Like Father, Like Son:
Differences and Similarities between King Henry IV and Prince Hal

[Included here with the permission of the author.]

King Henry and Prince Hal of Shakespeare's Henry IV invite both comparison and contrast, but they are difficult characters to grapple with. Prince Hal is constantly shifting personas, and the king, the title character, appears seldom, and then mainly in a military context. There is, however, a great deal of friction between the two, and the exception to King Henry's dearth of stage time is Act 3, Scene 2, in which the father confronts his royally inadequate son. During this confrontation, King Henry wastes no breath in pointing out how vitally different he and Hal are; nonetheless, Act 3, Scene 2 of Henry IV, Part One is the fulcrum of many other scenes in which Hal and Henry's similarities crop up unexpectedly. In this particular relationship, comparison and contrast exist simultaneously. The son's and the father's most striking differences often lie closest to what is analogous between them.

King Henry, as soon as Hal is brought before him, launches onto the subject of Hal's "barren pleasures" and "rude society" (3.2.14) "which do hold a wing/Quite from the flight of all thy ancestors" (3.2.30-31). The king (along with all the previous Plantagenets) is, as a matter of self-definition, removed from what the Prince has entrenched himself within. Bollingbroke of Richard II informed those under him, "Little are we beholding to your love,/ And little looked for at your helping hands" (Richard II 4.1.160-161). King Henry IV is a solitary ruler, and his son's reliance on others, who are all the worse for being base, offends him.

Hal is a unique character, however, in that, nearly from the outset of the play, the audience knows him as two people. From scene to scene, and often from moment to moment, he switches between prose and verse. He by turns integrates himself into the Boar's Head Tavern, amongst the company his father despises, and into the battlefield, "gallantly armed…" (and appropriately) "like a feathered Mercury" (4.1.104-105). Far from relying on anyone, Hal is as slippery as can be. Just as he is capable of coldly summing up the emotional confrontation of Act 3 Scene 2 with, "I am good friends with my father, and may do anything" (3.3.186), the prince refers to his tavern family, including the misfit father-figure of Falstaff, saying "I know you all, and will awhile uphold/ The unyoked humour of your idleness" (1.2,199-200). These great dramatic turn-arounds of Hal's have a distancing effect, and it looks as if he is as "little beholding" to the love of others as Bollingbroke.

Despite his distaste for Hal's wild lifestyle, King Henry describes his younger self in oddly roguish terms. He says, "I stole all courtesy from heaven,/ And dressed myself in such humility/ That I did pluck allegiance from men's hearts" (3.2.50-53). Not only do "stole" and "pluck" sound like words out of Hal's tavern life, but the concept of Henry dressing himself in humility echoes Hal's playacting. The king and the prince, in fact, use consistently similar language. At the end of Richard II, King Henry vows, "I'll make a voyage to the Holy Land,/ To wash this blood off from my guilty hand" (Richard II 5.6.49-50), and Hal correspondingly promises his father, "I will wear a garment of all blood… Which, washed away, shall scour my shame with it" (3.2.135-137). The characters' guilt and shame stem from different sources, but they see the solutions in remarkably similar terms.

In Act 3, Scene 2, the king does not cease to use his younger self, Bollingbroke, as an exemplar, and he remembers that he was "Ne'er seen but wond'red at" (3.2.57). He reinvokes his "sunlike majesty" which shined "seldom in admiring eyes" (3.2.79-80), and he in turn criticizes his son, "Not an eye/ Is but aweary of thy common sight" (3.2.87-88). The king, of course, doesn't know that Hal's soliloquy of Act 1, Scene 2 includes nearly the exact same self-description. Hal says, "Yet herein will I imitate the sun… That when he please again to be himself,/ Being wanted, he may be more wond'red at" (1.2.201-205). Hal doesn't keep his body sequestered from common view, as did his father, but rather he hides his oft-referred-to true "self". Of course, it's hard to trust that Hal is "himself" in any context, but nonetheless, whenever he refers to this "self", it corresponds only to his royal side, and never his ignoble one. Regardless of what is being withheld, father and son agree, "Nothing pleaseth but rare accidents" (1.2.211) (the king says much the same at 3.2.72-73).

Hal and King Henry reach some peace after their confrontation, and again in the last act of Part One; however, the common ground between father and son is, at least to some extent, what keeps them from finding real concord. Both Prince Hal and the king segregate themselves. The repeated theme between the two of them is isolation, and although the kings tells his son that he "hath desired to see thee more" (3.2.89), he ignores Hal's promise to "hereafter… be more myself" (3.2.92-93) in favour of delving once again into the past, and the period in which Richard was still alive. The prince tells his father, "they did me too much injury/ That ever said I heark'ned for your death" (5.4.50-51), but he is still the "lion's whelp" and will not be "feared as the lion" (3.3.151-153) until he has taken his father's place, as king.