Henry IV Part 1

5 Feb, 2026 820 English and Old English literatures

Misha Glenny and guests discuss one of the most successful of Shakespeare’s plays in his own time. Written with no Part 2 in mind as ‘Henry the Fourth’, the play explores ideas about who can be a legitimate ruler and why, and how anyone can rightly succeed to the throne. This was an especially pressing question for his Tudor audience as Elizabeth I had named no successor. Playwrights, banned from openly discussing the jeopardy her subjects faced, turned to these themes of power, legitimacy and succession in distant and recent history. When Shakespeare combined this relevance with the vivid characters of Falstaff, Hotspur and Hal and with the tensions between noble fathers and sons, he had a play that fascinated well into the Jacobean era and has been revived throughout the centuries.

→ Listen on BBC Sounds website

Guests

  • Emma Smith 8 episodes
    Professor of Shakespeare Studies at Hertford College, University of Oxford
  • Lucy Munro 2 episodes
    Professor of Shakespeare and Early Modern Literature at Kings College London
  • Laurence Publicover No other episodes
    Associate Professor in the Department of English at the University of Bristol

Reading list

  • Staging Female Characters in Shakespeare's English History Plays
    Hailey Bachrach (Cambridge University Press, 2023) Google Books →
  • The Cambridge Introduction to Shakespeare's History Plays
    Warren Chernaik (Cambridge University Press, 2007) Google Books →
  • Tyrant: Shakespeare on Power
    Stephen Greenblatt (Bodley Head, 2018) Google Books →
  • Shakespeare: The Histories
    Graham Holderness (Red Globe Press, 1999) Google Books →
  • Engendering a Nation: A Feminist Account of Shakespeare's English Histories
    Jean Howard and Phyllis Rackin (Routledge, 1997) Google Books →
  • Henry IV Part I: The New Oxford Shakespeare
    William Shakespeare (eds. Indira Ghose, Anna Pruitt and Emma Smith) (Oxford University Press, 2024) Google Books →
  • 1 Henry IV: A Norton Critical Edition, 3rd edition
    William Shakespeare (ed. Gordon McMullan) (Norton, 2003) Google Books →

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Programme ID: m002qth3

Episode page: bbc.co.uk/programmes/m002qth3

Auto-category: 822.33 (English drama - Shakespeare)