The three history plays by Shakespeare known as the Henriad are comprised of Henry IV: Part I, Henry IV: Part II, and Henry V. Richard III is actually the beginning of the historical sequence, but the three plays of the Henriad are concerned specifically with the development and ascension of Henry V (formerly Prince Hal) to the throne of England. In the course of the three plays, Prince Hal changes from a rather wastrel youth to a mature king, and in his development Henry becomes what would be considered a Christian rathe than a Machiavellian prince, dedicated to cetain principles rather than to the principle that how a king rules is in itself always right.
Throughout these plays, including Richard III, there is a search for national unity is found in Henry V:
The principal theme of Henry V, already approached in its predecessors, is the establishment in England of an order based on consecrated authority and crowned successfully by actions against France (Traversi 187).
The conditions examined by Shakespeare are both moral and political, with the crime of regicide still hanging over the action as a distant memory. However, as Traversi notes, the real subject of the Henriad is somewhat different:
It was the conditions of kingship, as much as its results, that interested Shakespeare in these plays: and these conditions are viewed, by the time the last of them came to be conceived, in a light definitely akin to the tragic (Traversi 187).
Henry IV: I and II are only incidentally about King Henry IV or even about history as the other history plays are. Balancing the historical action in these plays is a purely fictional tale of Sir John Falstaff and his circle, which includes Prince Hal:
Though there is no histoical evidence for it, by Shakespeare's day there was a longstanding tradition of Prince Hal's profligate youth, from which he emerged to become the very model of a Christian king (Becker 32).
In...