ABSTRACT
The stratagem illustrates nicely how to win by the dialectical, divide et impera or tertius ridens method. Dialectics is an ordering device and the dialectician acts as though he ordering device the challenge of disorder. The argument runs as of the two royal virtues, valor and justice and it has shown that the governing theme of the history plays, derived by Shakespeare from Hall's Union of the Noble and Illustre Famelies of Lancastre and Yorke, is that of the disturbed succession. If the problem of succession were solvable by dramaturgic skill, here it would be solved. The point of this interpretation of the Hal trilogy is that Shakespeare, having discovered that the most fine, most honoured, most renowned golden unity of the Elizabethan world picture was in truth a lethal mixture of two mutually inconsistent. Poins cannot believe that Hal is sincerely grieved by his father's illness, which promises to speed him to the throne.
