Month: May 2026

In past posts, we have said that every story begins with a sacrifice. However, that is only the half of the equation. Let’s use a more neutral way to describe it and say that every story begins with an “identity crisis”, where “crisis” simply means “time for a decision”. The hero must decide to take the journey. That is true even if the situation was entirely generated by external forces. The hero must still choose to face reality. The only other option is dissociation, which amounts to a renunciation of agency, will, and consciousness. We can turn that around and say that the hero who faces the journey in the fullest terms displays the greatest agency, will, consciousness, and all other aspects of their being. All of Shakespeare’s heroes fit into this category.

The reason why dissociation is a tempting option is because the identity crisis that begins every transformation requires us to leave behind an identity that we are attached to. That entails grief. But Joseph Campbell was also correct to say that the identity crisis is a “call to adventure”, since it holds the promise of something new with all the excitement, novelty, and surprise that comes with that. Therefore, every transformation is simultaneously a death and a birth. Every identity crisis is a double-edge sword that implies sacrifice and novelty, grief and adventure.

We can think about this another way using the ancient Greek concepts of Eros and Thanatos. Eros is usually translated as “love”, but it can also be thought of more neutrally as “attraction”. Something is drawing the hero forward towards a new identity. That “something” is a collection of external and internal drives, forces, motivations, and occurrences. It encompasses both the esoteric elements of the hero’s identity and the world which they inhabit. We may draw boundaries around these and give them names, but it is the interactions between them all where the magic lies. Because the number combinations quickly exceeds rational understanding, cause and effect seems to disappear. Transformations are acausal and non-deterministic, which is why modern science wants to have nothing to do with them and why the concept has been safely tucked away in a neat little box called “fiction”.

The upshot of all this is that our first step in interpreting any story-as-transformation is to recognise the dual action of Eros and Thanatos. Under Eros we think of all the elements, both esoteric and exoteric, which are driving the hero towards the new. Under Thanatos, we think of all the elements that are holding the hero back, tying them to their old identity. Eros includes the hero’s desire for a new identity. Thanatos includes their attachment to the old and the grief that comes from letting it go. Thus, our first questions when interpreting any story are:

·      What is the starting holy state of the hero, i.e. the stable identity they begin with?

·      What is Thanatos? What part of their old identity must the hero sacrifice?

·      What is Eros? What is drawing the hero towards some new identity?

Before we apply these questions to Shakespeare’s Henry IV, there is one more technical point we need to cover, which is that it is common for storytellers not to show us the starting holy state of the hero directly. In such cases, the story begins with the hero already in sacred state, i.e., already having made some kind of sacrifice that moves them towards a new identity. We can demonstrate the difference using two famous science fiction movies from recent decades.

Most people would know the movie The Matrix. When we meet Neo for the first time, he is already searching for the matrix and has already created the parallel identity that allows him to do so. This identity as a computer hacker and digital drug dealer (called Neo) exists in conflict with his official exoteric identity as a professional computer programmer (Mr Anderson). Mr Anderson is a law-abiding, tax-paying citizen. Neo is a criminal. In short, Neo is already in sacred state when the movie begins. His identity is split between the old and the new, and he has not yet made the decision to fully relinquish the old.

Compare that to another famous science fiction hero: Luke Skywalker. In the first Star Wars movie, Luke is in holy state when we first meet him. He has a stable, secure identity as a farm boy on Tatooine. That identity gets destroyed by the arrival of the droids with the message from Princess Leia and then the killing of his aunt and uncle by stormtroopers. Thus, the movie directly portrays Luke’s transition from holy state to sacred state.

Now, the trouble with both of these stories, and the reason why neither of them is on a par with anything in Shakespeare, is that they pay no attention whatsoever to the sacrifice that the hero makes in agreeing to the transformation. In the case of Luke Skywalker, this is particularly egregious since his aunt and uncle have just been murdered and he shows not the slightest sign of remorse or grief. Meanwhile, The Matrix completely avoids any of the issues raised by the fact that the people Neo thought were his parents, family, and friends were not real or that all his childhood memories were fake. Both movies are too eager to get to the fun parts of the story to worry about dealing with these pesky issues that would actually arise in real life. As a result, they entirely avoid the notion that Luke or Neo has to sacrifice anything in order to make their transformations.

Almost all of Shakespeare’s works follow The Matrix by presenting us with a hero who is already in sacred state when the action begins. But the Bard always provides us with the clues we need to understand the starting holy state, the sacrifice, and the desire that drives the hero forward. Learning to unpack this is the key to understanding Shakespeare’s greatest works, as I detailed in my recent book on the subject.

It shouldn’t surprise us, then, to find that Henry IV features a hero who is already in sacred state when the story begins. We learn in the opening scene of the play that Prince Hal is estranged from his father. The king receives news of growing internal problems caused by an ambitious young man called Harry Hotspur. The exploits of Hotspur on the battlefield earn the respect of the sovereign but also cause him to reflect negatively on his own son, who shares the name of Harry. Instead of proving himself in battle like the gallant Hotspur, Prince Hal has been frequenting taverns and brothels, indulging in shameful behaviour not befitting his position in society. The very next scene reinforces this message as we meet Hal and Falstaff, who are recovering from a night of debauchery.

From our vantage point in the modern world, the idea of a young man partying and enjoying himself is not behaviour that we would consider inappropriate (within certain bounds). But we must remember that this story is set at a time when leaders were expected to show courage on the battlefield and Christian piety off it. Indeed, Henry IV was a devout Christian in real life who took a spiritual quest to the Holy Land.

Thus, the implied holy state for Hal is to follow in his father’s footsteps by receiving an education befitting a nobleman, including military and religious training, and learning the ins and outs of the royal court, which he would one day lead. The story implies that Hal had applied himself to this education in the past because, when the time comes to fight later on, he proves himself a skilled warrior. In fact, Hal effortlessly transitions back into his royal role in the second half of the story. Therefore, we can surmise that he was once a normal prince doing normal prince things. That is his starting holy state and that gives us the answer to our first question.

This brings us to the next question: what is Eros? What desires, drives, and opportunities are pushing the hero forward into a new identity. In relation to Hal, we might think it is Eros itself that is driving him, since what we have is a young man indulging in wine, women, and song, and that is something “natural” that requires almost no explanation. If that were true, then it wouldn’t be much of a story. But Shakespeare is doing something much more interesting than that.

