"Cliff Notes - Henry 4 Part1" - читать интересную книгу автора (Cliff Notes)

Although these rebellions failed, they worried Elizabeth; thereafter
her subjects were required to listen to sermons on civil
disobedience three times a year. The sermons followed a strict
doctrine that the monarch was God's deputy on earth, and no subject
had a right to oppose her. Rebellion against the monarch was
rebellion against God, a terribly grave sin, to be punished by chaos
on earth and eternal damnation for the rebels.

In 1588, King Philip II of Spain had sent the Armada, a huge
flotilla of warships, to invade England. Elizabeth sent her navy to
attack Philip's fleet, and after a week of merciless fighting the
Armada was roundly defeated. Elizabeth's subjects rejoiced, and
celebrated their country's greatness with an unprecedented patriotic
fervor. One product of this burst of nationalist pride was the
history play, which celebrated England's past and, like the sermons,
instructed audiences in good civil behavior. Henry IV, Part 1 is one
of ten plays Shakespeare wrote to celebrate England's history.

Shakespeare died in Stratford on April 23, 1616. He left no male
heirs to continue his name. His only son, Hamnet, had died at age
eleven. Susanna and Judith both married, but Susanna's only child
Elizabeth was Shakespeare's last direct descendant. She died
childless in 1670.

But Shakespeare left another kind of heir--thirty-seven plays and
three major poems. In 1623, seven years after his death, two of
Shakespeare's former colleagues in the theater published thirty-six
of his plays, eighteen of them for the first time. We refer to this
as the "First Folio." In a prefatory poem, Ben Jonson praised his
old friend and rival playwright as "the wonder of our stage." That
verdict has stood through the centuries.


HENRY IV, PART 1: ACT I

King Henry IV is holding a political conference with his advisory
council. His preparations for a holy crusade must be postponed
because England's borders are threatened. The English general
Mortimer was taken prisoner by Glendower after losing a battle in
Wales, and another English lord, Hotspur, who has just won a battle
in the north against the Scottish leader Douglas, refuses to send
the king the prisoners he captured. King Henry is angry with Hotspur,
and summons him to court.

Prince Hal, who should be helping his father King Henry govern the
country, is somewhere in London roistering with an old friend, the
disreputable Sir John Falstaff. A young thief named Poins meets them,
and arranges with Falstaff to commit a highway robbery at Gad's Hill.
Hal refuses to join them, until Poins privately tempts Hal with a
plan to play a practical joke on Falstaff, which will show him up as