Henry IV Part 1

Misha Glenny and guests discuss one of the most successful of Shakespeare's plays in his own time. Written with no Part 2 in mind as 'Henry the Fourth', the play explores ideas about who can be a legitimate ruler and why, and how anyone can rightly succeed to the throne. This was an especially pressing question for his Tudor audience as Elizabeth I had named no successor. Playwrights, banned from openly discussing the jeopardy her subjects faced, turned to these themes of power, legitimacy and succession in distant and recent history. When Shakespeare combined this relevance with the vivid characters of Falstaff, Hotspur and Hal and with the tensions between noble fathers and sons, he had a play that fascinated well into the Jacobean era and has been revived throughout the centuries.

With

Emma Smith

Professor of Shakespeare Studies at Hertford College, University of Oxford

Lucy Munro

Professor of Shakespeare and Early Modern Literature at Kings College London

And

Laurence Publicover

Associate Professor in the Department of English at the University of Bristol

Producer: Simon Tillotson

Reading list:

Hailey Bachrach, Staging Female Characters in Shakespeare’s English History Plays (Cambridge University Press, 2023)