Who is Falstaff?

Talking like common people

I have recently appeared on the William Blair podcast, the Pathless Path podcast, and the Unleashed podcast.

Remember, paid subscribers meet on Sunday 7th April, 19.00 UK time to discuss Henry IV part I. You can find all the Shakespeare essays here, and the schedule for future meetings here. There is a chat threat about the play here.

---

Why is Falstaff so popular?

It is perhaps little wonder that the first part of Henry IV is Shakespeare’s most popular play. It combines the two core aspects of English culture: tavern life and royal watching. Between the first performance in 1597 and the publication of the First Folio in 1623, there were seven quarto editions of this play, more than for any other Shakespeare play. The heart of Henry IV is the fat knight and gentleman scoundrel Sir John Falstaff. In a reference book made in the 1930s which recorded all references made to Shakespeare in other literature, the index listed Falstaff at the top, saying “for the purpose of this index Falstaff shall be referred to as a work.” There were more entries for Falstaff than for the rest of Shakespeare’s works put together.

There is a story, thought to be true, that when Falstaff came into the stage the groundlings stopped cracking their nuts so that they wound be able to hear him better. It is often said that in creating Falstaff, Shakespeare created a character he could not control, one who escaped the limits of his play. If Hamlet is the Shakespearean character who has given the most phrases and sayings to ordinary language, Falstaff bequeathed us something much greater—a whole archetype, a species of character, a mode of being.

But what is Falstaff? Rogue, smiling villain, court jester, Everyman, Vice personified, the spirit of life, an old soak, a friend betrayed, idler, chancer, turncoat, wit. He is all things. Above all, he is life resisting age. What he seeks to cheat are all the forces conspiring to get him killed: kings, soldiers, diseases, time. Bring me sack is his constant refrain, and in reply the hapless waiter at The Boar’s Head calls back—anon, anon sir, anon, like the reaper whispering a memento mori. Anon anon and Sir John is undone.

But can this explain the enormous interest in this enormous man? It is surely insufficient to say that he is all things to all men. Is that alone what makes him as popular and as referenced as all of the rest of Shakespeare combined? No. The secret lies in language.

Henry IV is largely written in prose, a break from the poetic lyricism of Romeo and Juliet, Love’s Labour’s Lost, and Richard II. And remember what makes this play so popular: tavern life and royal watching. Two aspects of life that rely, more than any other, on language, on register. Just think what an achievement it is to put a Prince into a tavern and have him speak vernacular prose and for it to be convincing, natural, enjoyable, entertaining. Hal moves between two poles of the language, extremes of usage, from bawdy banter to formal phrasings. You need only look at the speeches of Henry IV to see how uncourtly the tavern talk is, how accomplished Hal can be in both.

Now we reach the rub: Falstaff is the vernacular.

It is notable that the real person he was supposedly modelled on Sir John Oldcastle (though to such an inflated degree Shakespeare was forced by powerful relatives to change the name) was a Lollard, a Protestant heresy that pre-dated the Reformation. (Hence “fall to thy prayers” when Henry V rejects him.) Like the Protestants of the sixteenth century, Lollards believed in a more direct relationship to God than one mediated by the Church in Latin. They believed in reading the Bible in English. This was a tremendous break with history. Note that Henry V (Prince Hal) was the first English king to govern in the vernacular. Many official documents were still in Latin and French, but many were also in English for the first time. King Harry preferred honest English to courtly French and was the first monarch who could read and write with ease in the vernacular. That is exactly what Shakespeare captures in Henry IV.

It would be a mistake to read this as a “Reformation play”. But the role of the vernacular in intellectual, religious, and public life was very much a result of Protestantism in Falstaff’s time (late fourteenth, early fifteenth century) and in Shakespeare’s time (a century later). This meant that England became the land of the Bible. Tyndale’s translation was enormously influential, the main source of much of the King James translation. Parish churches conducted their services in English. More Bibles were sold, proportionate to the population, in England than any other country. A century of exceptional English poetry (Donne to Milton) was steeped in this vernacular Bible language.

In both the court and the tavern in Henry IV, the vernacular is central. What makes Prince Hal into a great king as Henry V (though not without his faults) is his ability to talk to common men as well as noble ones. He learned this from Falstaff, a character often noted for being, like Joyce later, a language in himself.

The twin character archetypes of Falstaff are the clown and the Lord of Misrule. In Shakespeare’s early plays, the clown is a foil. (In Love’s Labour’s Lost the clowns put on their play to make the King’s play look good by comparison.) C.L. Barber says clowning could be a release (saying what was not allowed or respectable to be said) and a clarification: they test the limits to show us the limits. Slowly, the role develops into that of court jester, a clown who knows what his words imply, who can tell the truth to power by telling it mockingly as in Twelfth Night and King Lear.

Lords of Misrule were a standard part of popular entertainments from villages to the law courts, where a humble figure would take the role of a senior one. In these saturnalias, the master waits on the servant, the common plays the role of the lord. This was a holiday which presented order with a reflection of disorder. This is seen most clearly in Henry IV part one in the tavern scene, where Falstaff plays the king wearing a cushion for a crown.

As Barber says, Falstaff is a fusion of clown and Lord of Misrule. He provides release by testing Hal’s limits, who mirrors the truth about the court, and who allows for a release through misrule. But Falstaff is no type. He is bigger than all of this. Each tributary is lost in his vastness. He is the holiday as counterpoint to the battle, wit as opposed to death, language as opposed to silence. He is not just a language in himself, but the vernacular language made witty, brilliant, defiant, tragic, profound.