Old Men Remembering in Shakespeare’s Second Tetralogy

There are four scenes in Shakespeare’s second tetralogy (Richard II, 1 Henry IV and 2 Henry IV, and Henry V) that depict older men remembering. These scenes are different from one another, but they are connected by deep-rooted literary and historiographical patterns. Reminiscences enable thinking across past and present and future, and they are inventively explored from John of Gaunt’s dying words to Henry V’s promises about Agincourt’s legacy. The plays’ different spaces and manners of remembering reveal aspects of the historical crisis being depicted, of emerging tensions in Shakespeare’s own time, and of his acute psychological exploration of the individual and social functions of memory.