Remember, what we are looking for in the identity crisis that begins a transformation is Eros and Thanatos, all the things that are driving the hero towards a new identity and all those that are holding them to the old one. The attachment to the old identity comes at least partly from the fear of stepping into the sacred state where the new identity is not yet established. The hero must effectively put themselves into limbo, a state between identities. A common metaphor for this is the rickety old bridge over a gaping chasm. You can’t be sure that the bridge won’t collapse and plunge you into the abyss. That is what it means to be in sacred state, and that is why the temptation always exists to back away from the bridge and stay in the safety of the known world.

Even in Shakespeare’s comedies, this dynamic holds. The hero must lay something on the line if they want to get what they desire on the other side of the transformation. If Hal wants to enjoy wine, women, and song, he should have to pay a price for it. But this is where Henry IV is unique. Prince Hal is not laying anything of real importance on the line. Despite his behaviour, he is still a prince, and there is no question that he won’t be king one day. In fact, Falstaff and the other characters make constant jokes about “when you’re king, you should do such and such”. But if that’s true, then doesn’t it follow that Hal is not making any real sacrifice and therefore that he is not going through any real transformation?

As a first approximation, we can say that the answer is yes. Those who have seen the play would know that Hal spends the first two acts mucking around with Falstaff and his friends until he gets a call from his father that a civil war is breaking out and he is expected to do his duty as prince and lead forces into battle. That is exactly what Hal does. His transition from bad boy back to prince happens effortlessly and with no real drama at all. A big part of the reason why that is true is because Hal’s bad behaviour was entirely intentional.

We don’t need to speculate on this point; Shakespeare has Hal tell us himself in a soliloquy at the end of Act 1. The prince says that he is deliberately engaging in vice, not for the enjoyment of it alone, but as a way to improve his reputation later. He reasons that any quality is more fully appreciated only by contrast with its opposite. Even leisure would become tedious if it were not interspersed with work. Therefore, he is engaging in vice now because he believes this will make the virtue he wins later shine more brightly than it would if he had always been a faithful and obedient son and heir.

It follows from this that Hal’s excursion into debauchery is entirely deliberate, and he has every intention of returning to virtue when the time comes. This means that Hal is entirely in control of the situation and, because of that, he cannot be in sacred state. The whole point of sacred state is that you are on a rickety bridge crossing a chasm, and you might fall in. That is not the case for Hal. Everything proceeds according to his plan.

All of this seems to contradict our model of transformation and we must either say that it is a failure on Shakespeare’s part or a failure in our model. In Henry IV, the hero of the story doesn’t really go through a proper transformation in the sense that they sacrifice something and get something in return. What we have is a hero who effortlessly manipulates things to his advantage and does so in full consciousness of what he is doing. That is not what happens in practically every other Shakespearean story. On the contrary, Shakespeare makes his heroes lay everything on the line in order to transform themselves. How, then, are we to interpret what is going on in Henry IV?

The answer lies in the themes we discussed in last week’s post. Remember, the story of the playboy prince who has an epiphany that leads him to renounce his wicked ways and become a faithful servant to god, king, and country was a fictional one. It had been created by Henry V and then propagated by Henry VIII for propaganda purposes. Shakespeare was not at liberty to change that story, but he could satirise it.

What does Hal tell us in his soliloquy? He tells us that it is possible to manipulate one’s reputation and appear more virtuous than one is by engaging in vice in order to make one’s virtues seem greater than they are. What is it called when you deliberately manipulate people’s perceptions in this fashion? One word for it would be “deception”. Hal is telling us that he is trying to deceive others by altering his reputation in his favour.

And here is the beautiful thing: that is exactly what Henry V did in real life! The fictional story of Henry V’s epiphany was constructed in order to make him seem more virtuous than he was. Shakespeare is satirising the whole thing by making his Prince Hal tell us how propaganda works. Even more specific than that, he is telling us how the original propaganda created by Henry V works. You create a fictitious story of a wayward prince who miraculously reverts back to virtue. That is a far more interesting and memorable story than the truth, which is that Henry V was a faithful son and dutiful prince in his younger years.

Thus, the fact that Shakespeare makes his Prince Hal not go through any kind of meaningful transformation is a deliberate choice which further enhances the satire because the real Henry V also didn’t go through the transformation that he claimed. That’s the whole reason why the story was fake.

It follows from this that Shakespeare clearly knew that the original story of Henry V was bullshit, and he decided to poke fun at it. One of the ways he does this is by having his Prince Hal control his own transformation. He becomes a bad boy when he wants, and he reverts to a good boy when he wants too. That takes most of the drama and suspense out of the story because Hal doesn’t really have anything on the line. That would be completely unacceptable in a tragedy, but Henry IV is a comedy and so it is valid. Thus, Shakespeare is breaking “the rules” of storytelling for effect in order to create a satire.

All of this is true, and yet, there is much more to it. Transformation is always about identity, and identity has two aspects. There is the exoteric, outward-facing part and the esoteric, inward-facing part. Our exoteric identity is how other people perceive us. If those people know us and witness any transformation we happen to go through, their opinion is valid. But when they don’t know us personally, as was the case with the king of England in 1400, they can’t make any valid judgements. Nevertheless, historical stories always describe transformations. To the extent that those stories are believed, they become the accepted truth of a person’s exoteric identity. If you are a powerful person who can pay propagandists to invent a story about you, you can manipulate your own exoteric identity in your favour, just as Prince Hal tells us he is doing.

Shakespeare’s Prince Hal may be deliberately manipulating his own exoteric identity, but there is a crucial difference between him and the real-world Henry V: Hal is actually living it. He really is hanging around with petty criminals. Moreover, we can see that he is enjoying himself. The fun he is having is twofold. He gets to enjoy wine, women, and song, and he gets to manipulate events in his favour. Therefore, the exoteric transformation that Hal goes through is real. Unlike the real-life Henry V, Hal is hanging around with petty criminals at the start of the story. He then goes back to the royal court to do his duty. This is a transformation of his exoteric identity. But there is no transformation of his esoteric identity because he is doing it all on purpose.

