I Know You All (Sarah Stickney)

Audio recording of a lecture given by tutor Sarah Stickneyon May 8, 2026 as part of the Dean’s Lecture & Concert Series.  The Dean’s Office has provided this description of the event: “This lecture will look at Prince Hal’s passage fromtavern brawler to battlefield hero in Shakespeare’s Henry VI part I.  Many elements of the play suggest that Hal will fail and Harry Hotspur will triumph; why does the opposite happen? What kind of education does Hal need in order to become king and keep the newly usurped throne in the family?  From Bolingbroke’s perspective, Hal is threatening the precious reputation of the new kingship, wrested so unconventionally from Richard’s poetic but impotent hands.  Hal’s high jinks could come at enormous cost to the kingdom’s tenuous stability.  Yet Hal might understand better than his father that the new order of the kingdom will have to be newly invented now that the divine right of kings no longer holds.”