ABSTRACT

Central to the play’s concern with truth is the question of oaths and vows: those words which serve to stabilise in human conduct the relationship between past, present, and future, are indispensable to the maintenance of justice and law, and fundamental to the feudal-chivalric conception of nobility. In Henry TV, oaths and vows are remembered from the past and enacted in the present, and it might be said that the whole action turns on the making, keeping, and breaking of such commitments.2 The proliferation of minor asseverations such as To speak truly’, ‘as I am a gentleman’, ‘by the word of a noble’, ‘as I am a true man’, Tfaith’, ‘Faith’, ‘in good sooth’, and ‘as true as I live’ seems to reflect the central significance as well as the questionable value of the sworn pledge.