The reason this is important is because the difference between exoteric and esoteric identity becomes one of the core themes of the story, as entailed by the difference between “honour” and “dishonour”. Prince Hal playfully manipulates his own exoteric identity, which shows that he treats honour as something not of great importance. However, his antagonist in the story, Harry Hotspur, is obsessed with honour. Indeed, it is Hotspur’s insatiable drive for honour that forces the civil war to occur. What Prince Hal learns from his petty-criminal mentor, Falstaff, is a much more relaxed attitude to honour, and to life itself. This ends up being the main theme of the story, and we will address it in next week’s post.

One of the reasons Shakespeare is so important is not just because we can place him in his historical context and thereby draw out in fine detail the innovations he made in the art of storytelling, but also because he consciously understood himself and his work in a historical context. That context included not just the nation in which he lived but also the classical tradition that had been rediscovered in the Renaissance. Like any educated man of his era, Shakespeare knew Latin and would have been required to read the classics during his schooling. He also borrowed heavily from Italian Renaissance authors such as Boccaccio, and well-known English tales. Thus, Hamlet and King Lear were both existing stories that Shakespeare adapted.

Another source that the Bard used extensively was history itself. This includes Roman history, as in Julius Caesar and Antony and Cleopatra. However, the works that are called his “history plays” are the ones taken from English history, of which there are ten. This group does not include King Lear and Macbeth. Those characters had some basis in reality, but the details of their lives were not well known enough for them to count as proper historical figures. More importantly, they were not tied to the royal family that was current in Shakespeare’s time, and, therefore, they had no bearing on the politics of the day. This gave the Bard significant leeway to alter the stories as he pleased.

The same was not true of the work that we are examining in this series of posts. The official history of the English royal family was a tightly controlled narrative. That’s why there was an officially sanctioned version of the story of Henry IV and his son Hal, who later became Henry V. The Elizabethan court enforced that narrative via strict censorship and severe punishments for anybody who was seen to challenge the legitimacy of the royal family, including its ancestors. The British Crown had enough trouble fighting off interminable internal dissent. It was not going to allow lowly playwrights to make matters worse.

This is a key point that we must keep in mind in order to understand what Shakespeare does with Henry IV. It’s possible to criticise the play on technical grounds, and these criticisms would be valid except for the fact that Shakespeare had no room at all to change the overarching plot of the story. He had to uphold the official narrative or face the wrath of the censor. Once we understand that, we are able to understand which parts of the story he did modify and what he was able to express thereby.

In Shakespeare’s hands, Prince Hal becomes the quintessential teenager that we know so well in our time. He is the original rock ‘n’ roller or rebel without a cause. Such a character would have been considered an outrage to Elizabethan sensibilities if Shakespeare had presented him as the hero in his own fictional story. But there is the wonderful irony at play. The reason the Bard could get away with it was precisely because he was following the official narrative. It was not he who had created the myth of the playboy prince; it was the propagandists of Henry V’s court and then, much later, those of Henry VIII.

None of this had anything to do with the real historical figure of Prince Hal, who was, in fact, the epitome of a faithful son and dutiful prince who fought alongside his father on the battlefield at age 16. The falling out between father and son happened later on, and the myth of the rebellious teenager was partly constructed in order to obfuscate that fact. In short, the official story of Henry V was a work of propaganda. Shakespeare took that propaganda and managed to create out of it a novel and innovative work that calls into question both the political and religious basis of the ruling class of English society. All of this was done in plain sight under the eagle eye of the court censor.

Thus, before we get into an analysis of the story that Shakespeare wrote, we’ll need to spend this post looking at how and why the fictitious narrative of Henry V had been constructed in the first place. In turn, that will allow us to appreciate how Shakespeare ever so delicately adapted it for his own purposes.

Now, as I have been at pains to point out in recent posts, stories are “real” because the transformations that are described in stories really do occur. However, the question arises: why do we tell stories? If the transformation has taken place in the real world anyway, what is the point of recounting it?

In terms of everyday stories, the reasons are fairly straightforward. Stories can be funny, and we tell them in order to amuse others. Stories can be poignant and relevant to some discussion that is otherwise happening. We throw them in to elucidate the broader debate. Most simply, though, people just like hearing stories in the same way we like hearing a catchy melody. Telling tales is a pleasant way to spend the time.

There are stories, however, that have socio-political importance. One of the purposes of these kinds of stories is to initiate people into a culture. We tell the stories of culture heroes of the past so that those who are still alive may emulate them. Let’s take Jesus as an example. While he was alive, Jesus had a number of followers, including those closest to him that we call ‘the disciples’. During that time, Jesus was actively teaching his followers, and he was able to give them individual lessons and feedback. We see that happening in the gospel story when Jesus lays tests for the disciples or criticises them for their lack of faith.

Self-evidently, that kind of teaching is no longer possible once the master has died. What is possible, and what we find in seemingly every culture, is to tell the story of the dead master as a way to pass on his teachings. One of the main purposes of such storytelling is to allow imitation. That is, you describe the transformations of the master so that the followers may copy that way of living and try to achieve the same outcome.

This is a particularly poignant issue in relation to Jesus because he spent most of his time hanging around with the underclass of his society while railing against the political and religious authorities of his time. In order to imitate him, wouldn’t a proper Christian need to do the same? Well, that’s certainly how his immediate disciples understood the matter, and that is why most of them ended up getting crucified or otherwise put to death. In that respect, they faithfully imitated their master.

The problems began when the behaviour of the followers of Christ gradually deviated from that described in the Gospel story. Once the Christian church became merged with the Roman state, the meaning of being Christian could no longer include rebelling against the authorities since those authorities were the ones propagating the story in the first place. Therefore, the original story of Jesus came into conflict with the political and religious structures that claimed to speak for it. This is the hypocrisy that the Protestants realised more than a thousand years later and which motivated the Reformation.

It is no coincidence that the modern meaning of the word “sanctimonious” arose around the same time. Sanctimony once simply meant to uphold the external appearance of faith and honour. In the ancient and medieval worlds, just as in the time of Jesus, putting on the appearance of righteousness was enough. Nobody much cared whether your internal thoughts and beliefs matched your outward actions. Jesus flipped that by encouraging his followers to pursue inner virtue, including and especially when it brought them into conflict with established convention.

