SOURCE: Levine, Nina. “Extending Credit in the Henry IV Plays.” Shakespeare Quarterly 51, no. 4 (2000): 403-31.

In the following essay, Levine discusses how Shakespeare employed the concept of credit and mercantile exchange in the Henry IV plays as a metaphor for the Lancastrian dynasty's claim to the English throne. The critic also explores how this perspective of royal political discourse—a mode of speech that involves “promises and payments” to maintain power—parallels the everyday financial dealings of Elizabethan playgoers, who relied on credit and mercantile exchange to maintain a complex community held together by commerce.

Credit terms are habitual among the Lancastrians, associated with both the king, who, as Hotspur puts it, “Knows at what time to promise, when to pay,” and the prince, who cryptically assures the audience at the start of 1 Henry IV that he will eventually “pay the debt I never promised” (4.3.53; 1.2.209).¹ Reading credit as a...