Ambition in Henry IV, Part 1

Hotspur speaks of plucking bright honour from the pale-faced moon, and in that image lives the whole fever of ambition that drives the play. It is not a quiet thing, this hunger—it burns hot enough to make a man disrespect his own father, to insult the very allies he needs, to die rather than be overlooked. Hotspur’s ambition is pure, almost crystalline in its clarity: he wants glory that no one else can claim, wants his name to live in the mouths of soldiers and kings. It is the kind of ambition that feels noble because it asks for nothing but honour itself, no crown, no land, only the world’s acknowledgment that he is without equal.

Yet the play shows us how ambition wears different masks as it moves from Act One to Act Five. In Act One, Hotspur’s hunger seems almost innocent—a young man’s fire, the natural pride of a soldier. By Act Three, when Hal’s father confronts the Prince about his own lack of ambition, we see Henry IV’s confession that he stole a throne by carefully managing his own reputation, by being seldom seen, by refusing to make himself common. His kind of ambition succeeded where it counted—he has the crown—but he has spent every day since afraid of losing it, guilty about the way he got it. Hal, listening, absorbs a harder lesson: that ambition without strategy is just noise, and that the greatest ambition of all might be to seem not ambitious at all.

Falstaff stands as the play’s argument against ambition. He has none, or claims he doesn’t, and this frees him. When Hal asks him if he fears death before the battle, Falstaff shrugs and says honour is just a word, a thing that cannot heal a wound or fix a leg. The dead do not feel honour or hear it. It is invisible to them, and therefore useless. He will take life over honour every time. He lies about his own deeds, fakes his own death, stabs a corpse to claim credit for Hotspur’s killing—not out of a burning need for glory, but out of a simple desire to stay breathing. His anti-ambition is so complete it becomes almost a kind of wisdom.

What the play finally argues, though, is that ambition cannot be wished away. Hal learns this most clearly. He promises his father he will redeem all his shame on Percy’s head, and this promise is ambition—the desire to prove himself, to become worthy. He does prove himself. He kills Hotspur, he saves the king, he stands between his father and death. His ambition was hidden, was patient, was disguised as idleness, but it was ambition nonetheless. The play suggests that the only way to survive ambition is to master it, to hold it in check, to know that you are ambitious and act accordingly. Hotspur could not master his ambition; it mastered him. Hal can. That is the only real advantage the Prince has.