SOURCE: Forker, Charles R. “The Idea of Time in Shakespeare's Second Historical Tetralogy.” Upstart Crow 5 (fall 1984): 20-34.

In the following essay, Forker examines how Henry IV, Parts 1 and 2 and the remaining plays of Shakespeare's second historical tetralogy promote a cyclical, providential, ironic, and tragicomic view of time's progress.

For the Methode of a Poet historical is not such, as of an Historiographer. For an Historiographer discourseth of affayres orderly as they were donne, accounting as well the times as the actions, but a Poet thrusteth into the middest, euen where it most concerneth him, and there recoursing to the thinges forepaste, and diuining of thinges to come, maketh a pleasing Analysis of all.

—Edmund Spenser's letter to Sir Walter Raleigh, prefixed to The Faerie Queene

I

That eight of the ten Shakespearean histories are arranged into tetralogies—two sequences of four plays each—suggests an important point about...