o henry.

Well I began my reading of Henry the Fourth Part One. To get situated historically, I visited Wikipedia to get the brief rundown of the Plantagenet lineage. That helped a bit, and it will help to keep referencing back to short histories of the time of these monarchs. I also read the introduction before the play, and that really just set up what was to follow.

Since yesterday, I've only read the first two acts of the play, but that was enough for me to see a few differences from Hamlet. First off, the characters in Hamlet weren't nearly as confusing as in Henry IV. Because of the confusion and the who's-against-the-king thing in Henry I have made a little card with the characters' names and allegiances on them so I don't have to keep flipping back to the front page of the play. Secondly it seems that there are lengthier speeches for any given character in Henry. Perhaps in Hamlet no one had the patience to listen to long speeches, unless it was an individual offering a soliloquy to themselves. And lastly, this may not be so much a difference as me just noticing more, but I found myself having to refer more often to the footnotes during the dialogue between the two Carriers in act two scene one. Their speech patterns are by far very different from the more "sophisticated" usage of the royalty and upper-class characters of the play. If it weren't for the glosses, I'm afraid I wouldn't have the slightest clue of what they were talking about.
Well, so far so good.