In 1784, Thomas Davies, in a collection of essays on Shakespeare's plays, observed that "in the opinion of Thomas Warburton, and I believe all the best critics, the First Part of Henry IV. is, of all our author's plays, the most excellent" (Davies, 1, 202). If "all the best critics" of more recent times have been somewhat less willing to grant 1 Henry IV absolute pre-eminence in the Shakespeare canon, they have generally shared this admiration. "No play of Shakespeare's is better than Henry IV", wrote Mark Van Doren in 1939; "History as a dramatic form ripens here to a point past which no further growth is possible" (Van Doren, 116). A few years later, W. H. Auden exuberantly punctuated Van Doren's enthusiasm in his lectures on Shakespeare at the New School in New York City: "It is difficult to imagine that a historical play as good as Henry IV will ever again be written" (Auden, 101). .
The judgments are easily multiplied, but it is worth noting that, although Davies's commendation is specific to "the First Part", Van Doren and Auden praise a play that doesn't exist: Henry IV. Both write about the two plays on the reign of Henry IV as if they formed a single, coherent dramatic conception. The two, however, were written separately and, until recently, were usually performed independent of one other (see below, pp. 00). And, if they are equally interesting, unquestionably Henry IV has regularly been the more admired and popular of the two.
Even in its own time, Henry IV was less well received, never reprinted after its initial publication in 1600 until its appearance in the 1623 Folio. Part One, however, was almost immediately both a literary and theatrical triumph, as successful in the bookstalls of London as it was on the stage. Nine editions were published between 1598 and 1640, making it an early best-seller among all printed play-books of the period; and in the theatre it seemingly also flourished, probably first performed in the winter of 1596-7 and regularly acted throughout the seventeenth century.