SOURCE: "Now of All Humours: Henry VI, Parts I and II," in The Breath of Clowns and Kings: Shakespeare's Early Comedies and Histories, Atheneum, 1971, pp. 260-97.

In the following essay, Weiss offers an overview of the major characters and themes of the two parts of Henry IV, maintaining that through the character of Prince Hal, Shakespeare constructs a play that is as accomplished as a comedy as it is a history.

Richard II, my reading of it has proposed, is Shakespeare's most thoroughgoing study of the absorption in words and of the perils such absorption invites. On the other hand, Henry IV, written probably some years after Richard II but directly following it in historical time, constitutes the triumph of words properly understood, of words immediately, felicitously conjoined with—a very part of—action. From Richard II by way of Bolingbroke to Hal this circle is completed. Richard...