1 Henry IV: a critical guide

When they have had enough of serious matters, Shakespeare scholars sometimes play, extempore, a party game. What if ? What would we think of Shakespeare if the First Folio had not made it into print, and we did not have As You Like It, Macbeth, Twelfth Night, Antony and Cleopatra, The Tempest, The Winter’s Tale, Julius Caesar? What would we think of Shakespeare if we only had five comedies and six tragedies to go on? How would we then feel about Shakespeare’s extant sequence of seven history plays, beginning with the reign of Richard II and ending with the death of Richard III? And what would we think about Falstaff, who dominates 3 of those 18 plays, giving his name to one of them, and whose death is movingly described in a fourth?1 We might then still have had a Shakespeare who is pre-eminent in the creation of character – but with an achievement weighted rather more towards comic character than currently is the case