3
uncontroversially legitimate descent whose political incompetence brings his downfall. He is
deposed by his popular cousin Henry Bolingbroke, but the new problem caused by this remedy is
that Henry IV was not the next in line. Though he has a great deal of support at the time, he soon
runs into the problem Machiavelli warns of: many of the nobles who helped him to the throne are
not satisfied with the reward for their service. Henry IV Parts 1 and 2 revolve around the civil
broils that the combination of the break with divine right and a host of powerful, dissatisfied
nobles creates.
The competition for rule is also the theme of the entire tetralogy that opens with Henry
V’s death. In between, however, England’s ‘princes’ and peoples are temporarily united in a war
against France. Henry’s success is not only a result of following his father’s dying advice to
“busy giddy minds with foreign quarrels,”(2H4 4.5.213-4). It is also the product of Henry’s
recognition that his father’s troubles persisted in part because he allowed the old regime to
persist, but could no longer plausibly claim the divine sanction it relied upon (Alvis 125-6).
Shakespeare’s Henry sees the need both for some ‘new modes and orders’, and for some kind of
re-establishment of the claim of Divine Right. In Part One I will outline the republican reforms
by which he attempted to achieve the former, and the wonder-inspiring spectacles he
orchestrated to achieve the latter. I will do so with reference to the teaching of Machiavelli - the
theorist who in Elizabethan times had most famously promoted an alliance between the prince
and the people strictly on the grounds of the prince’s self-interest. In Part Two I will briefly note
some glaring discrepancies which force us to conclude that Shakespeare’s Henry is something
different, and seemingly higher, than Machiavelli’s prince: namely, Shakespeare’s Machiavellian
monarch. In Part Three I will evaluate the possibility of this in the light of his achievements and
Shakespeare’s subtle analysis of his motives: I will conclude that Shakespeare does outline a
model of good statesmanship through Henry, but that this Henry falls short of the model because
of a lack of self-knowledge reflected chiefly in his obsession with glory.
Convention