“Make you merry”: Forced Laughter and Other Epilogic Failures in Henry IV, Part 2

This essay examines the epilogue to 2 Henry IV and its threat of a merriment that never comes. The play’s final lines demand the impossible question as to where failure is located between the speech’s promise of a future Falstaff and his ultimate absence in Henry V. The audience is implicated in the closure of the second Henry IV, not only in the familiar epilogic function of begging pardon and seeking applause but also in the maintenance of the play’s beloved character’s survival. I argue that this speech is both an epistemologically–and morally–encumbered space, where the generic form of the address is fractured. In doing so, I identify a three-part comic structure to the Henriad that results in the embrace of humorlessness, evident in: the epilogue’s unusual length; Falstaff’s death, threatened in 2 Henry IV as a hypothetical statement only to in fact occur, offstage and disembodied, in Henry V; and the beleaguered jig that follows the epilogue. In all, I consider how the demand for a choreographed audience response that is inescapably organized toward failure destabilizes the epilogue as form and refuses epistemic resolution. [B.B.]