Henry IV, Part 1
The member's edition. The leader's edition adds notes for whoever opens the discussion: the history behind the scene and where Shakespeare bends it, where the prose is doing what the verse cannot, and a question to start a fight.
Read it
Henry IV, Part 1 is in the public domain. The whole play is on this page, scene by scene, with every harder word glossed where it stands; the same text sits in the Society's library, the Armarium, inside the Complete Works.
Start reading → Contents Read along in the Armarium: the words light up →Listen free
The LibriVox full-cast reading (2008): twenty-six volunteers take the parts, Mark F. Smith as the King, Max Porter Zasada as Prince Hal, Michael Sirois as Hotspur and John Lieder as Falstaff, Kalynda reading the stage directions. Five tracks, one an act, under three hours. It plays here, keeps your place in every act, and works from the lock screen on an iPhone or Android phone.
Recorded for LibriVox and hosted by the Internet Archive; in the public domain. The cast reads the Project Gutenberg text, the same one on this page. Not the Arkangel recording, which is a commercial release and stays under copyright. Each act is a 64 kbps MP3 of 9 to 23 MB: on a phone plan, start it on Wi-Fi.
Kindle + Audible
Whispersync links a Kindle book to its Audible narration: own both, and your phone keeps one place between them, so you can read at home and pick up by ear in the car where you stopped.
The Arkangel Shakespeare on AudibleFor the ear the Society's standing choice is the Arkangel Shakespeare's full-cast recording (Julian Glover as the King, Jamie Glover as Hal, Richard Griffiths as Falstaff; about two and three-quarter hours), on Audible. For the page, the Folger edition is the Society's choice for the whole Henriad: annotated, inexpensive, matched across the four plays. Arkangel reads the Pelican text, not the Folger's, so the two will not sync by Whispersync; read one and listen to the other, scene by scene.
Henry IV, Part 1 is the second play of the Henriad. The crown Bolingbroke took in Richard II sits uneasily on him: the Percys who helped him to it now rise against him with the Welsh and the Scots, and his heir keeps company with thieves and a fat old knight in an Eastcheap tavern. The play moves between the court, the tavern and the rebel camp until all three meet on the field at Shrewsbury in July 1403, where the Prince kills Hotspur and Falstaff rises from the dead to claim the body. It was written about 1597 and printed in 1598, and was the most popular of all Shakespeare's plays in print in his lifetime, seven quartos before the Folio. About half of it is prose, which is new in the Henriad: the tavern speaks prose and the court speaks verse, and the Prince speaks both.
This is the whole play and the Society's companion to it in one page: each speaker named, every verse line kept as a line and the prose scenes as prose, so it reads on a phone. Before each scene is a short note on what happens; after it, the turn of the scene in plain words, who is in it, the lines worth keeping, the harder words glossed, the Great Ideas it touches, the Scripture it leans on, books in the Armarium to read beside it, and (in the leader's edition) notes for whoever opens the discussion; at the end of each act, questions for the meeting. Words with a dotted underline are glossed: tap one to see what Shakespeare meant by it. Line numbers count spoken lines, scene by scene, and land within a line or two of a printed edition.
A note on the text
The text is Project Gutenberg's Complete Works (ebook #100, the PG Shakespeare Team's text), as canon-corpus cuts it into speeches for the Armarium, where the play sits inside shakespeare as henry-iv-1; nothing is cut. Falstaff was Sir John Oldcastle in the play's first performances, and was renamed under pressure from Oldcastle's descendants, the Cobhams; the epilogue to Part 2 apologises. Line numbers are counted as canon-corpus counts them, spoken lines only, and in the prose scenes a line is a line of the printed text.
Persons
Everyone in the book, alphabetically by surname, with the parts they are in.
The Great Ideas
Each of Adler's Great Ideas the book touches, with the parts where it does. Ideas marked in gold are from the Society's own Syntopicon Addendum and link to it.
Scripture
Every quotation and clear allusion, in canonical order, with the King James text.
Glossary
Every harder word, A to Z, glossed in the sense it has here. Each links to the place it is used. Rarity is measured by how seldom the word turns up in English at large; the commonest words are never glossed.
Lines Worth Keeping
Every line the Society marked, in order.
Potent Quotables
The book's most-quoted lines, as first-letter study cards: read the first letters and say the line, then check it against the full text.
The Armarium Shelf
Books in the Society's library that the companion sends you to, and which parts send you there.
Memory Work
The Potent Quotables, and every line worth keeping ( of them), as decks for the Mnemonicon.
Download the Potent Quotables or the whole deck, then in the Mnemonicon choose Import and pick the file. Importing both adds nothing twice.
To study the glossary's words with spaced repetition, open the Vocabularium.