The History of Folly in the Henriad

Abstract

None of the kings in Shakespeare’s “Henriad”—Richard II, the two parts of Henry IV, and Henry V-—has a court jester, yet fools are everywhere. The Henriad is both the sparkling crown of folly and a stringent anatomy of folly. The vain and frivolous Richard II is, according to his successor, a blatantly foolish king of misrule: “The skipping King, he ambled up and down, / With shallow jesters, and rash bavin wits” and “mingled his royalty with cap’ring fools” (1H4 3.2.60–61, 3.2.63). Melodramatic and histrionic, Richard discovers “the carnival nature of kingship itself”¹ by gazing into his mirror: “Within the hollow crown / That rounds the mortal temples of a king / Keeps Death his court, and there the antic sits, / Scoffing his state and grinning at his pomp” (R2 3.2.160–63). Richard’s shattered mirror is the emblem of his fallen and fragmented state. Yielding the crown to Bolingbroke, he deliberately plays the fool as an act of self-abasement; yet the scene is also a spectacle of self-exaltation, flamboyantly upstaging Bolingbroke. Though Richard’s foolish “cap’ring” disgusts Bolingbroke, he himself proves a poor player whose own turn as King Henry IV remains an unconvincing illusion. A usurper defied as a pretender, Henry overplays the role of monarch and never fully establishes his royal “state.” The king’s opening speech—“So shaken as we are” (1H4 1.1.1)—is highly over-elaborated; upbraiding his son in act 3, scene 2, Henry delivers one of Shakespeare’s longest speeches.²

A true prince … is always exposed to public view so that he may either promote the welfare of his people by a spotless character, like a beneficent star, or he may, like a baleful comet, bring disaster upon them.

—Erasmus (107)