The Anti-Henry Reading of Henry IV

The Archbishop of Canterbury is presented as a buffoon always forgetting things and getting confused in these long genealogies. The second is the exposition of the so-called Salik law in Act 1 Scene 2 the source of Henry's legal claim to France. An interesting modern production by Nicholas Heitner with Adrian Lester as Henry around the time of the dodgy dossier about war in Iraq very much made it clear that the case for war was not to be laughed at.