It's a lot cheaper to aggregate,
remasticate, and pontificate than to send reporters in the field to dig.
Rather than "
remasticate the life of the dead!" (act 2) through the mouthing of well-worn platitudes and the performance of normative codes of behavior, repudiated by Nietzsche as "a perfunctory convention, a miserable imitation or even a crude antic" (UA, 4), "Henry IV" opts for the lead role in a period drama over a comedy turn (as noted above, "Henry IV" had been cruelly mocked for his originality) in the death-in-life shadow-play of modern-day society.