Horses and Harries: Medieval Depictions of Virtue and Vice in 1 Henry IV

1 Henry IV interrogates honor: its acquisition, its possession, its loss, its legitimacy. As Shakespeare presents it, honor is a call simultaneously driving characters to action, to inaction, to deception; it is a concept strongly defining constructions of masculinity; it is a behavioral template unabashedly announcing its roots in an ancient and medieval past. And the past is Shakespeare's point of departure for 1 Henry IV, a history play in which he adapts the basic structure of the medieval morality play to explore honor as a chivalric ideal. For many critics, the play's dependence on the morality structure has seemed quite clear: Hal is the impressionable youth who, like the everyman of so many medieval moralities, must choose between the path of virtue (the battlefield and Hotspur) and vice (the tavern and Falstaff) to find salvation. Hence Alan C. Dessen observes that, "to argue for the debt of 1 Henry IV to the morality tradition is apparently to belabor the obvious. For … Prince Hal himself … described Falstaff as 'that reverend vice, that grey iniquity, that father ruffian, that vanity in years.'"¹

Yet to simply adopt the morality framework and read Falstaff as vice, Hotspur as virtue, and Hal as redeemed sinner is to oversimplify each of these characters and to obscure, in turn, Shakespeare's use of them to explore honor, chivalry, and masculinity. The complexity of Shakespeare's dramatic engagements with these themes emerges through examination of a motif similarly associated with the medieval literary past: the horse. There are more references to horses in 1 Henry IV than in any other Shakespearian play, a fact in and of itself suggestive of the horse motif's function in this play, but one that nonetheless becomes even more crucial in light of the horse's myriad and often contradictory meanings in medieval literary and cultural discourse.² Hotspur, the nickname given to Harry Percy, illustrates this point: "Hotspur" registers both Percy's fine horsemanship and the overindulgence of his temper, significations of horses stemming from the medieval literary traditions of romance and preaching, respectively. Depicted variously in these two traditions as the foundation of knighthood and unbridled sin, the horse motif reflects Shakespeare's integration of competing medieval ideologies into his play. In this article, I will show how Shakespeare implements these competing ideologies to create a paradigm shift in the form of the morality play, a paradigm shift that destabilizes the clear-cut meanings of virtue and vice by secularizing what should be the morality play's moral center. Shakespeare rewrites heaven as the court, God as the ruling monarch, and the attainment of heaven's reward as the attainment of approval for loyal service to the monarch. Henry IV therefore becomes the center of Shakespeare's play, with Hotspur, Hal, and Falstaff all playing the parts of both virtuous and vicious figures—figures strictly demarcated as either virtuous or vicious in the original morality play tradition. By uncovering how these competing medieval ideologies of the horse contribute to the creation of honor and masculinity in the play, I hope to challenge the seemingly straightforward categorization of Falstaff as vice, Hotspur as virtue, and Hal as reformed sinner that heretofore has dominated the critical understanding of Shakespeare's appropriation of the morality play in 1 Henry IV.

Horses

Inherent to the ancient and medieval exegetical and iconographic traditions that Shakespeare inherits is the tendency to explain "a given image or emblem in bono and in malo."³ As a result, "the horse" as an image or figure abounds with positive as well as negative cultural associations up to and through the early modern period, associations as contradictory as, on the one hand, "the animals bringing nature closest to perfection"⁴ and, on the other, as the "natural symbol of lust"⁵ whose "neighing is associated with adultery: cf. Jeremiah 13:27 and 5:7–8."⁶ These various equine depictions stem from antiquity and may have their locus classicus in the two horses of Plato's Phaedrus. According to this allegory, the soul is...