He wishes that “some night-tripping fairy” had exchanged the two Harries in their cradles “And called mine Percy, his [i.e. Northumberland’s] Plantagenet.” But this time it is the rebel who falls and the true heir who succeeds. Henry IV, a doubleheader of a play, is full of doubles. There are paired fathers and sons: the king and the prince, Northumberland and Hotspur in Part I. There are surrogate fathers to the young hero: Sir John Falstaff and, in Part II, his antithesis, the Lord Chief Justice. There are brothers in blood (in Part I, Northumberland and Worcester, Hotspur and his brother-in-law Mortimer; in Part II, Prince Harry and Prince John, the aged kinsmen Shallow and Silence) and brothers in jest (Hal’s “sworn brethren” among the tavern crowd, Ned Poins chief among them).

One of the questions that fascinates Shakespeare in these plays is, what is the appropriate education for a future king? The Tudor view was that the ideal king should combine the qualities of soldier, scholar, and courtier. Fencing, jousting, and hunting offered training in the chivalric arts of the medieval aristocracy, but a learned humanist tutor was also required to drill the prince in languages, literature, history, ethics, law, and theology. And at the same time it was necessary to imbibe the elaborate codes of behavior, the conventions of propriety and deference, upon which courtship depended.
Hotspur is the embodiment of an old-style chivalric warrior. He would rather be astride his horse than engaging in courtly parley with his wife. He lives by the code of honor and is deliciously scornful of the courtly manners embodied by the trimly dressed, clean-shaved lord who comes with “pouncet-box” in hand to demand Hotspur’s prisoners: the clash of styles between battlefield and court is enough to turn him into a rebel. Hotspur has boundless courage and energy, but his desire “To pluck bright honour from the pale-faced moon” is susceptible to parody: his own wife teases him and Prince Hal mocks him as “the Hotspur of the north, he that kills me some six or seven dozen of Scots at a breakfast, washes his hands, and says to his wife ‘Fie upon this quiet life! I want work.’” His impulsiveness means that he cannot calculate, he is never the politician. “[A] plague upon it, / I have forgot the map!” he says during a council of war. A more politic customer would be most unlikely to have forgotten it—and would never admit as much if he had.
As Hotspur embodies the old chivalric code, his fellow warrior, the Welshman Glendower, stands for an equally antiquated mode of being: magical thinking. He boasts of portents at his birth—fiery shapes in the air and goats running from the mountains—but this kind of talk is ridiculed. When he claims that he can call spirits from the vasty deep, Hotspur wryly asks, “But will they come when you do call for them?” Talk of dragons and finless fish is “skimble-skamble stuff” which does nothing to advance the cause of the rebellion. In the end, the consequence of Glendower’s desire to listen to prophecies is that he fails to turn up for the battle.
HONOR VERSUS INSTINCT
Part I shows Prince Harry playing “truant” from “chivalry,” but returning to it when the time is ripe. Even as he proves himself on the battlefield, the critique of honor continues with Falstaff’s mock “catechism”: “Can honour set to a leg? No…Who hath it? He that died o’Wednesday.” Falstaff’s philosophy is a simple “give me life”: never mind about ethical and political codes of behavior. “I am not a double man,” he says to Hal, putting down the dead Hotspur, whom he has been carrying on his back. Yet he is double the size of anyone else in the play and he has a double life, rising from feigned death on the battlefield of Shrewsbury so that he can return in Part II. It will be altogether harder to get rid of cowardly Falstaff than to defeat brave Hotspur. “Thou art not what thou seem’st,” remarks Hal: in seeming to have killed Hotspur, Falstaff is not the coward he has appeared to be. But he has not slain Hotspur, merely stabbed him when he is already dead—a supremely dishonorable deed. And yet, what is honor? A mere word, an empty code. It is the trickster, the chancer, who survives, not the honorable man.
Falstaff is at once the great deceiver and the great truth-teller, who reduces war to its bottom line: common foot soldiers are but “food for powder.” One of the reasons why Shakespeare made him fat was to remind the audience of the solidity of the human body: Falstaff’s girth is a way of saying that history is made not only of big speeches and dramatic events, but also of the daily lives of people who eat, drink, sleep, and die: “Rare words! Brave world! Hostess, my breakfast, come! / O, I could wish this tavern were my drum!”
A key word is “instinct.” Hotspur has instinctive courage and Falstaff an instinctive sense of self-preservation. The king thinks that his son is instinctively idle and irresponsible. The aim of a sixteenth-century royal humanist education was to overcome such innate propensities by developing the ethical, linguistic, and political faculties of the pupil prince. For Hal, the King’s Tavern in Eastcheap serves as a parody of the schoolroom at court. Falstaff is explicitly identified as his “tutor” and a central part of his education is to learn a new language—not, however, Latin, Greek, or the rhetorical elaboration of courtly speech, but the language of the people. This is a Harry who develops the art of speaking with every “Tom, Dick and Francis.” He learns their jargon—“They call drinking deep, dyeing scarlet”—and he becomes “so good a proficient in one quarter of an hour” that he will be able to “drink with any tinker in his own language” for the rest of his life.
Henry IV believes that one of the failings of his predecessor Richard II had been to seek to make himself popular, thus eroding the necessary distance that creates awe and gives mystique to the monarchy. But King Henry’s own distance from public life—he is nearly always seen surrounded by an inner circle of courtiers or closeted alone in his chamber—causes power to ebb from him.