The gulf between image and identity is wide and deep. A person can hide behind his image; he can be concealed by his image, he can oppose his image, he can serve his image, but no matter how hard he tries, he can never actually be his image. The supposed truth of what a person is buries itself behind layers of desire, repression, and performance.

Take, for instance, Henry Percy, who surges ahead with dreams of victory in his heart. To triumph against Henry IV will bring peace and justice to all of Great Britain.

No, that’s not quite right. Let’s say it this way: Henry Percy rallies all of England behind him, in a noble bid to oust the depraved tyrant Henry IV and bring liberty to all the land.

No, that doesn’t sound right either. Let’s try this: Although triumph from this battle will allow Hotspur and his cronies to slice up Great Britain any ole’ way they please, it’s only a matter of time before some other upstart Duke of Whateverham or Earl of Somethingshire gets ticked off, raises an army, and plunges the land into self-destructive civil war. Again.

Soldier-boy, where’s your nationalism? Shouldn’t a true soldier be a little less gung-ho about going to town on his own countrymen? Isn’t Britain at a continuous state of war with, say, France? A true soldier would probably be more worried about hopping across the pond and taking out some limp-wristed, crepe-chomping Frenchies. Instead, Hotspur is at home throwing a temper tantrum. Tres gauche.

Were he truly as noble and valiant as he pictures himself, being slighted by a petty, self-serving king would do nothing to diminish Hotspur’s luminous accomplishments.

On the contrary: being slighted by someone petty and self-serving is exactly what makes Hotspur’s blood boil. Blood is on Hotspur’s mind all the time. Hotspur referred to blood, to bleeding, and to wounds at least twelve times in Act I.3. That images of blood and steel filter into his dreams – as Lady Percy mentions in II.3 – suggests events of great shame and trauma in his past, probably at the hands of some indifferent aristocrat. As an adult, the mere mannerisms of such an aristocrat stoke Hotspur’s inferiority complex.

Therefore, it is not honor that rests at the core of Hotspur’s raison d’etre; rather, it is the lack thereof. Between honor and shame surges the constant approach toward honor. Hotspur needs to prove oneself, to show off what he’s really made of, and re-claim honor lost he long ago.

Whatever Hotspur has suffered, he re-casts his complex as soldierly pride, and fights to rehabilitate his wounded psyche. Hotspur needs to reconcile the contradiction between intense shame and pride; blood represents the power others have over Hotspur and the power he has over them. For him, blood is the truth of what a man is. When Hotspur rides into battle against the king, he does not want to win. He wants to bleed. During Percy’s death speech, both flesh and his thoughts were wounded by the prince.

The schizophrenic crown prince holds an interesting relationship to the truth. There is no single central core that unites Hal’s personas. It is like a coin, only surfaces; an index card with a different word on each side. You can look around whenever you want and see the other side, but you can only see one side at a time, and whenever he appears, he holds the special position of being able to construct his own truth through language and performance.

For Hal, kingliness, like everything else, is a duty, set of traits and rituals, a manner of bearing, a way of acting. Being the king is just a matter of impersonating kingliness. You model yourself after an archetype, who is in turn modeled after someone else; another leader, another archetype, who also had some traits, which were modeled after someone else, ad infinitum. In fact, Hal opens up the possibility that all the roles we play in life are filled by impersonation.

He makes this point most clearly when he and Falstaff role-play as the king in the tavern in II.4.

To underline it, he presents Falstaff continually as a vessel, a container that holds stuff. A bolting-hutch (flour bin), a bombard (jug), a trunk, a swollen parcel, and a cloak-bag.

He unloads phrases in a short, rhythmic pattern. “That trunk of humours, that bolting-hutch of beastliness, that A of B, that X of Y,” and so on. Identity can be assigned. It can be present or absent, empty or full.

Hal brings both Falstaff and the king are in his comic crosshairs by taking on the role of the king in this scene. But if the prince will be the king one day, this humor is also self-effacing. To impersonate requires a true identity as a point of reference. The reason Hal can objectify his own truth, pour it out, put it into play and even attack attack it, then later fill himself up with it again, it is because he always has another truth, another performance – either the jolly scoundrel or the dutiful prince – from which to stand and drain that vessel of its truth, and fill it again as needed.

Both “truths” are real, as artfully constructed and performed as his tavern speech. Hal is eminently superficial, and neither surface excludes the other; rather, at this point in the story, each persona desires and serves the other, then conveniently goes away when not needed, just like a king’s subjects would do.

In conclusion, with regards to these central characters in the narrative, truth is not a fixed locus, but rather a derivative. Identity consists of a cover-up of alternatives. The real truth of these mens’ identities always governs their characters from the background. In Hotspur’s case, we may never know what trauma set his bloodlust in motion. In Hal’s case, we know eventually he’ll pick his princely side and toss out the other bit, but in the mean time, watching him go through the motions is endlessly fascinating.