In the familiar oration of Prince Hal over the body of the slain Percy occur the lines:
If thou wert sensible of curtesie
I should not make so deare a shew of zeale,
But let my fauours hide thy mangled face
And euen in thy behalfe ile thanke my selfe,
For doing these faire rights of tendernesse.
(1 Henry IV, v. iv. 94–98)
“Favours” in this passage is usually glossed as a scarf or riband, perhaps a glove. The lines are taken to imply a stage direction of some sort. It would seem, however, that Shakespeare here intended more than a conventional chivalric gesture on the part of the regenerate Prince. From a chain of textual evidence it is demonstrable that the playwright had in mind for his climax a far more dramatic, more tacitly ironic move—Hal's disengaging his royal plumes (the “budding honours” of his own helmet) to shroud the face of his dead rival. In three earlier passages the quarto text supports this interpretation.