Finishing Henry IV

I have to say, I thoroughly enjoyed most of this play. I enjoyed the characters of this play and really enjoyed the plot. The characters of Prince Harry and his band of misfit friends were incredibly funny. I even liked the scenes between Hotspur and Lady Percy, which were brutal in some aspects and funny in others.
I was excited in the beginning of this play because I wasn’t King Henry’s biggest fan and I was hoping that by the end of this play, his reign would be overthrown and we would have a new king to adjust to. By the end of the play, however, I liked King Henry slightly more; it was Prince Harry that was the problem.
Unlike most other people, I do not believe that Prince Harry actually wanted to change anything about himself. He wanted people to believe he would. This I find to be incredibly sad and manipulative, and makes me believe that Harry is a bad choice for the future king. Plenty of teenagers hang out with questionable crowds and make bad decisions, and I can certainly find fault with that. My problem is in his plan to “fix” himself. I think the change from boy to man should happen organically, not be meticulously planned in order to “look” better. If he wanted to look better he should have just acted better, gotten rid of his loser friends and behaved himself. He did not do either of these things. Given the chance, Prince Harry is so stuck in his childish ways that he puts his degenerate friends in positions of power! And later he proves that he is not beyond pranks of any kind when he steals Falstaff’s wallet and allows him to blame the bar hostess and generally make a fool of himself.
I don’t think that Prince Harry will make a very good ruler and because of this, the ending of this play made me uneasy. I suppose that after reading King Richard II and III I was expecting that history plays ended with the overthrowing of the government that was in power in the beginning of the play, so by the end of this play, I was almost thrown for a loop. I didn’t know what to do at the end because neither party was particularly desirable as the monarchy. I know that Prince Harry did what he said he would do, kill Hotspur, but I still think he’s all for show.
One other problem I had at the end of this play is that there is no real reconciliation. At the end of the comedies, there is always a marriage. At the end of the tragedies, everyone is dead. At the end of the previous two histories I have read, the governments from the beginning have been overthrown and the end is actually a beginning for the new rulers. This, however, left the monarchy (and me) unresolved. I don’t like the feeling that nothing really NEW happened. Although Hotspur is dead the king still has a number of living adversaries who could potentially attack his crown. Did the action of this whole play really do anything to strengthen or weaken the power of the royal family? I really don’t know.