King Henry the Fourth Author:William Shakespeare Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: (3) The colloquial prose of dialogue and of matter-of- fact narrative, as in IV, ii. "Shakespeare was the creator of colloquial prose, of the prose most appropri... more »ate for drama."—Churton Collins. Here and there in King Henry the Fourth, Part I, may be read the principles which underlie Shakespeare's transition from prose to verse and from verse to prose. In I, ii, the badinage between Prince Henry and Falstaff and the dialogue of information between the prince and Poins are naturally in prose, but when the prince is left alone his deepest feelings find expression in verse. Similarly, in II, iii, the transition from prose to verse takes place when Lady Percy enters. V. DRAMATIC CONSTRUCTION AND DEVELOPMENT The supreme hero of Shakespeare's ten plays on English history is Henry of Monmouth. The three which deal with him constitute the great trilogy in the range of chronicle drama, and it is peculiarly significant that with the development of his dramatic interpretation of this hero Shakespeare should have interwoven that of Falstaff, the supreme figure in English comedy. Never before in English drama had been such perfect fusion of the serious and the comic as in King Henry the Fourth, and the history and the comedy are organically connected through Prince Henry. Drama, be the outcome tragedy or comedy, deals with a conflict between an individual force (which may be centered either in one character or in a group of characters acting as one) and environing circumstances. In tragedy the individual (one person or a group) is overwhelmed;in comedy the individual triumphs. In both tragedy and comedy five stages may be noted in the plot development: (i) the exposition, or introduction; (2) the complication, rising action, or growth; (3) the climax, crisis, or turning point; (4) ...« less