SOURCE: “Hal's Desire, Shakespeare's Idaho,” in Henry IV: Parts One and Two, edited by Nigel Wood, Open University Press, 1995, pp. 35-64.

In the following excerpt, Goldberg examines representations of male homosocial relations and normative masculinity in Henry IV, Parts 1 and 2, particularly with regard to Hotspur and Falstaff. The critic also compares Hal to the fair friend of the sonnets and contrasts the latent sexuality of these plays with the explicit sexuality of Gus Van Sant's cinematic adaptation in My Own Private Idaho (1991).

The Henry IV plays are, no doubt, history plays, yet their relationship to at least one kind of history—the history of sexuality—has gone largely unexamined.¹ The reasons for this are not all that difficult to understand. Sexuality is often thought to be nothing other than heterosexuality, and there is, especially in relationship to the central drama of these plays—the prince's ascendance to the...