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.

In the following essay, Fujita contrasts Hal's arrival in regal costume and procession in Act V, scene v of Henry IV, Part 2 with Falstaff's appearance in dirty and disheveled clothes, and contends that the fat knight's disregard of ceremony and his mockery of royalty, though amusing in Part 1, can no longer be tolerated by the new king.

In the essay that follows, Yachnin contends that what is perceived to be a structural problem in Henry IV Parts 1 and 2 (that is, the question of whether the plays should be approached as one ten-act play or two separate five-act plays) ceases to be an issue when the plays are understood to be performance texts, rather than literary texts. As such, the critic maintains, the two plays reveal Shakespeare's critique of Renaissance historiography and demonstrate the ‘open-ended’ character ...