Paper II Section II – Module B – Essay on King Henry IV

Resource Description

Essay Rewrite MOD B (Trials): 16/20

Paper II

Section II

 

Question:

Hal is a reflection of Shakespeare’s evolving London.

Evaluate this statement with direct reference to Shakespeare’s play, King Henry IV, Part I, and Hal’s relevance to the play as a unified whole.

Prescribed text: King Henry IV Part One,

 

Through the precise and close examination of literature, we can gain a greater understanding of the use of history and composition to form a new meaning to an audience. In William Shakespeare’s historical drama, King Henry IV Part One (1598), the evolving nature of London’s time is explored through the renaissance humanist character of Hal. Hal generates a new, emerging modality one built from doubling and character foils that solidify the meaning and universalising true nature of the humanist figure. Shakespeare explores the shifting nature of power, one going from an externalised elitism that separates itself from the people, to a integrated humanist internalisation of power centred on merit. The shifting honour codes of Shakespeare’s time is realized through the characterisation and interplay of Aristililian balanced individuals, as Hal, Hotspur and Falstaff form an emergent form of honour, a pre-emptive humanist modality that their interaction across the play enlighten. The precise control and use of the language of concise, trade and debt is utilized continually to illuminate mercantile class and continual usurpation of power in Elizabethan time, resonating with the contextual audience’s uncertainty as to who would gain power after Queen Elizabeth’s approaching death.

 

Shifting power systems reveal the modality in which a specific time and people existual, as the tudor myth and evolving London grew in Plurality and Multicurluralism. Shakespeare, through the characterisation of the doubling fails of King Henry and Prince Hal expresses the changing nature of power. The play’s opening is situated in tension, as the King is “shaken” by the “civil butchery” and “opposed eyes” that threaten the security of Englands nationhood. Shakespeare reflects the centre of the problem being usurpation, a cyclical – power struggle for inheritable rulership, feudal systems and separation. King Henry embodies this traditional modality, just as “like a comet I was wondered’d at”, King Henry uses celestial imagry to form a sense of superiror elitism in his ruling, by separating himself from the common people of England, he solidifies the strict hierarchy of the court, crown and common-people. The father’s burden is then transferred onto the “son”, Hal, who must fufil this new way of rulership. Hal’s ability to “know you all” and “drink with any tinkerer” reveals his new form of integrated rulership, one that listens to and is part of the people. Hal’s acceptance to “imitate the son” exposes his evolving ability, like an actor, to perform a role rather than embody one, reinforcing the new modality of rulership based on a pre-modernist meritocracy. Holistically, Shakespeare creates textural integrity by having Hal “Fufill” the father’s expectations, being a new figure that can balance both the ruling and common-people’s lifestyles through imitation, breaking down the hirarchial barriers of Shakespeares contextual times.