Enter Bolingbroke with Percy and other lords

BOLINGBROKE          Can no man tell me of my unthrifty son?

’Tis full three months since I did see him last.

If any plague hang over us, ’tis he.

I would to God, my lords, he might be found—

Enquire at London ’mongst the taverns there,

For there they say he daily doth frequent

With unrestrainèd loose companions,

Even such they say as stand in narrow lanes

And beat our watch and rob our passengers,

Which he, young wanton and effeminate boy,

Takes on the point of honour to support

So dissolute a crew.                          (5.3.1-12)

I think this is such a cool opening to this next scene. But first: the edition which I am using as my text makes the choice to keep speech prefixes consistent—so, Bolingbroke, even though he’s now King Henry—but in fact the first quarto changes at this point, and Bolingbroke becomes King or King Henry. It’s perhaps a little glimpse of a printed text, and therefore the printer (or the person who had prepared the manuscript used as the copy text) thinking about readers, not audiences, who cannot, of course, be aware of the change (and actors, working from their own ‘part’ or cue script, with only their own lines with brief cues, wouldn’t need speech prefixes either). There’s also such a strong sense of theatrical culture here, too: the dissolute behaviour of the young future Henry V is attested in many chronicle sources, but it’s hard not to read this as a trailer for Henry IV Parts 1 and 2, Prince Hal’s escapades in Eastcheap with Falstaff and Poins and the rest, and of course that effect is (and would have been) much more pronounced when they play in repertory. (We probably don’t pause to contemplate that Hal has only just become a future king, because we know what’s going to happen to him, both historically and theatrically, but in this moment, Bolingbroke is George VI, Richard is Edward VIII, and Hal is the Princess whose life has been irrevocably changed by the actions of father and uncle…) That Percy is the key interlocutor here is also angling at the contrast, so central to 1 Henry IV, between Hotspur and Prince Hal, and King Henry’s guilty fantasy that Hotspur, not Hal, could have been his son.

Much more to it than that, of course. Bolingbroke has often seemed older than Richard, although they’re also presented as doubles or reflections of each other, but here he’s explicitly established as the father of an adult or near-adult son, as if he jumps up a generation. The concern for the relationship between fathers and sons echoes (and anticipates) the fraught state of affairs between York and Aumerle. So what’s this as-yet unnamed prodigal up to? Annoying his father, plaguing him, because he’s both making a nuisance of himself and being gossiped about in scandalous ways. He’s got in with a bad crowd, unrestrainèd loose companions, and spending all his time in the pub. Worse than that, though, the people he’s hanging out with are petty criminals, pickpockets, who get into fights with our watch, the police. Troublemakers, louts, drunk and disorderly. He’s being led astray, perhaps, and not just into criminality, but morally as well; he is a young wanton and effeminate boy, effeminate meaning that he’s spending too much time with Bad Women. He’s running riot, showing off, making it a point of honour, perversely, to ally himself with so dissolute a crew, such low lifes. Hal’s joined a gang, and he’s having a great time. Bolingbroke (as was), perhaps, not so much.