His son, by contrast, comes to know the common people, developing a rapport that will enable him to inspire and lead his army in Henry V. The point is made through the very linguistic medium of the drama: all Shakespeare’s other English kings speak entirely in verse, whereas Prince Hal has command of a flexible prose voice, with which he reduces himself to the level of his people, an Eastcheap trick that he repeats when he goes in disguise among his men on the night before the battle of Agincourt.

The prince works according to the principle articulated by the cunning politician Ulysses in Troilus and Cressida: a man “Cannot make boast to have that which he hath, / Nor feels not what he owes, but by reflection, / As when his virtues shining upon others / Heat them and they retort that heat again / To the first giver.” That is to say, we can only make value judgments through a process of comparison. “Percy is but my factor, good my lord, / To engross up glorious deeds on my behalf”: by temporarily ceding glory to Henry Hotspur, Henry Monmouth will seem all the more glorious when he eventually triumphs over him. His whole strategy is revealed in the imagery of his first soliloquy: the sun seems brighter after cloud and a jewel on a dull background will “show more goodly and attract more eyes / Than that which hath no foil to set it off.” The offsetting of the prince against his various foils is the structural key to the drama.

THE PRINCE AS MACHIAVEL?

What is the basis of political rule? Orthodox Tudor theory propounded that kings and magistrates were God’s representatives on earth, their authority sanctioned by divine law. But the Elizabethan stage had another possible answer. Christopher Marlowe’s tragedy The Jew of Malta, written about 1589 and well known to Shakespeare, has an extraordinary opening. The prologue is spoken by an actor pretending to be the Florentine political theorist Niccolò Machiavelli. He voices a series of deeply subversive suggestions about the nature of sovereignty. His riposte to political orthodoxy is that the only basis of effective government is raw power:

I count religion but a childish toy,
And hold there is no sin but ignorance…
Many will talk of title to a crown:
What right had Caesar to the empery?
Might first made kings, and laws were then most sure
When, like the Draco’s, they were writ in blood.

Religion as an illusion; the idea that human knowledge does not require divine sanction; the notion that it is “might” not “right” that decides who rules; the proposition that the most effective laws are those based not on justice but on the severity exemplified by the ancient Greek lawgiver Draco (from whose name we get the word “draconian”). French and English thinkers of Shakespeare’s time demonized Machiavelli for holding these views, but for Christopher Marlowe the act of thinking the unthinkable made Machiavelli a model for his own overreaching stage heroes.

Shakespeare’s history plays are steeped in the influence of Marlowe, but politically he was much more cautious—he would never have risked suffering Marlowe’s end, stabbed to death by a government spy while awaiting questioning in a heresy investigation. But that did not stop Shakespeare from recognizing the theatrical charisma of the Marlovian machiavel. He created a string of such characters himself—Aaron the Moor in Titus Andronicus, Richard III, Iago in Othello, Edmund in King Lear. What attracted him to the type was not so much the subversive politics as the stage panache of the unapologetic villain. Political orthodoxy is staid and solemn. The machiavel is nimble and witty. But is he necessarily brutal and irreligious?

Prince Harry is a man of the future; his father is haunted by the past. Both parts of Henry IV are suffused with the memory of the “by-paths and indirect crooked ways” by which Bullingbrook “met” (or rather took) the crown. The king is revealed at his most vulnerable halfway through Part II, in a scene that may have troubled the censor: sick and sleepless, he meditates on the cares of state, the fragility of office, and the weight of his past sin. A usurper himself, Henry IV has no ground on which to base his authority over the rebels who were once his allies. The only basis of his power is victory on the battlefield. In each part, this is achieved by means of a trick. At Shrewsbury in Part I, the device consists of dressing several different men as the king in order to confuse the enemy. Having slain one of the impersonators, Douglas assumes that he is addressing another of them: “What art thou, / That counterfeit’st the person of a king?” This time, however, it is the king, not a counterfeit—which beautifully dramatizes the point that the king is a counterfeit because of his usurpation. In Part II, the king is too sick to fight his own battle, so at Gaultree Forest the Machiavellian strategy of reneging upon the terms of a negotiated truce is carried out by his second son, Prince John of Lancaster. Does that make Prince Harry into the true follower of Machiavelli, who advised that the effective prince is one who gets someone else to do his dirty work for him?

At the beginning of Part I, the king says that he must postpone his Crusade to the Holy Land because of the new civil broils at home, the fresh wound upon the earth of England. His dream of expiating his sins by liberating Jerusalem from the heathen is never translated into action. The prophecy that he would end his life there is only realized ironically: he dies in the “Jerusalem chamber” of Westminster Abbey. Henry IV’s fear, apparently borne out by the bad company that Prince Harry keeps, is that the sin of the father will be visited upon the reign of his son:

For the fifth Harry from curbèd licence plucks
The muzzle of restraint, and the wild dog
Shall flesh his tooth in every innocent.
O my poor kingdom, sick with civil blows!
When that my care could not withhold thy riots,
What wilt thou do when riot is thy care?
O, thou wilt be a wilderness again,
Peopled with wolves, thy old inhabitants!

He imagines that the “riot” of the wayward prince will be translated into civil disorder when he becomes king. That is also Falstaff’s hope on hearing that his beloved Hal is now Henry V: “the laws of England are at my commandment…and woe unto my Lord Chief Justice!” But he is in for a shock: Hal immediately adopts Falstaff’s adversary, the Lord Chief Justice, as his new surrogate father. As in Part I he had startled the rebels by transforming himself from tavern idler to armed warrior on horseback, so in Part II he will prove that he has learned the civic virtues as well as the military ones.

The prince’s self-revelatory soliloquy early in Part I began with the words “I know you all.” The newly crowned king’s rejection of Falstaff late in Part II begins with the words “I know thee not, old man.” The verbal echo is unmistakable: he has ceased to be Hal, he is now delivering on his promise that the time would come when he would throw off the companions and misleaders of his youth.