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Henry IV, Part 2
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 Quarto and Folio differ, where the prose is doing what the verse cannot, and a question to start a fight.
Read it
Henry IV, Part 2 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 (2009), with the same company as its Part 1: Mark F. Smith as the King, Max Porter Zasada as Prince Hal, John Lieder as Falstaff, Rosalind Wills as the Hostess, Cecelia Prior as Rumour, Kalynda reading the stage directions. Five tracks, one an act, about three hours and ten minutes; the Induction opens Act I. 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 12 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, the same company as Part 1; about three hours), on Audible. For the page, the Folger edition, matched across the whole Henriad. The two do not sync; nobody has paired a Kindle Henriad to Arkangel, and the Society has not found one to recommend. Read the Folger, listen to Arkangel, and let the page here keep your place.
Henry IV, Part 2 is the third play of the Henriad and the second half of a pair. Shrewsbury is won before it begins, but the news of it comes wrong; the rising goes on under the Archbishop of York and is put down at Gaultree Forest in 1405, not by a battle but by Prince John's promise; the King, who has been dying since the first act, dies in the fourth, in the chamber at Westminster called Jerusalem; and Hal, who in Part 1 told us he would throw off his loose behaviour, throws it off in the last scene, in Falstaff's face. Falstaff meanwhile has grown old. The play was written about 1598 and printed in 1600.
It is the quieter and sadder of the two parts, and in some ways the deeper: the whole kingdom is sick and knows it, the old men in Gloucestershire talk about the price of bullocks and the friends who are dead, and the comedy is played in a key the first part never reached. Read it after Part 1 and before Henry V, and read Justice Shallow's orchard slowly.
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-2; nothing is cut. The Quarto of 1600 and the Folio of 1623 differ more in this play than in most: the Folio adds eight passages the Quarto lacks (among them Lady Percy's speech on Hotspur and the King's on the book of fate) and the Gutenberg text takes them in. 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. The Epilogue is in the last scene.
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.