STUDIES of Falstaff's role in The Henriad tend to emphasize the positive qualities that he embodies and to overlook the crimes that he commits. Roy Battenhouse, for example, considers him a "holy fool" and "comic oracle" who slyly comments on the ills of Henry's...

STUDIES of Falstaff's role in The Henriad tend to emphasize the positive qualities that he embodies and to overlook the crimes that he commits. Roy Battenhouse, for example, considers him a "holy fool" and "comic oracle" who slyly comments on the ills of...

In the following excerpt, Hardin studies the thematic links between ceremony and proper rulership in the Henriad.

Maurice Hunt, Baylor University Granted the late-medieval, early fifteenth-century settings of Shakespeare's 1 and 2 Henry IV and Henry V, theater audiences are not surprised by the large number of references in these plays to Catholic practices and beliefs.¹ What has proved problematic for commentators is the coexistence of Catholic elements with explicitly Protestant traits in Shakespeare's characterizations of Falstaff, Henry IV, and Prince Hal/Henry V. In what follows, I argue t...

In the following essay, Traub considers how Falstaff and Katherine of Shakespeare's Henriad "are constructed as female Others who must be repudiated or subjugated in order for Prince Hal to assume phallocentric control as King Henry V" and thus "suggest ways in which the phallocentric order might be undermined."