Obscurity of Honor

     After considering some of the major themes we've covered in class, honor was the one that stood out to me the most. There's such a vast difference between characters' honor in each of the works, and often times the concept is at the forefront of the play's meaning and theme.
     I decided to look up the word 'honour' in the Concordance, and see how often it appears. But more specifically, I was interested in how many times it was used in Timon of Athens, and King Henry IV Part 1. Both of these plays deal heavily with honor, and what it means to be honorable. I assumed King Henry would have many more instances of the word, seeing as it's brought up so often by Falstaff and Hotspur, and how Timon seems to lack honor amongst its characters.
    To my surprise, Timon had double the uses of the word, with 28. Even words like honourable, honoured, and honours were used more in the play. A funny thing I noticed was that Timon, the man with arguably the most honor in the play, has a smaller percentage of uses than Falstaff, who is arguably the least honorable one in King Henry.
   It's interesting to me because both Cymbeline and All's Well That Ends Well have many more occurrences of honourable, but the theme of honor doesn't stick out to me as much in those works. If I were to narrow this down for a research paper, I would maybe focus on the honor of characters from Athens, or English characters in Shakespeare's plays. Or I could look at how honor is represented amongst classes, since Timon generally focuses on the upper class, whereas King Henry IV Part I is more diverse. I think honor is one of the most fascinating aspects of Shakespeare's plays because it's always there, no matter what character.