What is true in the realm of religion is also true of politics. There are established conventions and official narratives by which we determine whether a political figure is legitimate or not. In the English tradition, one of the foundational rules of succession was one that played a central role in many of Shakespeare’s greatest works. From the Middle Ages onwards, England had been run according to the doctrine of primogeniture, which means that the eldest son receives practically all the inheritance of the father. If the father happens to be king, the inheritance includes the crown. Therefore, the eldest son must become king. That was the rule that was in place, and the legitimacy of a king was based on following that rule.

What happened when the rule couldn’t be fulfilled? Most people would know that Henry VIII went to extraordinary lengths to try and secure a male heir. One of the reasons he did so was because the uncertainty created by the failure to beget a son had caused enormous problems in English political history. A famous example was the brutal civil war of the 12th century known as “The Anarchy”, which was caused by the fact that Henry I had no male heir and tried to make his daughter the queen.

A second example is one that is directly relevant to our subject here. Richard II failed to have a son, and this played a major role in allowing his cousin, Henry Bolingbroke, to usurp the throne and become Henry IV. However, the failure to follow the rules of royal succession created uncertainty and placed Henry’s rule on shaky ground from the very beginning. That’s a big part of the reason why he needed to put down various rebellions, including the one described in Shakespeare’s play where Harry Hotspur and other rebels mounted a major challenge to the king.

As we have already mentioned, Henry IV’s son, Hal, faithfully joined with his father on the battlefield and helped to put down the rebellion. In this sense, he was a model son. However, partly because of his successes, and partly because of the failing health of his father, the relationship between them turned sour later on as the father saw in the son a challenge to his authority. One of the results was that Henry kicked Hal out of the royal council, a disgrace that could have marred the transfer of power later and thereby become a threat to the son’s succession. Even though the transfer of power eventually happened smoothly, Henry V (formerly Prince Hal) also had to fight off significant internal opposition in the early years of his reign.

That is the very brief political background to the story. There is no evidence whatsoever that the future Henry V was a rebellious child or that he led a life of dissolution and debauchery. Where, then, could the story have emerged about Harry’s supposed youthful indiscretions?

Well, funnily enough, this is where religion re-enters the picture. We have to remember that the kings of this era were mostly genuine exponents of the Christian faith. Indeed, Henry IV had visited the Holy Land, and his desire to launch a crusade was genuine, even though he never got around to doing it. But it was not the story of Jesus as a holy anarchist that was invoked in relation to Henry V but another very common religious narrative that occurs in many cultures.

Remembering once again that the transformations depicted in stories almost always have a basis in reality, one of the most famous kinds of religious transformation occurs where an aristocratic young man (it is always a man) uses his status and wealth to partake of wine, women, and song, only to suddenly transition into an austere religious practitioner after an epiphany of some kind. Perhaps the most famous example of this in world-historical terms is the Buddha, who lived a life of pleasure until the age of 29, when he had his religious conversion. Two prime examples from the Christian tradition were St Augustine and St Francis of Assisi. These were real transformations that happened in the lives of these men.

In the case of the two Christian saints just mentioned, their stories were very well-known throughout Christendom in the time of Henry V. Most importantly, it was believed that such men had been chosen by God, since only this could seem to explain the sudden and violent change in their characters as they threw off all worldly possessions to live a life of poverty.

Again, there is no evidence at all that such a religious transformation happened to Prince Hal. In any case, the story was only constructed many years later when he had become Henry V. Henry’s brother paid an Italian scholar called Tito Livio Frulovisi to write a biography of the king describing the conversion and how it reunited him not just with his faith but also with his father. The implication was that Henry had been saved by God, who brought him back onto the path of righteousness and made him king. All of this was a fabrication designed to give legitimacy to a kingship which was suffering from internal rebellion.

By modern propaganda standards, it was all incredibly unsophisticated. In fact, Frulovisi seems to have plagiarised most of his work directly from other sources. Moreover, the narrative seems to have delivered very little actual political benefit to Henry V during his reign. If that was all there was to it, the whole thing might have been simply forgotten. However, a century and a half later, the fictitious story of Henry V’s religious epiphany was rediscovered and reinvigorated by the propagandists of the court of Henry VIII.

We noted earlier how changing social and political realities tend to bring elements of important stories into dissonance with succeeding generations. To be a Christian in the time of Jesus was very different to being one in the time of Constantine or later in medieval Europe. One of the main functions of the Catholic Church was smoothing out the inconsistencies between the narrative and reality. However, it’s a fine line between smoothing out inconsistency and engaging in blatant hypocrisy and lies.

The rank hypocrisy of the Catholic Church led to the Reformation, which caused major religious and political changes between the rule of Henry V and that of Henry VIII. One of those changes was the fact that the papal blessing, once given to kings as the seal of divine approval for their reign, had lost its validity. But if the Pope were no longer the authority who could vouch for the divinity of a king’s rule, who could?

The answer was found in a modification to the divine right of kings. According to the new doctrine, kings were already divinely blessed, irrespective of what the pope had to say about it. In accordance with Protestant beliefs, the king’s divinity came from internal rather than external authority. It was a personal connection with God that was not mediated by priest or pope.

Now, in the time of Henry VIII, these ideas were still new and not universally accepted. What the king needed was some historical examples to help bolster his case. The entirely fictitious story of Henry V’s religious conversion was just what the doctor ordered. Here was a king who had undergone a religious epiphany and had been chosen by God. As an ancestor to Henry VIII (sort of), he was a prime exemplar of the new doctrine of the divine right of kings and proof that the royal line had always been blessed by God. That is the reason why Henry VIII’s chroniclers got to work embellishing the story by turning the wayward Prince Hal into the kind of playboy that Edward VII would later be. All of this was designed to enhance the miraculous nature of Hal’s conversion and thereby the inherent divinity of the royal line.

It was this narrative, created by the propagandists of Henry VIII, which had become official court doctrine by the time that Shakespeare picked up the story many decades later. Prince Hal was known as a pleasure-seeking youth who willingly gave up his wicked ways to faithfully serve God, king, and country. To reiterate, all of this was an inversion of the truth. Hal had started off faithful to his father and become unfaithful later. The grubby business of political infighting within the royal family, which is a major theme in Shakespeare’s greatest works (Macbeth, King Lear, Hamlet, etc.), had been airbrushed away and replaced by a quasi-religious fairytale.

