Tag Archives: Hal

Selective Amnesia in Shakespeare’s 1Henry IV

The characters from Shakespeare’s 1Henry IV are engaged in constant forgetting as it appears that forgetting is a tool, used by characters throughout the play to achieve their through actions. Literary critic Greenblatt discusses the play in terms of producing and containing subversion and disorder, and forgetting is to some scholars what drives the chaos. According to Jonni Koonce Dunn (Ph.D), forgetting is not just the absence of memory but also a coordinated erasure “conducive to re-imagination and re-inscription” (4). Continue reading

“The poor abuses of the time”: Henry IV’s Strange Temporal Location

They say that “hindsight’s always 20/20”. Knowing what we know in the present, if it were possible to go back then we could “fix” the past—avoid the mistakes we made the first time around. In a similar vein, it is said that “those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it”. The past exists as a place defined by the present: we can see where we went wrong, and what we should have done differently. But, the past defines the present as much as it is defined by it.

Continue reading