As predicted in the soliloquy, Harry has succeeded in falsifying men’s hopes. His reformation glitters over his fault. Falstaff and company suddenly seem to be no more than instruments in a princely conjuring trick, a theatrical act of self-transformation designed to impress a public audience.

Radically opposing interpretations thus become possible. By one account, the politic march of history stands in violent contrast to the humane virtues of friendship, loyalty, good humor, sociability, verbal inventiveness, self-mockery, and love. Humanity gives way to what the Bastard in King John called “commodity.” History is a Machiavellian nightmare of violence and self-interest. The alternative view is that Falstaff embodies the temptations of the flesh. He scores highly for at least three of the seven deadly sins—gluttony, lust, and sloth. He is the Vice figure of the old tradition of morality plays and his rejection is accordingly Hal’s final step on the path toward political and moral redemption. So it is that Hal can be played equally persuasively as a young man going on a journey toward maturity but still enjoying his departures from the straight and narrow path, or as one of Shakespeare’s Machiavellian manipulators—energetic and intellectually astute, a brilliant actor, but intensely self-conscious, emotionally reined in.
We may perhaps reconcile the opposing readings by supposing that, in the character of Prince Hal, Shakespeare—perhaps as his own riposte to Marlowe—set out to create a new and distinctive kind of “good machiavel”: a political realist who is prepared to take difficult, even brutal, decisions when it is necessary, but who, instead of being atheistic and self-interested, always tries to do what he takes to be God’s will and so to serve the best interests of his nation and his people. Still, though, the dilemma remains: even as Falstaff uses Hal for his own advancement, he is always a truer father than the cold and politic King Henry IV can ever be. The point is made with beautiful clarity by the contrast between Falstaff’s heated engagement in the scene in which he and Hal act out the prodigal prince’s forthcoming interview with his father and the king’s chilly detachment in the interview itself.
REFORMATION AND REJECTION
It is not known whether Shakespeare always intended Henry IV to be a two-part play or whether he discovered at some point in the writing or production of Part I that it would be dramatically unsatisfying to contain a double climax in a single play, to have Prince Harry prove himself a chivalric hero by defeating Hotspur on the battlefield and then immediately dissociate himself from Falstaff and the other thieves. Instead, the rejection of Falstaff is withheld until Part II, but anticipated in the play-within-the-play in Part I, where the prince’s return to his father is pre-enacted in the tavern.
The scene is a glorious piece of improvised theater, with the actors changing roles and parodying different linguistic registers. Thus, for instance, when Falstaff plays King Henry he apes the affected courtly prose style of the once fashionable writer John Lyly: “for though the camomile, the more it is trodden the faster it grows, yet youth, the more it is wasted the sooner it wears.” It is a mark of Shakespeare’s attention to detail that when Falstaff is playing the king he calls the prince “Harry” instead of his pet name, “Hal.” Though the language of the mock play is intricate and varied, the staging is simple: “This chair shall be my state, this dagger my sceptre and this cushion my crown.” The meta-theatrical effect reminds the audience that they are in a theater, and at the same time suggests that power is itself a form of theater. There is no intrinsic reason why a golden crown is sacred and a stuffed cushion anarchic; whether in a theater or a palace, a throne may represent a “chair of state,” but it is still a mere chair.
A chair is a chair and, as Gadshill puts it, “Homo is a common name to all men.” Falstaff may be “that reverend Vice, that grey Iniquity, that father Ruffian, that Vanity in years,” but he is also the embodiment of the shared frailty of all humanity: “If sack and sugar be a fault, heaven help the wicked: if to be old and merry be a sin, then many an old host that I know is damned.” To banish plump Jack is to banish “all the world.” “I do,” says Hal, playing the role of his father the king. “I will,” he adds, anticipating what he will do when he becomes king himself. As so often when Shakespeare’s art is working in its most concentrated form, judgment is left suspended. Is Hal “essentially made,” with or without knowing it? And is it possible to be a true friend and a true prince? At the end of the “play extempore,” he is friend more than prince, lying to an authority figure, the sheriff, in order to protect Falstaff. So is he—as some editors emend—“essentially mad,” fundamentally as opposed to temporarily a “madcap”? “The true prince may, for recreation sake, prove a false thief,” says Falstaff: is the playtime of “recreation” a space for a brief interlude of misrule or a crucible in which the self is re-created?
There is little historical warrant for the story of Henry V’s riotous youth. A “prodigal son” narrative was attached to him in the chronicles and the anonymous play The Famous Victories of Henry the Fifth in order to highlight the change he undergoes when he becomes king, submits to the rule of law, and so unifies and brings to order the nation that his father divided. The rejection of Falstaff and company is part and parcel of Harry’s symbolically becoming a new person at the moment of his coronation. The notions of “reformation” and the washing away of past iniquities clearly have strong religious connotations. Each time the prince returns to the court, he speaks a language of “fall” and “pardon.” When he fights well, his father tells him, “Thou hast redeemed thy lost opinion.”
The rhythm of Prince Hal’s life is that of providential history, leading to his “reformation” and his assumption of the roles which attracted Queen Elizabeth to him: unifier of the body politic, victor over a rival kingdom, heroic leader of a great and independent nation. The rhythm of Falstaff’s life is that of the body and the seasons. In Part II he will journey into the deep England of Justice Shallow’s Gloucestershire orchard. We learn from Shallow that Falstaff began his career as page to Thomas Mowbray, Duke of Norfolk. This appears to be a Shakespearean fancy without source: it is true of neither the historical Sir John Falstaff, who flees the battlefield in Henry VI Part I, nor the historical Sir John Oldcastle, of whom the character of Falstaff was originally an irreverent portrait. Why did Shakespeare give his fictional Falstaff a past that began in the service of Mowbray? At one level, it links him with opposition to the Lancastrian ascendancy represented by King Henry IV and his son. Mowbray was Henry IV’s opponent when the latter was still Bullingbrook, back at the beginning of Richard II. Like father, like son: as Bullingbrook’s accusation of treachery was instrumental in the banishment of Mowbray from the land, so Hal will banish Falstaff from his presence. Mowbray departs with a moving farewell to his native land and language; the effect of his words is to suggest that love of the English earth and the English word goes deeper than dynastic difference.