SOURCE: "Virtue and Kingship in Shakespeare's Henry IV," in English Literary Renaissance, Vol. 5, No. 3, Autumn, 1975, pp. 313-43.

In the following essay, an expanded version of a lecture given at the Shakespeare Association America in 1973, Hawkins examines the competing claims of virtue and lineage over the right to rule in Henry IV, maintaining that Shakespeare appears to stress virtue over lineage in these two plays.

For a quarter of a century, criticism of Shakespeare's histories has been dominated by what E. M. W. Tillyard called the "Tudor myth." With its emphasis on the sin of deposing a lineal king in Richard II, Tillyard's "Tudor" myth—so Robert Ornstein argues—might better be renamed the "Yorkist" myth.¹ But it is possible (as both Essex and Elizabeth were well aware) to interpret Richard II in a way more sympathetic to the usurper. Thus Irving Ribner maintains that though Shakespeare never condones...