SOURCE: “Time, Space and the Instability of History in the Henry IV Sequence,” in Shakespeare the Historian, Macmillan Press, Ltd., 1996, pp. 102-36.

In the essay below, Pugliatti responds to several of Paul Yachnin's arguments, maintaining that Henry IV, Part Two strengthens and clarifies elements of Henry IV, Part One, rather than revising premises of the first play, as Yachnin suggests. Pugliatti also examines the concept of political, as well as historiographical, instability in the plays.

The General Frame: Rumour, or the Falsifications of Historiography

The issue of the ‘structural problem’ of the Henry IV plays seems still to attract the attention of critics. In a recent article, Paul Yachnin has taken up the subject once again, remarking that those critics who have argued for the unity of the two plays have normally not developed ‘the idea of sequence into an interpretive approach’.¹ Starting from what are considered discrepancies...