The Famous Analyses of Henry the Fourth: The Famous Analyses of Henry the Fourth

David Willbern, State University of New York, Buffalo

One of the earliest criticisms of Shakespearean character is Maurice Morgann's well-known but rarely read "Essay on the Dramatic Character of Sir John Falstaff," published in London in 1777 as a bold defense of the corpulent and witty knight against the charge of cowardice.¹ Morgann assumed that Shakespeare's characters were like people and that Falstaff was like an historical person, with a history and an inner life that corresponded to common human nature, which he termed "certain first principles of character," and who therefore could be understood and judged through the critic's emotional responses to that nature, which he called "mental Impressions" as opposed to rational "Understanding." Since then both Falstaff and his fellow sportsman, Prince Hal, have attracted scrutiny from traditional character critics like A.C. Bradley, L.L. Schucking, and J.I.M. Stewart, and psychoanalytic critics like Ernst Kris.² My plan in this chapter is less to review various analyses of characters in Henry IV, Part One than to sketch categories of psychoanalytic interpretive strategies that have been deployed in the effort, and then to consider the large issue of psychological versus (new) historical or cultural approaches.³ I find four major categories of psychoanalytic explication: (1) structural, (2) oedipal, (3) pre-oedipal or object-relational, and (4) linguistic or semiotic.

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