Henry IV Part 2 (SparkNotes Literature Guide)
By SparkNotes
()
About this ebook
Making the reading experience fun!
Created by Harvard students for students everywhere, SparkNotes is a new breed of study guide: smarter, better, faster. Geared to what today's students need to know, SparkNotes provides: chapter-by-chapter analysis
explanations of key themes, motifs, and symbols
a review quiz and essay topics
Lively and accessible, these guides are perfect for late-night studying and writing papers.
Read more from Spark Notes
Bird by Bird (SparkNotes Literature Guide) Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5King Lear: No Fear Shakespeare Deluxe Student Edition Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5As You Like It (No Fear Shakespeare) Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Measure for Measure (No Fear Shakespeare) Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Much Ado About Nothing (No Fear Shakespeare) Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Tempest (No Fear Shakespeare) Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Macbeth: No Fear Shakespeare Deluxe Student Edition Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Richard III (No Fear Shakespeare) Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5No Fear Shakespeare Audiobook: Romeo & Juliet Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Winter's Tale (No Fear Shakespeare) Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Outsiders (SparkNotes Literature Guide) Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsRomeo and Juliet: No Fear Shakespeare Deluxe Student Edition Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5No Fear Shakespeare Audiobook: Julius Caesar Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Two Gentlemen of Verona (No Fear Shakespeare) Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsAtlas Shrugged SparkNotes Literature Guide Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsMerchant of Venice: No Fear Shakespeare Deluxe Student Edition Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Tempest: No Fear Shakespeare Deluxe Student Edition Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/51984 SparkNotes Literature Guide Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5100 Years of Solitude (SparkNotes Literature Guide) Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsA Raisin in the Sun (SparkNotes Literature Guide) Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsDune (SparkNotes Literature Guide) Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsComedy of Errors (No Fear Shakespeare) Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Henry V (No Fear Shakespeare) Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Henry IV Parts One and Two (No Fear Shakespeare) Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Merchant of Venice (No Fear Shakespeare) Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Othello (No Fear Shakespeare) Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5King Lear (No Fear Shakespeare) Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Julius Caesar: No Fear Shakespeare Deluxe Student Edition Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Richard II (No Fear Shakespeare) Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5
Related to Henry IV Part 2 (SparkNotes Literature Guide)
Related ebooks
Henry V (SparkNotes Literature Guide) Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsHenry VI Part 1 (SparkNotes Literature Guide) Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsHenry IV Parts One and Two (No Fear Shakespeare) Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5King John (SparkNotes Literature Guide) Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsRichard II (SparkNotes Literature Guide) Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsHenry IV, Part II Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Henry IV, Part 1 Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5King Henry V Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Henry VIII (SparkNotes Literature Guide) Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsHenry IV, Part I (SparkNotes Literature Guide) Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsA Study Guide for William Shakespeare's "Henry IV, Part One" Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsJohn Ford’s Perkin Warbeck: A Retelling Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsHenry VII Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Henry VI Part 2 (SparkNotes Literature Guide) Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Life of King Henry V of England: Biography of England's Greatest Warrior King Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsHenry IV, Part 1 (Annotated by Henry N. Hudson with an Introduction by Charles Harold Herford) Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Life and Times of King Henry V of England Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Last White Rose Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5King John Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Henry the Fifth Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsHenry V Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Last Royal Rebel: The Life and Death of James, Duke of Monmouth Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Four Great Histories: Henry IV Part I, Henry IV Part II, Henry V, and Richard III Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Life of King Henry V: Biography of England's Greatest Warrior King Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsHenry IV: The Righteous King Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Red Prince: The Life of John of Gaunt, the Duke of Lancaster Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Sword and Scepter: The Reign of Henry V Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsPolitical Animal: An Essay on the Character of Shakespeare’s Henry V Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsHenry IV, Part I Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Henry V (No Fear Shakespeare) Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5
Book Notes For You
Gavin de Becker’s The Gift of Fear Survival Signals That Protect Us From Violence | Summary Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue by V. E. Schwab: Conversation Starters Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5The Midnight Library: A Novel by Matt Haig: Conversation Starters Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Summary of The 48 Laws of Power by Robert Greene Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Summary: The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck by Mark Manson Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties by Tom O'Neill: Conversation Starters Rating: 2 out of 5 stars2/5The Compound Effect: Jumpstart Your Income, Your Life, Your Success by Darren Hardy: Conversation Starters Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The 5 AM Club Summary: Business Book Summaries Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents by Isabel Wilkerson: Conversation Starters Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Summary of 12 Rules For Life: An Antidote to Chaos by Jordan B. Peterson Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Summary of Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones by James Clear Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Eight Dates: Essential Conversations for a Lifetime of Love by John Gottman: Conversation Starters Rating: 1 out of 5 stars1/5Summary of The Anxious Generation by Jonathan Haidt: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsSummary of Ichiro Kishimi's and Fumitake Koga's book: The Courage to Be Disliked: Summary Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art by James Nestor: Conversation Starters Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5I Will Teach You To Be Rich by Ramit Sethi: Summary by Fireside Reads Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5The Silent Patient by Alex Michaelides: Conversation Starters Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men by Caroline Criado Perez: Conversation Starters Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Workbook for Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones by James Clear Rating: 1 out of 5 stars1/5Summary of Poverty, by America By Matthew Desmond Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Hidden Valley Road: Inside the Mind of an American Family by Robert Kolker: Conversation Starters Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratings
Reviews for Henry IV Part 2 (SparkNotes Literature Guide)
0 ratings0 reviews
Book preview
Henry IV Part 2 (SparkNotes Literature Guide) - SparkNotes
Henry IV Part 2
William Shakespeare
© 2003, 2007 by Spark Publishing
This Spark Publishing edition 2014 by SparkNotes LLC, an Affiliate of Barnes & Noble
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (including electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without prior written permission from the publisher.
