Unhorsing the Lustiest Challenger: Reflections on Chivalry in Richard II and Henry IV, Part 1

Summary

BY Shakespeare's time, the heyday of chivalry was long past, though strong reminders of it survived “in the tilt yard and tourneying ground.” The revival of tourneying in such events as the Accession Day tilts, inaugurated in the 1560s to honor the queen, would have given the dramatist access to lavish exhibits of chivalric ritual. He would also have absorbed elements of chivalry from the chronicles, from handbooks, from Arthurian literature, and from the writings of Chaucer, Sidney, and Spenser. Surrounded as he was by mementoes of chivalry, it would be surprising if Shakespeare did not appropriate its concepts and procedures for his own purposes, especially in creating settings for history plays about the medieval era. This means that one very profitable way to read the eight plays that deal with English history in the period 1399–1485 is through the lens of chivalric ethos, practice, and language. Such an approach allows for easy assumptions by critics about identifying aspects of the plays as chivalric, as in the comment that in Henry IV, Part 1 the Prince's offer to fight Hotspur in single combat on the field at Shrewsbury is a sign of Hal's “chivalrous nobility.” While I acknowledge that most random observations of this nature are justified, I would like to examine Shakespeare's undoubted uses of chivalry more systematically. To put it another way, I want to demonstrate the hold chivalry had on his imagination by inventorying a number of key points of chivalric outlook and lifestyle as described by a modern historian and then by showing how an awareness of these elements on the playwright's part is crucial to his construction of Richard II and Henry IV, Part 1 both as individual works and as companion pieces.

A recent account of chivalry provides a useful comprehensive description of its chief features:

Medieval chivalry was more an outlook than a doctrine, more a lifestyle than an explicit ethical code. It embraced both ideology and social practice. Among the qualities central to it were loyalty, generosity, dedication, courage and courtesy, qualities which were esteemed by the military class and which contemporaries believed the ideal knight should possess. Chivalry meant different things to different people; like beauty, it was found in the eye of the beholder.