ABSTRACT
It is generally agreed that Henry IV is saturated with a sense of time, multi fariously expressed.1 Frequent references are made to the present moment or current state of affairs (‘the time’, ‘the times’) and its relation to the past and the future. We hear of memory, consequence, and succession; of promise, hope, and expectation; of prophecy and prediction; of ancestors and descendants, youth and age and growing old; of decay and mutability; of speed and slowness, haste and delay; of the hours of the day, the days of the week, and the total span of human time from ‘the old days of goodman Adam to the pupil age of this present twelve o’clock at midnight’ (1:2.4.91-3). We hear too o f ‘time’s doting chronicles* and of ‘chronicles in times to come’.
