Warfare Theme Analysis

Henry IV Part 1 presented warfare as meaningless bloodshed devoid of grandeur and so too does Henry IV Part 2 present war in an unfavorable light. Yet while Part 1’s extended, gruesome battle scenes illustrated war’s senseless violence, this play focuses on war’s other negative attributes. Henry IV Part 2 doesn’t feature any actual battles, but instead showcases the gross corruption and dishonorable cruelties that war inspires in people.

Falstaff merrily engages in ignoble fraud to profit at the expense of both military and civilian populations, once again taking bribes from recruits and stocking the army with pathetic excuses for soldiers to line his own pockets. The old man also plans to make off with a hefty military pension by pretending that his limp (caused by gout and venereal disease) is the result of battle wounds won in brave combat.

Falstaff may be the play’s clown, but serious characters are just as culpable of ignoble military practice. Lancaster only manages to defeat the rebel forces by resorting to underhanded tactics. He dupes the Archbishop of York, Mowbray, and Hastings into thinking he’s offering peace, then captures them right as they’ve let their guard down. Thus, despite the fact that the rebels are the play’s villains, the Archbishop, Mowbray, and Hastings actually act more honorably in war than Lancaster does.

King Henry IV, too, turns out to be a less than wholly noble warrior. The crusades through the Middle East that he has supposedly wanted to launch in the name of Christianity are, he reveals, motivated by much less high-minded reasons. In his final advice to Prince Hal, the king explains that foreign wars are simply the best way to distract one’s own subjects from rebellion, a perspective uncomfortably willing to sacrifice the lives of foreigners for the sake of one’s own ease at home. Further, the old king admits on his deathbed that his eagerness to attack the Middle East was always rooted in the childish desire to fulfill a personal prophecy. “It hath been prophesied to me many years, 
I should not die but in Jerusalem; which,” he laments, “vainly I suppos'd the Holy Land.”