Sparknotes is a registered trademark of SparkNotes LLC
Spark Publishing
A Division of Barnes & Noble
120 Fifth Avenue
New York, NY 10011
www.sparknotes.com /
ISBN-13: 978-1-4114-7550-2
Please submit changes or report errors to www.sparknotes.com/.
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Contents
Context
Summary
Characters
Prologue; Act I, Scene i
Act I, scenes ii-iii
Act II, scenes i-ii
Act II, scenes iii-iv
Act III, Scene i
Act III, Scene ii
Act IV, Scenes i-iii
Act IV, Scene iv
Act V, Scenes i-ii
Act V, Scenes iii-iv
Act V, Scene v & Epilogue
Questions for Study
Review & Resources
Context
Likely the most influential writer in all of English literature and certainly the most important playwright of the English Renaissance, William Shakespeare was born in 1564 in the town of Stratford-upon-Avon in Warwickshire, England. The son of a successful middle-class glove-maker, Shakespeare attended grammar school, but his formal education proceeded no further. In 1582, he married an older woman, Anne Hathaway, and had three children with her. Around 1590 he left his family behind and traveled to London to work as an actor and playwright. Public and critical success quickly followed, and Shakespeare eventually became the most popular playwright in England and part owner of the Globe Theater. His career bridged the reigns of Elizabeth I (ruled 1558-1603) and James I (ruled 1603-1625); he was a favorite of both monarchs. Indeed, James granted Shakespeare's company the greatest possible compliment by endowing them with the status of king's players. Wealthy and renowned, Shakespeare retired to Stratford and died in 1616 at the age of 52. At the time of Shakespeare's death, such luminaries as Ben Jonson hailed him as the apogee of Renaissance theatre.
Shakespeare's works were collected and printed in various editions in the century following his death, and by the early eighteenth century, his reputation as the greatest poet ever to write in English was well established. The unprecedented admiration garnered by his works led to a fierce curiosity about Shakespeare's life, but the paucity of surviving biographical information has left many details of Shakespeare's personal history shrouded in mystery. Some people have concluded from this fact that Shakespeare's plays in reality were written by someone else--Francis Bacon and the Earl of Oxford are the two most popular candidates--but the evidence for this claim is overwhelmingly circumstantial, and the theory is not taken seriously by many scholars.
In the absence of definitive proof to the contrary, Shakespeare must be viewed as the author of the 37 plays and 154 sonnets that bear his name. The legacy of this body of work is immense. A number of Shakespeare's plays seem to have transcended even the category of brilliance, becoming so influential as to affect profoundly the course of Western literature and culture ever after.
Henry IV, Part 2 is one of Shakespeare's so-called history plays; it forms the third part of a tetralogy, or four-part series, that deals with the historical rise of the English royal House of Lancaster. (It is preceded by Richard II and Henry IV, Part 1 and followed by Henry V.) The play was probably written around the year 1598.
The events of Henry IV, Part 2 take place in the early 1400s, about two centuries before Shakespeare's own time. The play mixes history and comedy, moving from high
scenes of kings and battles to low
scenes of city taverns and country life. Its major themes include Henry IV's struggle with the heavy burden of royal power and Henry V's transformation from a young hell-raiser into a wise king. Although Shakespeare often alters or invents historical details, the play features well-known historical events and people. A quick review of the historical events covered in the play's prequels,
Richard II and Henry IV, Part