To say it one more time, Shakespeare was not at liberty to deviate one iota from that fairytale. His portrayal of Henry IV had to include a young prince who lived a life of excess and then underwent a dramatic transformation to become a faithful servant to his father. That is what the play shows. It is what Shakespeare did with the rest of the story that shows us his real intent.

It is indicative of a major change that had taken place in English society between the time of Henry V to that of Elizabeth I, that the Bard was able to remove almost all of the religious themes from the story. Clearly, the court censor didn’t care that the prince does not have a religious epiphany. Instead, Shakespeare’s Prince Hal reunites with his father out of political and familial duty, nothing more.

But the far more important point that is related to this is that Shakespeare’s Prince Hal never renounces the life of pleasure. On the contrary, he tacitly supports it through the character who ended up becoming the crowd favourite: Falstaff. Falstaff is the pleasure-seeking Fool who had been a stock character in comedies since the ancient world. Shakespeare elevates him to the position of wise Sage. He is actually the mentor to Hal, providing the prince with a different view on life.

It is through Falstaff that Shakespeare manages to critique both the religious and political establishments of his day, all while staying faithful to the official propaganda line. We’ll see how he did it next week as we begin our analysis of the story proper.

In last week’s post, we made the case for why every story is a transformation that requires the hero to relinquish their old identity and make the transition to something new. It follows that every story requires a sacrifice. Traditional religious sacrifice is relevant here since it involves giving up something of value in order to attain something else of value. Of course, the modern economy is predicated on the same principle. You sacrifice your time to work in order to get money to buy some other things that you want.

Although society attempts to fix the exchange rates of such sacrifices, in the greatest transformations and stories, the hero can’t know in advance what they are sacrificing or what they will get in return. It’s for this reason that Joseph Campbell called the beginning of a story a “call to adventure”. It’s an adventure because we don’t know exactly where it’s going to take us. The sacrifice is the price to be paid for taking the call to adventure. But, again, the sacrifice the hero thinks they are making and the one they end up making are rarely the same thing. Every story is a journey into the unknown.

It follows from this that the most fundamental question of interpretation for any story is, ‘What is the hero sacrificing and what may they get in return?’ We will think of this in terms of the “identity” of the hero, using that concept in its broadest possible fashion to include any attribute or property of human nature. Sacrifices that involve property are part of our identity because property is part of our identity. But the more fundamental transformations of life always involve something more esoteric, such as a challenge to our worldview or our understanding of who we are as a person.

The concept of transformation therefore touches on some of the biggest questions of existence. If life is a series of transformations, then it follows that our identity is always changing. That is self-evidently true. Our physical appearance changes. Our beliefs change. Our social position changes. But as philosophical and religious thinkers have long known, transformation implies some kind of enduring entity which is doing the changing. In the Western tradition, this is normally called the “soul”, but we might just as well call it the “will” or the “I”. We can contrast this with the notion of the “self”, which we will use to denote the set of qualities which make up our identity. Thus, another way to describe the transformation process is that we sacrifice the old self in order to create a new self.

Although transformations can be truly existential in nature, it is also true that everyday life is full of countless smaller transformations that we barely pay attention to. Nevertheless, the pattern of these transformations is identical to the greatest existential crises. This is an important point to recognise because it maps to the difference between the everyday kinds of stories we tell each other and the great works of literature. Both of these have the same underlying structure. The difference is only in the magnitude the transformation that the hero goes through. Let’s take an example from everyday life to demonstrate this fact.

The hero of our story is Bob. Bob hauls himself out of bed in the morning, visits the bathroom, and then staggers bleary-eyed to the kitchen for his regular bowl of breakfast cereal, hoping that the blood-sugar injection will kickstart his brain into gear. He throws open the fridge door and reaches for the milk bottle, more by instinct than by conscious awareness. It is also instinct that signals to Bob’s brain that something is wrong. The bottle is too light. He holds it up to his bloodshot eyes and confirms the worst. Bob has run out of milk.

Although we would never think of it this way in the daily course of life, Bob has stumbled into a transformation that needs to be resolved one way or another. Our first question to understand the transformation is to identify the hero’s holy state, meaning the world which they understand and know how to navigate.

Bob eats a bowl of cereal for breakfast every day. It is part of his daily routine and therefore a component of his identity. That identity is in holy state because there is an abundance of breakfast cereal available at Bob’s local supermarket, and there is no inner compunction driving Bob to call his eating habit into question. The fact that Bob can stagger into the kitchen still half-asleep in order to eat his cereal is further proof that he is in holy state. He barely needs to pay attention to what he is doing.

Because we are using the concept of “identity” in the widest possible fashion, we also say that Bob’s identity includes his mental model of the world. In that mental model, there is a bottle in his fridge that has enough milk in it to enable Bob to eat breakfast. It is this mistaken belief which becomes the trigger for Bob’s transformation. That trigger is the next crucial point of analysis we need in order to understand the transformation that Bob is going through. It is what we call the sacrifice. Part of Bob’s identity has been called into question. That forces him out of holy state and into what we call sacred state. The sacrifice is the transition point between these states and is usually what we think of as the beginning of a story.

The first thing that gets sacrificed in Bob’s story is his mental model of the world. His belief that there is milk in the fridge has been proven incorrect. This forces Bob into an identity crisis, which sounds hyperbolic in this context, but which simply means that Bob needs to make a decision about what to do next. Note that any decision that Bob makes involves a further sacrifice. For example, he may decide to drive to the supermarket and buy more milk. That requires a sacrifice of time, energy, and money. He may decide to look in the cupboard for something else to eat. That requires a sacrifice of his plan to eat breakfast cereal. He may decide to skip eating altogether, meaning he is sacrificing the entire notion of breakfast.

This highlights another quality of the transformation process which is that the initial sacrifice always leads to a greater sacrifice. What was a minuscule little factual error in Bob’s mental model of the world becomes something more tangible. But we can say the same thing using the more positive terminology of Joseph Campbell. Bob has been given an opportunity to try something new. That is his call to adventure. How adventurous Bob might get with his breakfast dilemma is partly a function of his character and partly a function of the world he lives in. In any case, Bob needs to make a decision and then to implement it. Only once he has done that does he return to holy state with the matter of breakfast resolved for the day.

