry IV, Part 2 contains a curious piece of legal and historical housekeeping. The speaker assures the audience that Falstaff is not based on the historical figure Sir John Oldcastle, an anti-Catholic rebel. The epilogue states plainly: "Oldcastle died martyr, and this is not the man."
This disclaimer was necessary because Falstaff had originally been named Oldcastle. Shakespeare drew from an earlier play, The Famous Victories of Henry V, as his primary model, and that play used the name Oldcastle. Shakespeare was forced to change the name after complaints from Oldcastle's descendants. Modern scholars accept that the name was originally Oldcastle in Part 1. Whether Part 2 ever used the name Oldcastle, or whether it was always Falstaff in that play, remains disputed. According to the scholar Rene Weis, metrical analyses of the verse passages containing Falstaff's name have been inconclusive on the question.
The epilogue also promises that the story will continue in a forthcoming play featuring Sir John, along with "fair Katharine of France." The epilogue even predicts that "Falstaff shall die of a sweat" in this future play. He does indeed die in Henry V, but offstage, described by another character, and never appears on stage in that play. Ancient Pistol steps into the role of cowardly soldier in Henry V, carrying forward that particular strand of the Eastcheap world.
Shakespeare's primary source for Henry IV, Part 2 was Raphael Holinshed's Chronicles, as it was for most of his chronicle histories. The second edition of Holinshed was published in 1587, which establishes the earliest possible date for the play's composition. Edward Hall's The Union of the Two Illustrious Families of Lancaster and York was also consulted, and scholars believe Shakespeare was also familiar with Samuel Daniel's poem on the civil wars.
The play was entered into the Register of the Stationers' Company on the 23rd of August 1600 by the booksellers Andrew Wise and William Aspley. Valentine Simmes printed it in quarto that same year. The quarto's title page notes that the play had been "sundry times publicly acted" before its publication. Less popular than Part 1, the quarto saw only one edition. The play next appeared in print in the First Folio in 1623.
Extant records suggest both parts of Henry IV were acted at Court in 1612. Those records describe the plays cryptically as Sir John Falstaff and Hotspur, rather than by their standard titles. A separate, damaged record may point to a Court performance of the second Falstaff play in 1619. The earliest surviving manuscript text of scenes from Henry IV, Part 2 appears in the Dering Manuscript, catalogued as Folger MS V.b.34, a theatrical abridgment of both parts prepared around 1623.
Three BBC television films have adapted Henry IV, Part 2. In the 1960 mini-series An Age of Kings, Tom Fleming played Henry IV, Robert Hardy played Prince Hal, and Frank Pettingell took the role of Falstaff. The 1979 BBC Television Shakespeare version starred Jon Finch as Henry IV, David Gwillim as Prince Hal, and Anthony Quayle as Falstaff. In the 2012 series The Hollow Crown, Richard Eyre directed both parts of Henry IV, with Jeremy Irons as Henry IV, Tom Hiddleston as Prince Hal, and Simon Russell Beale as Falstaff.
Orson Welles made perhaps the most famous film adaptation. His 1965 Chimes at Midnight condenses both Henry IV plays into a single film, adding scenes from Henry V and dialogue from Richard II and The Merry Wives of Windsor. Welles played Falstaff himself; John Gielgud played King Henry; Keith Baxter played Hal; Margaret Rutherford played Mistress Quickly; and Norman Rodway played Hotspur. Gus Van Sant's 1991 film My Own Private Idaho draws loosely from both parts of Henry IV.
In spring 2024, director Robert Icke adapted both Henry IV plays into a new version called 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 embarking on a UK tour. A 2015 production by the Michigan Shakespeare Festival, directed and adapted by Janice L. Blixt, won awards for its combined staging of the two plays, with its focus placed specifically on the relationship between Henry IV and Prince Hal.
The most quoted line from Henry IV, Part 2 is one the play frames as a quiet observation by a sleepless, troubled king. At the close of Act III, scene 1, Henry IV reflects that "Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown." The line has taken on a life of its own, frequently misquoted as "Heavy is the head that wears the crown."
The misquoted version appears in the film The Departed, where Jack Nicholson's character renders it as "Heavy lies the crown...sort of thing." The correct line appears in the opening frame of the film The Queen. In Spider-Man: Far From Home, Nick Fury quotes the original line while handing Peter Parker the glasses the late Tony Stark wanted him to have, adding that Stark predicted Peter would not recognize the reference because it was not a Star Wars quote. The moment is used to press on the film's central theme: the weight of standing in a great figure's shadow.
The Ultimate Edition of Monty Python and the Holy Grail takes the connection further, featuring subtitles that correlate scenes in the film to specific lines from Henry IV, Part 2. Four centuries after its composition, the play's concerns, the burden of succession, the cost of transformation, the grief of men who must be left behind, keep finding new containers.
Common questions
When was Henry IV Part 2 written by Shakespeare?
Henry IV, Part 2 is believed to have been written between 1596 and 1599. It is possible Shakespeare interrupted its composition around Acts 3-4 to write The Merry Wives of Windsor, possibly commissioned for a meeting of the Order of the Garter on the 23rd of April 1597.
What is the plot of Henry IV Part 2?
Henry IV, Part 2 follows two parallel storylines: Falstaff's comic misadventures in the London underworld and Prince Hal's difficult path toward kingship as his father, King Henry IV, falls gravely ill. The play ends with Hal ascending the throne and formally rejecting Falstaff, while the remaining London lowlifes are arrested.
Why is Falstaff's character originally named Oldcastle in Henry IV?
Shakespeare originally named the character Oldcastle after the historical figure Sir John Oldcastle, following his source The Famous Victories of Henry V. He was forced to change the name to Falstaff after complaints from Oldcastle's descendants. The epilogue of Part 2 explicitly states that "Oldcastle died martyr, and this is not the man."
Who plays Falstaff in Orson Welles' film Chimes at Midnight?
Orson Welles played Falstaff in his 1965 film Chimes at Midnight, which combined both Henry IV plays into a single condensed film. John Gielgud played King Henry, Keith Baxter played Hal, Margaret Rutherford played Mistress Quickly, and Norman Rodway played Hotspur.
What is the famous line from Henry IV Part 2 about the crown?
The most quoted line from Henry IV, Part 2 is "Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown," spoken by King Henry IV in Act III, scene 1. It is frequently misquoted as "Heavy is the head that wears the crown" and appears in films including The Queen and Spider-Man: Far From Home.
Who starred in the 2024 Player Kings adaptation of Henry IV Part 2?
The 2024 stage adaptation Player Kings, directed by Robert Icke, starred 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 a UK tour.
All sources
9 references cited across the entry
- 1bookThe Complete WorksWilliam Shakespeare — Clarendon Press — 1988
- 2bookKing Henry IV, Part 2William Shakespeare — Bloomsbury Publishing — 1981
- 6webMatt Sax's Hip-Hop Musical 'Clay' Plays KC Prior to NYCKenneth Jones — Playbill On-Line — 27 August 2008
- 7webPast Productions
- 8newsPlayer Kings review – Ian McKellen's richly complex Falstaff is magneticArifa Akbar — 2024-04-11
- 9videoThe DepartedWarner Bros. Pictures — 2006