# Henry IV Part 1

Page: https://stenobird.com/podcast/in-our-time-318133/henry-iv-part-1
Text version: https://stenobird.com/podcast/in-our-time-318133/henry-iv-part-1.md
Podcast: [In Our Time](https://stenobird.com/podcast/in-our-time-318133)
Published: 2026-03-05T10:15:00+00:00
Episode link: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m002qth3
Audio file: http://open.live.bbc.co.uk/mediaselector/6/redir/version/2.0/mediaset/audio-nondrm-download-rss/proto/http/vpid/p0mys11q.mp3
Processing state: not_requested
JSON: https://stenobird.com/v1/public/podcasts/in-our-time-318133/episodes/henry-iv-part-1
Duration seconds: 3065

## Resource

Misha Glenny and guests discuss one of the most successful of Shakespeare's plays in his own time. Written with no Part 2 in mind as 'Henry the Fourth', the play explores ideas about who can be a legitimate ruler and why, and how anyone can rightly succeed to the throne. This was an especially pressing question for his Tudor audience as Elizabeth I had named no successor. Playwrights, banned from openly discussing the jeopardy her subjects faced, turned to these themes of power, legitimacy and succession in distant and recent history. When Shakespeare combined this relevance with the vivid characters of Falstaff, Hotspur and Hal and with the tensions between noble fathers and sons, he had a play that fascinated well into the Jacobean era and has been revived throughout the centuries. With Emma Smith Professor of Shakespeare Studies at Hertford College, University of Oxford Lucy Munro Professor of Shakespeare and Early Modern Literature at Kings College London And Laurence Publicover Associate Professor in the Department of English at the University of Bristol Producer: Simon Tillotson Reading list: Hailey Bachrach, Staging Female Characters in Shakespeare’s English History Plays (Cambridge University Press, 2023) Warren Chernaik, The Cambridge Introduction to Shakespeare’s History Plays (Cambridge University Press, 2007) Stephen Greenblatt, Tyrant: Shakespeare on Power (Bodley Head, 2018) Graham Holderness, Shakespeare: The Histories (Red Globe Press, 1999) Jean Howard and Phyllis Rackin, Engendering a Nation: A Feminist Account of Shakespeare's English Histories (Routledge, 1997) William Shakespeare (eds. Indira Ghose, Anna Pruitt and Emma Smith), Henry IV Part I: The New Oxford Shakespeare (Oxford University Press, 2024) William Shakespeare (ed. Gordon McMullan), 1 H…

## Actions

- request_transcript: `POST https://stenobird.com/v1/public/podcasts/in-our-time-318133/episodes/henry-iv-part-1/transcription-requests` — Idempotently request low-priority transcript generation for this episode.
- read_markdown: `GET https://stenobird.com/podcast/in-our-time-318133/henry-iv-part-1.md` — Read the agent-friendly Markdown representation of this episode resource.

A page view does not enqueue transcription. Agents should invoke `request_transcript` explicitly when they need this episode processed.

## Transcript

Full transcripts are not published on public pages unless there is a clear rights basis.