2Henry IV and the Theme of Time

2HENRY IV AND THE THEME OF TIME BENJAMIN T. SPE NCER QNE of the oldest of Shakespearean cruxes is Hal's renunciation of Falstaff, as Professor Shaaber's edition of the New Variorum of 2Henry IV reminds ·us, with the reprinting of the numerous commentaries devoted to it during the past two centuries. With Rowe's testimony at the beginning of the eighteenth century that he was sorry to see Hal use Falstaff "so scurvily" and with Doctor Johnson's ·rebuttal to the effect that if properly viewed the rejection will cause "no great pain," the two poles of the controversy . were fixed. In such apologists for Falstaff as Hazlitt, Bradley, Bridges, and Bradby, Shakespeare is censured for "the sudden dismissal"; there is implied, and sometimes expressed, the view that "the dramatist has missed what he aimed at,'' that "on this occasion .. . he has nodded." Other critics have reverted to· extra-dramatic speculation and have sought to exculpate Shake.: speare through historical and literary sources. Yet the crux is so genuine and the play is in its very essence so wholly the embodiment and expression of what is involved in the renunciation scene that no statement ca!'l entirely resolve it. The crux here, as in Hamlet, is evidence of the success of the play as a complete expression of experience, not of its fail~re. It implies neither Shakespeare 's technical ineptness nor a Machiavellian heart and· mind, but merely his " negative capability," to employ the useful Keatsian phrase. Therefore it cannot be resolved in any terms approaching poetic justice. It can be clarified, I believe;. through exploration of what is implicit in the renunciation scene in terms of the play itself. Indispensable to Shakespeare and omnipresent in his work is the concept of "time." Occurring in 2Hmry IV in forty-three instances, only in /Henry IV, Cymbeline and Hamlet is the word found as often, and in those plays it tends to be used in the first rather than the second sense in which Shakespeare employed it: in the first it concretely refers to specific occasions or eras; in the second it is regarded as an entity or force, abstractly or metaphysically conceived. An understanding of the first use is obviously necessary in determining the concrete refe~ences in the· . passages m which it occurs; but even more requisite f9r a proper 394 2HENRY If/ AND THE THEME OF TIME 395 construing of certain of Shakespeare's works in whic~ it is cen tral, is an inquiry into the signification of the more elusive !lecond sense; as every careful reader of the sonf!ets knows. Some of Shakespeare 's uses and conceptions of time in this latter sense have been noted by Miss Spurgeon in her well-known study of Shakespeare's imagery: as a disentangler of truth and falsehood; as a begetter of good and evil; as a destructive power with a variable speed. Yet she has' not examined the extent to which characters in 2Hmry I V are conscious of time, nor has she suggested the especial and inclusive sense in which the theme of time dominates the play. To explore this recurrent use does not revolutionize the interpretation of the tendency of the play, for indeed that· would signalize the failure of Shakespeare's art; but it does reinforce certain readings hitherto proposed and it enables one to ascertain mor.e specifically, I believe, motives and pressures by which the characters are moved an·d also the complex of issues involved in the rejection scene. Omitting, therefore, such references to time in the play as Northumberland's "The times are wild" (I, i, 9) or Falstaff's "these costermonger times" (I, ii, 191), which refer to actual conditions of an historical period, one finds throughout the play among all the characters a special consciousness of the demands of time. Enraged and cynical old Northumberland regards it as · an accomplice· of spite, the two bringing in " the ragged'st hour," which one must be prepared to meet with courage (I, i, 151). Later, as a somewhat fearful opportunist,· he again acknowledges the power of time to fix human destiny, and accordingly he delays conjunction with the...