Shakespeare’s Snuff-Play: Suffocating Figures in Henry IV, Parts 1 and 2

The prevalent linguistic patterns in Shakespeare’s Henry IV, parts 1 and 2, present a rhetoric of suffocation which combines frequent tropes of strangulation and moments where meaning gets progressively closed off. This rhetoric coincides with a series of episodes throughout both plays in which characters find their speech limited or throttled in various ways. These habits of speech and action form a kind of wordplay, distinctive to the Henry IV plays, that I have called snuff-play. The rhetorical and physical maneuvers involved in snuff-play dramatize Shakespeare’s concept of the history play in general and the particular historical figures these plays represent.