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Shakespeareans have long suggested that the history plays of the second tetralogy (Barber 1959: 195) exemplify the indecorous “mingling [of] kings and clowns” to which Philip Sidney famously objected in The Defence of Poesy (Sidney 1989: 244). Prince Hal holds court with witty robbers and tavern-dwellers in 1 & 2 Henry IV, and, in disguise in Henry V, the new King Harry debates the monarch’s “hard condition” with common soldiers before the battle of Agincourt (IV, i, 215).2 Hal’s fondness for such social mingling is not without precedent, for, according to Hal’s father, his son “standest” in the “very line” of Richard II (1 Henry IV, III, ii, 85). In Henry IV’s recollection of the ruler whom he deposed, Richard “carded” or mixed “his state,/ Mingled his royalty with cap’ring fools,” and, among other scandalous consequences, “[h]ad his great name profaned with their scorns” (III, ii, 62-64, emphasis added). In this iteration of Sidney’s censure of pre-Shakespearean drama (Shannon 2002: 17677), Hal is the heir, not of his own father, but rather of an uncle mongrelized by his associations with “gibing boys” (1 Henry IV, III, ii, 66) and with a crew of minions, the “caterpillars of the commonwealth” who are reputed to have provoked a “divorce betwixt his queen and him” (Richard II, II, iii, 165; III, i, 12). In these history plays, then, mingling transpires in the intimacies shared by princes and male inferiors. If we trust Henry IV, such sociability indicates a prince’s unfitness to govern and persuades subjects to take up lawful arms against him. According to his father, Prince Hal’s ascension would not secure genealogical legitimacy, but would constitute political regression – a clownish state governed by a “degenerate” ruler (1 Henry IV, III, ii, 128).