Over the years, in China, the translation and research of Shakespeare’s ten historical plays in Shakespeare academic circles are relatively scarce and lagging behind those of four tragedies and four comedies. This paper takes Shakespeare’s historical play Henry IV as the research object. Firstly, the Chinese versions of Henry IV since it was introduced into China are sorted out. Then, this paper investigates different translators’ historical background, translation strategies and characteristics of each version. And translations by Zhu Shenghao, Yu Erchang and Fu Guangming are compared with the source text in terms of language understanding, style reproduc-tion, and cultural transmission. Finally, this paper examines the pros and cons of different versions, focusing on the inheritance and transcendence of the new translation version over the previous ones.