Henry IV Part 2 by William Shakespeare
Published 1600 · 273 pages · 74,131 words · about 5 hours at an average pace · Drama
How hard is Henry IV Part 2 to read?
Henry IV Part 2 scores 55 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it quite demanding. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.
- Vocabulary: 55 out of 100
- Shakespearean vocabulary.
- Sentence structure: 58 out of 100
- Shakespeare's mature verse.
- Abstraction: 60 out of 100
- Time, death, and kingship.
- Information density: 55 out of 100
- Dense with English history.
- Narrative indirection: 50 out of 100
- Multiple plots converge.
- Symbolic density: 60 out of 100
- Crown, rejection carry weight.
- Ironic distance: 55 out of 100
- Shakespeare's characteristic distance.
- Resolution withholding: 50 out of 100
- Coronation achieved; Falstaff rejected.
- Structural complexity: 55 out of 100
- Multiple converging plots.
How Henry IV Part 2 is regarded
Henry IV Part 2 holds a literary regard score of 85 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.