Hotspur is a character whose career runs the gamut of dramatic expression. Commencing on a note of furious, even farcical, comedy, it concludes on a note of tragic grief so poignantly realized as to have inspired Northrop Frye’s perception that his dying remark, ‘thoughts, the slaves of life’, comes out of the heart of the tragic vision. Hotspur’s brave death is placed squarely and deliberately before the audience and provides the final means by which they can comprehend the nature and meaning of his life. Gradually the character has been moulded and determined by forces and events that culminate in the great encounter between himself and Prince Hal. The forces, both those seen by and those hidden from Hotspur, are the means by which the audience and reader are able to apprehend the development of a character whose existence has been bent into the shape of tragic suffering shown by that last speech: