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Languages & Culture
Literature: Much Ado about Shakespeare: Henry IV Part 1
Early booking is a membership perk for WEA members, where courses are available exclusively before becoming available for everyone else.
Course overview
If you find Shakespeare daunting and wonder what all the fuss is about, or if you are a devotee who wants to share and deepen your enjoyment of his work this course is for you. An opportunity to look in some depth at one intriguing play, Henry IV Part 1, by reading, discussing and watching extracts of performances. The play brings together full range of Shakespeare’s mature style, introducing the famous Falstaff, with high- and low-life equally represented. Among the themes are fathers and sons, duty and pleasure, morality in war, government and rebellion, all as applicable now as ever.
This course is for early booking only.
Course description
The play we know as Part 1 was first published simply as The History of Henry Fourth, and Part 2 was probably a later thought. It is more about young Hal, the future Henry V, than about his father. His princely education is far from orthodox, and he is the despair of his father. In contrast young Harry Percy seems the perfect son – or is he? Other father-figures are Falstaff, schooling Hal in debauchery and Glendower, the Welsh wizard who so annoys Harry Percy. The question of the right to rule hovers over the play: Henry IV, the usurper, and in time, his son; the Percy family, who aided his rise, but are disappointed in their reward; or Mortimer, the wizard’s son-in-law, named as heir by the deposed Richard II. Questions of betrayal, faith, loyalty, and honour are considered from every point of view. Honour may sound old-fashioned today, but call it reputation and the problems faced by public figures who lose it, deservedly or not, and perhaps we have not changed so much. Studying the play will give us insights into Shakespeare's mature writing style and explain why his work is still so relevan
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