Tragical-Comical-Historical Hotspur

IN SHAKESPEARE'S 2 HENRY IV THE WIDOWED LADY PERCY describes her husband, Henry Percy, called Hotspur, as "the mark and glass, copy and book, / That fashion'd others" (2.3.31-32). ¹ If titles are any indication, it may be fair to argue that Hotspur also played a crucial role in fashioning the early success of the play we know as 1 Henry IV. ² In its Wrst quarto edition, the play is dubbed THE HISTORY OF HENRIE THE FOURTH; With the battell at Shrewsburie, betweene the King and Lord Henry Percy, surnamed Henrie Hotspur of the North. With the humorous conceits of Sir John Falstaffe . In the First Folio of 1623 the play becomes, more succinctly, The First Part of Henry the Fourth, with the Life and Death of Henry Sirnamed Hotspur. Most strikingly, the Chamber Accounts for performances celebrating the 1613 marriage of Princess Elizabeth refer to a play likely to have been 1 Henry IV as simply "The Hotspurr." ³ Such foregrounding of Hotspur suggests that his presence was one of the play's major selling points in its own time—as, indeed, it remained for over three hundred years.

Not so for the play's twentieth-century interpreters, for whom Prince Hal, the only major character in 1 Henry IV not mentioned in the early titles, has generally emerged as its pivotal figure. Just as in the narrative of 1 Henry IV, Hotspur falls from his initial position as "sweet Fortune's minion and her pride" (1.1.83) to his death at the hands of the prince, so in recent critical history he has lost the status of tragic hero and been fixed as either a comic foil for Hal or an emblem of the feudal chivalry superseded by Hal's Realpolitik . The performance history of Hotspur's role has often paralleled criticism, moving from tragic to comic to historical modes in order to accommodate shifting theatrical conditions and shifting constructions of heroism. By examining Hotspur in his original theatrical and cultural contexts, it is possible to resurrect a performative figure that inhabited all three genres, becoming an example of Polonius's "tragical-comical-historical" (Hamlet , 2.2.398-99). Reevaluating Hotspur's contradictions can deepen our sense of the interaction between text and performance as they not only reflect but also challenge dominant cultural ideologies of masculine honor and its sources.

I

Honor, as Robert Ashley described it to Sir Thomas Egerton about the time of 1 Henry IV's composition, is "a certeine testemonie of vertue shining of yt self, geven of some man by the iudgement of good men." ⁴ The historical Henry Percy (1364-1403), eldest son of the first earl of Northumberland, certainly did not lack such testimony. His contemporaries dubbed him "Haartspore" for his fiery valor and chronicled him for posterity as "a 'renowned and noble lord,'" "'the flower and glory of Christian knighthood.'" ⁵ For Shakespeare and his audiences, however, Hotspur's image raised the question of what kind of "vertue" truly merited honor, for his name came down to them marked with the stain of rebellion as well as with undying military glory. Holinshed, Shakespeare's primary historical source, blames the Percy rebellion against Henry IV on the Percies' "envie [of the king's] wealth and felicitie" as well as on Hotspur's refusal to surrender the prisoners he had taken at the battle of Holmedon. ⁶ He characterizes the ensuing revolt in negative terms as a foolish conspiracy that "seem[ed] excusable" only because of the "contrived forgeries" of its leaders against their king. ⁷ Nevertheless, he admits that "the lord Persie" was "a capteine of high courage" who could declare on the eve of battle that "plaieing the men (as we ought to doo) better it is to die in battell for the commonwealths cause, than through cowardlike feare to prolong life." ⁸ Despite the rebellious context so offensive to dominant ideologies of degree, this declaration could not but...