Henry IV is deeply concerned with real and imagined relationships between fathers and sons. There’s Northumberland and his son Hotspur as well as King Henry and his son Hal. But when King Henry wishes, at the outset of the play, that the brave Hotspur were really his son, and ‘that it could be proved / That some night-tripping fairy had exchanged / In cradle clothes our children where they lay’ (1.1.85–7), his wish for an alternative son legitimates Hal’s own wish for an alternative father.