One of the core characteristics of any transformation is what we have called the ‘sacred state’, and we have said that the sacred state always carries a degree of uncertainty and risk. It follows that any transformation, however insignificant it may seem, can lead to unexpected outcomes. Bob’s breakfast crisis may be the least likely to lead to anything novel, and yet it is still possible that his run-in with randomness could create a lasting identity change.

For example, let’s say Bob decides to skip breakfast altogether. By mid-morning, he realises that he feels much better than normal because the blood sugar crash he usually experiences doesn’t happen. He resolves to skip breakfast permanently. Or maybe Bob decides to have breakfast at a local café, gets talking to a pretty woman he meets while there, ends up dating, and then marrying her (there must be a Hollywood movie with this plotline). What might have been a temporary change of identity becomes something more permanent. Every transformation has this potential.

The magnitude of any transformation cannot be known with certainty in advance. However, it is true that any story we tell about what has happened must be proportional to the transformation that has occurred, meaning that a transformation of great magnitude requires an equally long and complex story in order to do it justice. That is why the everyday kinds of stories that we tell each other are usually of the level of intensity of Bob’s breakfast tale. Since we don’t normally have much time to tell stories in our daily lives, we limit our everyday storytelling to these kinds of episodes.

Nevertheless, all of us will still go through major transformations in our own lives. Most of us don’t have the time or the skills to put these transformations into stories. That is where skilled practitioners such as authors, playwrights, screenwriters, and songwriters come into the picture. Seemingly every culture has one or more specialised roles for those who are able to communicate the major transformations of life. Although those stories are not about us personally, they capture something about the larger transformations that we may go through. That is why they resonate with us.

If a transformation is always about sacrifice, risk, uncertainty, and reward, it follows that the larger magnitude transformations of life turn all of these variables up to 11, and those who confront them are forced to grapple with the greatest challenges. If that is true, then it is also true that those who tell these kinds of stories must also grapple with those challenges, at least in the sense of finding a way to express them properly. Only those who are capable of seeing what has happened may make sense of it. But this doesn’t require actual sight but a kind of inner vision, hence the trope that mythical storytellers are often blind. Their ability to “see” transcends the facts of the matter and reveals the deeper truths beneath the surface.

For these reasons and more, the most popular fictional stories of any era serve as the best guide to the worldview of the people they represent. Our interpretive model is just as applicable to these kinds of stories because they have the same structure as an everyday story. In the next post in this series, we will begin to apply the model to Shakespeare’s Henry IV and see what it has to tell us about modern Western culture. But, as a preview to that, let’s briefly look at an important fictional story from a completely different cultural background: an Australian Aboriginal dreamtime myth.  

The hero is called Yirbaik-baik. She is an old woman that keeps a large pack of dingoes and has trained them to eat humans. More importantly, Yirbaik-baik also eats humans. Although aboriginal culture allowed for ceremonial cannibalism, cannibalism for food was forbidden. Therefore, Yirbaik-baik is breaking a taboo.

The story itself is short and simple. Yirbaik-baik lures a group of hunters into a trap and then unleashes her dingoes who kill the men and eat them. In retaliation, the families of the dead men kill Yirbaik-baik and her dingoes. The dingoes turn into tiger snakes, while Yirbaik-baik turns into a small brown bird which is known to call out during drought. (Note: as with most myths, there are multiple versions of this story. The one I am using is taken from this book).

Our first questions to begin to interpret this story are:

• What is the starting holy state of the hero?
• What is the sacrifice they make to begin their transformation?
• What do they hope to gain?

In the case of Yirbaik-baik, she is already in sacred state when the story begins because she has become a cannibal and a pariah. Nevertheless, we can fill in her implied holy state because she is an old woman and there must have been a time earlier in her life when she was not a cannibal. If that were not the case, then she would have been put to death well before reaching old age. Therefore, it is implied that Yirbaik-baik was once a normal woman and a functioning member of her tribe. That is the her starting holy state.

The next question is what sacrifice did Yirbaik-baik make and what did she hope to gain in return? The sacrifice is self-evident. She gave up being a normal woman and became a pariah. What she hoped to gain in return is also self-evident: she wanted food. That leads to a further question: why has Yirbaik-baik given up the normal food she once ate in order to eat human flesh?

To answer this, we need to expand a little on the starting holy state to include not just Yirbaik-baik as an individual but also the society in which she lives. In that society, there is a form of cannibalism that is perfectly normal. When a person dies, the family of the deceased eat some of their flesh because it is believed that you ingest their manna, or spirit, by doing so. That is a normal part of the mourning process and therefore something that everybody in that society will experience. Since Yirbaik-baik is an old woman, it is guaranteed that she will have engaged in this kind of ceremonial cannibalism multiple times in her life.

Once we understand that, we can better understand the nature of the sacrifice she has made. The taboo that Yirbaik-baik has broken is not around eating human flesh as such. Rather, it is about doing so for the wrong reasons. In her society, human flesh is not eaten for material but for spiritual nourishment. You eat the flesh in order to imbibe the spirit (the Christian rite of Eucharist stems from a related idea). Yirbaik-baik has begun eating flesh for food. This implies not just a moral but a spiritual transgression on her part.

There is still the question to be answered: why would she do that? The story tells us implicitly by equating Yirbaik-baik with dingoes. She has not just become estranged from her society, she has taken up living with these pack animals. Dingoes are carnivores and will happily eat human flesh if the opportunity arises. Clearly, dingoes do not eat humans for spiritual purposes but for food. Yirbaik-baik has become like them. She is no longer eating human flesh in order to imbibe manna. She is eating for food, just like a dingo. In a very real way, Yirbaik-baik has become a dingo.

Here we need to factor in yet more cultural background. The theology of Australian Aboriginals is what is sometimes called animalism, meaning they see little fundamental difference between human and animal spirits. As part of this belief system, Aboriginals have a totem animal, which signifies a kind of kinship or spiritual relation. However, it is still unacceptable to behave in accordance with the negative traits of the animal. If your spirit animal is a dingo, that doesn’t give you the right to eat humans. Moreover, dingoes are not usually capable of hunting humans alone, and the story tells us that Yirbaik-baik has trained them to do so. Therefore, she is leading them astray as well as herself.

Yirbaik-baik’s sacrifice is to give up her status as a human member of the tribe in order to transform into a negative manifestation of a dingo. What she has done is to break the law and bring herself into conflict with her society. This is another very common theme in stories from around the world, and it forms the sacred part of the story which, as we remember, is where the hero’s identity becomes un-whole, unholy, and unhealthy. Yirbaik-baik has broken the laws of her tribe. While she is an outlaw, we say that her identity is in sacred state. It must be brought back to some kind of holy state.

The final step in every story is the return to holy state where the hero attains a new identity that is stable and secure, but not necessarily the one they wanted. Yirbaik-baik may have thought she would become a dingo, but that is not how it ends for her. Her final transformation is to be killed by the tribe and then to turn into a bird. This resolves the transformation and returns the situation to holy state in multiple ways.

Firstly, Yirbaik-baik is brought to justice for her crimes. Secondly, her transformation into a bird is fitting with Aboriginal concepts of what happens to the spirit after death, which is a return to the eternal dreamtime state. Yirbaik-baik’s final transformation is to become a force of nature represented in an ongoing fashion by her association with a species of bird.

It is because of these symbolic meanings with deep resonances with the Aboriginal worldview that stories like those of Yirbaik-baik are called “myths”. However, every story implies a background of theological and cultural beliefs. Even Bob’s breakfast adventure contains a web of connections that we normally call “culture”. The return to holy state at the end of the story is always a kind of affirmation about how the world is because the transformation that has occurred creates that world to some extent.

We can see, then, that both the holy and sacred state of the hero of a story is never just about their individual lives but also about the society and culture in which they live. Every transformation has a culturally specific element, both in the objective nature of the events that happen and in the way in which the storyteller understands them. This is another reason why the great stories of any culture provide such insight, because they communicate in detail what both the storyteller and the audience understand to be real.

With that in mind, we are now ready to tackle Shakespeare, who is so valuable not just because he is a genius-level storyteller but because his work sits at the pivot point of what was the major transformation in Western culture that still dominates in our time.

Henry IV is not normally considered one of his top tier plays, but it does reveal a new kind of character and a novel resolution to his story. As we noted last week, the true hero of Henry IV is not the king but his son, Hal. Hal’s transformation also brings him into conflict with the society in which he lives. Unlike Yirbaik-baik, however, Hal will not be brought back into line by others, but by his own will. His story implies notions of self-creation and self-authoring, which is a fundamental theme in Shakespeare and which has become fundamental in modern Western culture. We’ll see all this and more as we begin our analysis next week.

Following on from my recent series of posts on stories and transformations, I thought it would be better to change tack from the theoretical side of things and demonstrate the ideas in a more concrete form by way of an analysis of one of the stories I left out of my recent book on Shakespeare: Henry IV. We’ll get to the details of the story in future posts. What we need to do first is to lay out the method of interpretation we will be using.

In some respects, the method is very simple. We start by recognising what both Aristotle and Joseph Campbell discovered independently two and half millennia apart: stories are always about the transformation of the hero’s identity. Furthermore, transformation has its own logic, which begins with an event that sets the hero on the path towards their new identity and ends with either its attainment or the failure to attain it.

Given the universal appearance of storytelling in the cultures of the world, it is clear that people intuitively understand the structure of a story. We are “in a story” to the extent that a process of transformation is underway. The story ends when the transformation ends, meaning the hero has attained a new identity, although not necessarily the one they thought they were getting.

If every story is a transformation, our fundamental method of analysis to get to the heart of its meaning is to utilise the logic of transformation. This does not negate any of the other qualities we can admire in stories, such as the poetry of the language, the vividness of description, etc. These are all valid in their own way. But our assertion here is that stories are first and foremost about transformation, and that is where the core meaning is to be found. To understand the transformation properly, we need to know how to unpack its logic.

At an abstract level, the transformation process is always the same. The hero begins in what we will call holy state. The word “holy” is related to the word “whole”. It means the hero’s identity is stable, secure, and complete. The society in which the hero lives recognises no deficiency, and the hero has no internal desire for change. They are in a world they understand and know how to navigate.

In order to begin the transformation, the hero must leave the holy state by sacrificing some part of their starting identity. The sacrifice does not need to be consciously understood or deliberately initiated. In fact, most of the time, transformation happens to us whether we like it or not, meaning that the sacrifice is forced upon us. If you are made redundant from your job, you enter the transformation we call “unemployment”. It’s not a sacrifice you wanted to make, but you will have to deal with the consequences nonetheless.

Once the sacrifice is made, the hero enters what we call sacred state. The word “sacred” means “to make holy”. While we are in sacred state, we are striving to get back to holiness, to attain a new identity that is once again stable and complete. Sticking with the redundancy theme, unemployment is the loss of your former identity as an employee of whatever company you were working for. The transformation to unemployment involves the sacrifice of your old job leaving you without an economic identity. Your identity has been made un-whole. There is a gap that needs to be filled.

For a person who is a wage earner that doesn’t have any other source of income or a large amount of savings in the bank, unemployment is not a state that can be ignored. It is possible to pretend that everything’s okay. Indeed, this kind of dissociation is quite common. But a failure to find a new identity (a new job) will only lead to even larger problems later on. Once we are in sacred state, a transformation is going to happen whether we like it or not. We can consciously accept that and try to influence the outcome, or we can dissociate and let events dictate it for us. In this respect, the transformation process aligns to what has traditionally been called “fate”.

This leads to another characteristic of the sacred state of a transformation: there is an irreducible degree of uncertainty and risk involved. The loss of a job may be a minor inconvenience if you find a new one quickly. If you fail to do so, it can spiral into something much more profound. Anybody who doubts that is free to look up the statistics that correlate long-term unemployment with divorce, drug and alcohol addiction, depression, and a range of other problems.

It is precisely because of the inherent uncertainty and risk involved that stories resonate with us because we understand intuitively that the hero is in danger until the matter is resolved. The greater the potential transformation, the greater the risk and danger to the hero. That is why the most memorable stories usually feature a hero whose life is in danger, since that is the highest sacrifice that any of us can make. It is the final transformation.

