SOURCE: Mackenzie, Clayton G. “The Third Face of the Elizabethan Mars: The Fallacy of Heroism in 1 Henry IV.” Neohelicon 22, no. 2 (1995): 185-203.

In the following essay, Mackenzie examines the mythological allusions in Henry IV, Part 1, and finds that the play lacks a truly heroic protagonist and presents a vision of England as both “tragic and unheroic.”

The apparent paucity of significant mythological allusion in 1 Henry IV is puzzling. There is, as James Hoyle has shown, a profusion of emblematic imagery, but such imagery is dominantly proverbial in character.¹ Danse macabre, Paradise and Fall, and Neptune themes, which are all powerfully evoked in the first play of the Lancastrian tetralogy, Richard II, are here absent or, at most, greatly diminished in prominence.² The differences between the two works in this regard may be instructive and it is possible to conjecture that Shakespeare sought different mythological objectives in 1 Henry IV. While...