The Impossibility of Atonement in Shakespeare’s Lancastrian Tetralogy

الملخص

This study examines the second Shakespearean tetralogy — Richard II, the two parts of Henry IV, Henry V, and their extension into the Henry VI plays — through the lens of inherited guilt and the theology of penitential selfhood, arguing that the originary crime of Bolingbroke’s usurpation generates across the entire dramatic sequence an ineradicable moral residue that neither military triumph nor theatrical self-fashioning can dissolve. The study traces how this inherited guilt operates not as an external political liability but as an internalised burden that shapes the psychology and the dramatic presentation of every major figure in the sequence: Hal’s prayer before Agincourt, Falstaff’s reported dying in green fields, Bedford’s hollow final satisfaction, and Henry VI’s pious condemnation of his father’s wars. Drawing on the theological tradition of penitential literature, the moral philosophy developed in the work of John Stachniewski and Debora Shuger, and the dramaturgical analysis of self-recharactering, the study proposes the concept of ‘the solace within’ as the tetralogy’s deepest moral category — a form of interior transformation, grounded in penitence rather than external achievement, that constitutes the only adequate response to the burden of inherited guilt. The analysis demonstrates that this solace is systematically withheld from the play’s most powerful figures — Hal, Bedford, Lancaster — while being granted, with devastating ironic force, to those the official narrative marginalises: the dying Falstaff, the captive Henry VI. The study concludes by arguing that the tetralogy’s moral architecture constitutes a profound and sustained critique of the Lancastrian claim that political power and moral legitimacy can be aligned through theatrical achievement, exposing this claim as the most seductive and the most destructive of the plays’ many fictions.