Disease Theme Analysis

Henry IV Part 2 is a play tainted by literal and figurative diseases. Its characters are as sick of body as they are of soul, and its atmosphere as heavy with actual illness as its language is thick with illness’ metaphors. King Henry IV’s physical sickness stands at the heart of the play. The characters around him initially assume that his sickness is just the side-effect of an anxious spirit and that his body will start to feel better as soon as he can put his mind at ease about the festering rebellions in England. At first, this does seem to be the case when, complaining about his insomnia, Henry IV attributes it to the anxiety surrounding his royal responsibilities. Yet even after King Henry IV receives the good news that the rebels have been arrested in Act IV scene 4, his condition doesn’t improve. In fact, it worsens and, just as England seems poised to enter the years of peace Henry has been longing for, Henry himself seems poised to die. Indeed, King Henry IV soon passes away, setting the stage for the rise of King Henry V and the plot of the final play in the Henriad (Henry V).

Yet even as the play firmly establishes that King Henry IV’s own sickness is not connected to the health or weakness of his kingdom, the play also repeatedly figures his kingdom as a diseased body with ailments of its own. The Archbishop of York describes the English people’s response to King Henry IV’s reign: “thou, beastly feeder, art so full of [Henry IV], that thou provokes thyself to cast him up.” But, he goes on to explain, the population’s vomitous inclination isn’t just specific to Henry: “so, so, thou common dog, didst thou disgorge thy glutton bosom of the royal Richard; and now thou wouldst eat they dead vomit up, and howl’st to find it.” King Henry IV himself calls his kingdom diseased: “O my poor kingdom, sick with civil blows!” Further, the Archbishop describes his and the other rebels’ cause as a sickness: “we are all diseased, and with our surfeiting and wanton hours have brought ourselves into a burning fever, and we must bleed for it; of which disease our late king, Richard, being infected, died.”

Throughout the play, other characters are likewise plagued by physical and metaphorical disease. In Henry IV Part 1, Northumberland claimed to be too physically sick to assist the rebels at Shrewsbury, but, berating him at the start of Henry IV Part 2, Lady Percy suggests that he was only feigning sickness. Northumberland then demonstrates that he is spiritually sick of the rebels’ cause by refusing to join forces with them yet again. Later, Bullcalf complains about a cold caught while celebrating the royal coronation and Falstaff repeatedly complains of pains in body and spirit, groaning about his overweight, slow-moving body, sending his urine off to be tested for (presumably venereal) maladies, and calling his looseness with money a “consumption of the purse,” a “disease…incurable.” Even Falstaff’s logic seems to suffer from sickness when he perversely attributes Prince Hal’s health to unhealthy behavior: it is the prince’s overindulgence in wine, Falstaff deduces, that has made Prince Hal so “very hot and valiant.”