Henry IV Part 1 Family Quotes Page 1

This passage from the play's opening speech gets at the unnaturalness of civil warfare, which King Henry portrays as a family affair. In the king's vivid metaphor, English soil becomes a cannibal mother, consuming the bloodied corpses of "her own children." This is a rather disturbing visualization of the burial of English soldiers in the earth's bowels, don't you think?

If the earth is a cannibal, then her own "children" are also guilty of gashing or, "trenching" and wounding the earth's "body." As armed cavalry soldiers march across the land and engage in earth-gouging combat, the violence of warfare seems to plant the "fields" with dead bodies, while destroying the small, tender flowers that spring from the soil.

According to King Henry, his son brings nothing but shame and "dishonour" to his family, while Hotspur is the very definition of honor.

As Henry describes his envy of Hotspur's father, he puns on the word "plant" to describe the way Hotspur distinguishes himself from wild Prince Hal and even other members in the Hotspur's family (the Plantagenet line) by being the "straightest plant." What Henry means is that Hotspur distinguishes himself from prince Hal and also other members of the Percy family, which are portrayed as a crooked "grove."

King Henry's remarks about his "sin[ful]" "envy" of Northumberland for having such a "blest" son help the play establish Hotspur as a foil to the wild and rebellious Prince Hal. It's curious, though, that Henry thinks so highly of the young man who will later organize a rebellion in an effort to bump King Henry from the throne. Hmm. We wonder why that is.

This isn't the first time a parent has complained about an unruly child being sent to earth by "God" as punishment for some past sin. Most parents (we hope) don't actually believe this, but Henry sure does. Hal's rebelliousness, he insists, is God's way of punishing him for deposing, and then ordering, the murder of King Richard II. Since it was believed that English monarchs were God's appointed leaders on earth, Henry's usurpation of the throne is a sin against God.

We're also interested in Henry's use of the term "grafted" to describe Prince Hal's relationship with the "rude society" of his friends at the expense of his relationship with his "blood" relatives. (Grafting is a horticultural term to describe the way a tree's tissue is fused with another tree so the sap of one tree circulates through the other.) Henry suggests that Hal's association with "rude society" is the worst kind of family disloyalty, one that threatens to transform his royal "blood" to something common and "base."