The sacred state constitutes the main body of any story. The hero must struggle to create for themselves a new identity. The story comes to an end when they have attained a new holy state on the other side of the sacred, meaning they have gained a new identity. For our unfortunate employee who was made redundant, the most common resolution is to find another job. The transformation resolves as a change of employer.

But note that all kinds of other outcomes are possible. A failure to find a new job may force the individual to try something completely different, such as returning to study, trying to retire, starting their own business, or any number of other options depending on their circumstances. In these cases, the transformation process becomes longer and more difficult and only resolves once the new identity has been stabilised into a new holy state.

Since every story is about transformation, every storyteller must describe the process we have just outlined by showing the starting holy state of the hero, the sacrifice they make to enter the sacred part of the journey, and their return to holy state at the end with a new identity. These are the “rules” of storytelling. The rules are very similar to those of grammar in that they may be broken for effect and even stories that are “ungrammatical” can still be understood to some extent.

There are a couple of key points to make about this. It is perfectly possible to write a narrative that does not describe the transformation of a hero. In fact, a great deal of what is considered “high art” in the modern world revolves around avoiding the telling of a story. Thus, not every work of literature or art is a “story” as we have defined it. Furthermore, life itself is not composed entirely of transformation. There are religious and philosophical schools which deny transformation or which see the purpose of life in transcending it. Not everything is a transformation, and therefore not everything is a story. Nevertheless, to the degree that a story is being told, it must follow the pattern just described.

Some people may disagree with this approach on the grounds that it is “reductionist”. In fact, the opposite is true. There are several reasons for this.

The first is that every transformation is about the identity of the hero, and we are using the term “identity” in the widest possible fashion to include everything that is involved in being human. Since we don’t have any definitive understanding of what a human being is, it is not possible for this approach to be reductionist. In fact, the very process of transformation often shows us something that we didn’t previously understand. All learning is a transformation, and therefore transformation is the process of discovering new aspects of human nature.

It’s also the case that, even though we may come up with some useful categories of identity, a human being is a whole entity whose wholeness transcends any of the more specific properties we may ascribe. Thus, a change in just one property may have cascading and unpredictable effects. The loss of a job is not a mere change of social status. It comes with all kinds of internal emotions. It changes our relationship with others, especially if we are married. It may lead us to re-evaluate our entire worldview. The sacred state of a transformation is inherently unpredictable. Therefore, transformation can never be reductionist.

Note also that the kinds of identity that an individual may have are fundamentally tied in with the kind of society in which they live. The identity of “employee” is specific to modern Western society. It did not exist in feudal times. It did not exist in ancient Greece or Rome. It may be that similar roles have existed in other civilisations, but the evidence is scant. Therefore, the transformation of unemployment is itself specific to the modern West. Even then, it has changed significantly over time. Nowadays, destitution as a result of unemployment is mostly mitigated by way of the welfare safety net. Thus, becoming unemployed in the modern world is very different from what it was a hundred and fifty years ago. Transformations have both a dynamic inner nature and a highly specific cultural aspect too.

But the most important reason why transformation can never be reductionist is because it is the very process by which something new is ushered into the world. The social role of employee must have begun at some time. From there, it must have grown in prominence until it arrived at the near universality it enjoys today. In fact, we know in great detail how that happened because it coincided with the enormous social transformation that came with industrial capitalism. Along the way, countless people lost their identity as feudal peasants and took up the new identity of employee. A new kind of society was thereby created.

It’s also the case that any individual transformation, while it can result in a number of negative outcomes, may also give rise to something new. It’s a very common story in the lives of notable individuals that they used the disappointment that came from being fired from a job to go on and create not just something new in their own lives but something that changed their society too. The great historian Arnold Toynbee believed that all major historical turning points are born out of this kind of crisis that leads to a novel transformation on the part of a single individual.

Thus, not only are transformations inherently non-reductionist, but we have barely begun to understand the transformations that have taken place in the past, and there is little agreement about how and why those transformations took place. Aristotle’s belief that history could be captured in story form was predicated on his implied understanding that history is made up of transformation. However, the great philosopher also stated that fictional works were better suited for this purpose because storytellers did not get bogged down in the details but were free to explore the more abstract meanings.

Indeed, it’s true that the great fictional storytellers of any age are able to intuit and then communicate the subtleties that go unnoticed in everyday life. Therefore, it is perfectly valid to use great literature as a form of historical analysis. Shakespeare provides an unusually clear case since he sits at the turning point where the modern West emerged from the medieval world and Renaissance. By investigating the kinds of transformations he puts his characters through and how they differ from the fictional works that preceded them, we gain a deep insight into the worldview which is still dominant in our time.

And that is what we will be doing in this series of posts. By analysing Shakespeare’s work from the point of view of transformation, we not only gain a better understanding of the meaning of those works individually, we open up new perspectives on the nature of transformation, especially as it changes as a culture evolves. Shakespeare’s stories are perfectly suited for such an analysis because his plays are entirely about the transformation of the hero. There is not a word spoken or an action undertaken that does not impact upon the hero’s journey. This is in contrast to the more sprawling works of Dickens or Dostoevsky, for example. Their stories are also fundamentally rooted in the transformation of the hero, but the transformation takes place in a far less condensed form.

But the thing that sets Shakespeare’s heroes apart from those of other great writers is the degree to which they are conscious of the transformation they are going through because they deliberately choose it for themselves. Every Shakespearean hero consciously relinquishes their old identity and strives for a new one. To understand their journey, we must follow the pattern described in this post by first identifying the holy state at the start of the story, then finding the sacrifice that signals the transition into sacred state, and, finally, understanding the path that returns to holy state with the attainment of a new identity. In the case of Hal in Henry IV, the story is a comedy, which means that the prince successfully makes it to the other side, unlike his fellow Shakespearean adolescent heroes Hamlet, Romeo, and Juliet.

We’ll begin unpacking Hal’s journey in two weeks’ time. Next week, however, we’ll need to spend some time bedding down our method of interpretation by showing how the model of transformation just presented can be used to interpret nominally different kinds of stories.