Echo, Self, and Sensibility

Through the chronologically sequential plays Richard II and both parts of Henry IV, Shakespeare presents us with portraits of three successive kings: Richard, Henry, and Hal. As characters, the three are revealed in provocative contrast to one another.
...
Hal cleverly provides his own foil: his later self-performance will be seen in flattering contrast to this earlier unprincely one. The person, for Hal, is not wedded to one specific performance, and its bachelorhood can be applied to advantage.
...
When, in Richard II, Henry is banished, his father John of Gaunt advises him: "Teach thy necessity to reason thus- There is no virtue like necessity... Look, what thy soul holds dear, imagine it To lie that way thou go'est." Henry, however, rejects this means of comfort: "O, who can hold a fire in his hand By thinking on the frosty Caucasus? Or cloy the hungry edge of an appetite By bare imagination of a feast? Or wallow naked in December snow By thinking on fantastic summer's heat?"
[ Caucasus - geopolitical mountain-barrier region located between the two continents of Europe and Asia - ?? not a warm place, as would fit the rhetoric here - ah: Prometheus was chained there by Zeus after Prometheus had presented man with the gift of fire. ]
To set this against a contrasting disposition, let me add: Who, being bounded in a nutshell, could count himself a king of infinite space? For the familiar answer ... bring Hamlet into the discussion for his ready presentation of this sensibility: that "there is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so." If the air to him seems "a foul and pestilent congregation of vapours," this estimation of it is not improved by knowing the air could seem a "most excellent canopy...this brave o'erhanging firmament." I think of this sensibility as poetic, because it feels itself to make. For Hamlet, the quality of the world is not in its presence, but in his response to it. This does not imply some greater control over experience. Hamlet does not mean that he can choose to make all things good: he controls his own thinking no more than Henry controls the situation. Hamlet does not let his claim, that he could count himself a king of infinite space, stand undiminished: he says he could, "were it not that I have bad dreams." The difference is that, where Henry thinks about what is the case, Hamlet thinks about what he thinks. Henry suffers the situation; Hamlet suffers his consciousness. Of course, the state of Hamlet's consciousness --what he thinks-- is his response to a situation. And for that matter, Henry's experience like anyone's is mediated by thought--but he does not dwell as Hamlet does self-consciously within that mediation.

Richard is the character in this sequence of plays who is most like Hamlet. Hamlet finds Denmark a prison; Richard makes his prison into a world, populated with his thoughts. We see Richard, bounded, counting himself a king of infinite space: "I have been studying how I may compare This prison where I live unto the world... My brain I'll prove the female to my soul, My soul the father, and these two beget A generation of still-breeding thoughts, And these same thoughts people this little world..." Richard's is a poetic sensibility: he evidently believes that thoughts make. In this same speech, he speaks of becoming what he thinks himself to be: "treason makes me wish myself a beggar, And so I am." When persuaded that it is better he be a king, he is one; but he is one no longer, when thinking that he is "unking'd" by Henry. As he thinks it, so it may as well be. And his thoughts are the substance of his torment: "O...that I could forget what I have been! Or not remember what I must be now!" This would not be the lament of a person like Henry, to whom the forgetting would not change the importance of what he in fact is, regardless of what he thinks himself to be. Henry, as we see when he is banished, grieves over circumstance. Richard does as well, but foremost he laments his awareness of his circumstance: not the nutshell, but the bad dreams.
...
Hal might say with Richard, "Thus play I , in one person, many people," but Hal would not continue with him, "And none contented..."
...
The Duke of York warns Richard not to interfere in the passage of hereditary rights from Gaunt to Henry. To intercept a son's inheritance from his father, says York, is to "take from Time His charters and his customary rights; Let not tomorrow, then, ensue today, Be not thyself -- for how art thou a king But by fair sequence and succession?" By interrupting the passage of rights from father to son, Richard disturbs that principle of fair succession which makes him king --he becomes not king, not himself. We see this happen: right order is broken. Henry usurps Richard, and being king loses the meaning with it had.
Henry takes what remains: the publicly recognized title, the trappings of power. He plans "rather to be myself, Might and to be fear'd, than my condition." By being less his condition (his private disposition), Henry will be more the king, which now, for him, means being mighty. But Hal? What does the prince mean when he says he will "hereafter be more myself"? We should remember the difference in their heavenly metaphors: Henry compared himself only to a comet, but Hal compares himself to the sun, the old-order celestial counterpart of the king. Richard several times speaks of himself as the sun, "the searching eye of heaven...rising in our throne, the east." To him the metaphor is given: it symbolizes his divine sponsorship, his sun-like place in a natural and right order. When that sponsorship and order is broken, Henry takes over the kingship but can not inhabit the metaphor. Hal, however, can. He has the poetic spirit which is able to appropriate it: "Yet herein will I imitate the sun." Hal can make a new order, can think himself the sun and thereby make it so. After promising to be more himself, this daring poet's further words to his father the king supply an echo which resounds to this effect: I will, says Prince Hal, "in the closing of some glorious day, Be bold to tell you that I am your son."