Henry IV

Henry IV asks: how do you live honestly as a real person in an inevitably political time? It’s about our responsibility to our country, to our leaders and to the people we lead – what does it mean to lead, to be a child, a parent, a warrior, a common person? What is honour for? Can there be such a thing as a good monarch, or is monarchy inherently oppressive? And what about the telling of the story? What do we focus on? What do we leave out? 

With this play, Shakespeare is trying to open up the genre of the history play, rejecting the way history had always been told — revising the standards of the history play, making it more like real life and less of an archetypal fable. For the first time, history was shown as being about real people of all classes, not idealized “Great Men,” making the highest- and lowest-status characters emotionally recognizable to the audience: there’s a yearning for a different world and a different way of telling stories. We need history itself to be more inclusive – but we can also keep working to open up our understanding of our history, bringing openness and inclusion and a radical sense of every person’s value to history just as much as we try to bring it to the present.