Someone I know told me they have never listened to Bach, so I made them this playlist. And don’t forget to book tickets for my Interintellect salon, Shakespeare’s Inadequate Kings.
(And remember, for paid subscribers, the next Shakespeare Book Club is 12th May, 19.00 UK time: we’re reading Much Ado About Nothing.)
Falstaff is the fulcrum of Henry IV
Like Love’s Labour’s Lost, the two parts of Henry IV contrast the futile exuberance of wit and the dull necessity of pragmatism. “If all the year were playing holidays,/ To sport would be as tedious as to work,” says Prince Hal. Wit in Henry IV is embodied, literally, in fat Jack Falstaff. We love Falstaff for the fact that he is not only witty but the cause that is wit in others.
But the trajectory of these two plays is of time catching up with wit. No jest can prevent the inevitable. Death is no joke. Just as death appeared at the end of Love’s Labour’s Lost, putting an end to the men’s banter, so death is implied at the end of Henry IV, when Falstaff is abandoned by the new king.
But this play is not tragic. It is tragi-comic. In the closing scene, John of Gaunt echoes the conclusion of Love’s Labour’s Lost, saying of Hal’s former companions, “all are banished till their conversations/ Appear more wise and modest to the world.” This is a theme Shakespeare will come back to like a refrain in the coming years, “absent thee from felicity a while,” the dying Hamlet tells Horatio. Falstaff has his chance. Hal is more lenient in fact than rhetoric. The blow is hard, but lessened.
Falstaff is disreputable, but not despised. When we hear of his death, in Henry V, his tavern companions lament his better qualities—Mistress Quickly tells us no man was more likely to go to Arthur’s bosom. In a joke where she mis-hears the word “incarnate”, Mistress Quickly says, “He could never abide carnation. ’Twas a colour he never liked.” The joke is subtler than it appears. Carnation derives from the Latin for flesh, so the joke is ironic, Falstaff being the most corporeal of all Shakespeare’s characters. He could abide the flesh very well indeed. This is the sort of joke Falstaff himself would have made. He lives on in his wit, in being the cause of wit in others.
This duality of the flesh—something that both symbolises his fullness of living and that is mocked and brings him pains—it the fulcrum of this tragi-comedy. A swollen body is the price he pays for being the fullest, most lively character in Shakespeare. He is too much for this world.
Purging the kingdom: Hotspur’s inverse.
Falstaff’s corpulence embodies the central metaphor of the Henriad—the body politic. Richard II made a prophecy, remembered by Henry IV: “foul sin, gathering head, / Shall break into corruption.” Falstaff’s body is constantly breaking into corruption. A pox on this gout, and a gout on this pox, he says. The doctor tells him that his water is a good water, “but, for the party that owed it, he might have more diseases than he knew for.” Falstaff is the life spirit taken to extremes, a body become a “whoreson, obscene, grease tallow-catch.” Likewise, England is the body politic swollen with corruption. The remedy for both is inevitably the same. And Falstaff admits it when, thinking he will be ennobled, he says that he will “purge”.
Falstaff’s double is Hotspur, another foul sin who gathers to a head and breaks into corruption. While Falstaff is a “sweet creature of bombast” Hotspur is “a wasp-stung and impatient fool.” Falstaff is a lord of misrule; Hotspur is a lord of rebellion.
O gentlemen, the time of life is short;
To spend that shortness basely were too long
If life did ride upon a dial’s point,
Still ending at the arrival of an hour.
An if we live, we live to tread on kings
Falstaff represents the excess of the body politic, but also the spirit of its joy; Hotspur is a death-force, a “Mars in swaddling clothes.” Rather than worry that life is short and therefore we must live, Hotspur sees the closing in of time as a spur to war. He hurries on towards death, the ultimate purge. His final words repudiate all that he has been.
O Harry, thou hast robbed me of my youth.
I better brook the loss of brittle life
Than those proud titles thou hast won of me.
They wound my thoughts worse than thy sword my flesh.
“Ill weaved ambition, how much art thou shrunk!” the Prince laments over Hotspur’s body. And who is watching? Who but Jack Falstaff, the great life-force who refuses to follow Hotspur in becoming “food for worms.”
Falstaff is the cause of wit in others because he is unique, and Lady Percy mourns Hotspur’s death saying
He was indeed the glass
Wherein the noble youth did dress themselves.
He had no legs that practiced not his gait;
And speaking thick, which nature made his blemish,
Became the accents of the valiant
Both men are larger than life, in some sense, both help to create these plays as among Shakespeare’s most vivid, most real, most entertaining. But Hotspur’s corruption of the body politic is far more sinister that Falstaff’s “playing holidays”. His war is the violent purge the kingdom cannot tolerate. In comparison, Hal’s cruel cutting out of the swollen Falstaff is the more magnanimous deed.
In a world of battle, rebellion, violence, and plotting, Falstaff lives only for life. He is the product of the dissolute times, not the cause of them. But that doesn’t mean the times can abide him anymore than the other characters, who all fall victim to time in the end.
“Banish plump Jack and banish all the world.”
Falstaff’s body is singularly impressive, the inverse of Hotspur’s martial physicality. One is compared to a god of war, the other is a “tunne of a man”. Writing in the London Review of Books in 1990, Barbara Everett traced the physicality of Falstaff through Shakespeare’s early work.
Shakespeare’s developing power of characterisation, the physical has a special place: from Crab the dog to Richard Crookback, then to Bottom, then to the magnificently delineated yet isolated Shylock, and finally the ‘fat old man’ himself.
And,
One simple way of explaining the splendour of these plays is to say that they are full of Falstaff’s fatness — they are full of people, newly defined as Falstaff is defined. In terms of stored resources suddenly and fully utilised, Shakespeare seems to have travelled a startling distance in 1 Henry IV from Richard II, that exquisite unpeopled verse exercise, a thin play in the sense that the Henry IV’s are fat. It is of course relevant that Richard II is written wholly in verse, while the Henry IV plays invent a new and magnificent prose, widespread in the plays and different with every character who uses it. Particularly in a raffish urban milieu, it is a prose that characterises, identifies, realises.
This fatness is what makes Henry IV loved. But fatness cannot be tolerated at court. This is obvious from the opening lines. It is quickly obvious that Falstaff’s prose, however magnificent, is uncourtly. This is a play, therefore, about inevitability.
When Worcester is sentenced to death, having failed to communicate the king’s offer of peace to the rebels, he says,
I embrace this fortune patiently,
Since not to be avoided it falls on me.
Hal still has plenty of time. He is young. He is the king’s son. His promise to redeem time—a pointed contrast to Richard II’s lament, “I wasted time, and now doth time waste me”—is possible because he has time before him. But Falstaff is old. He denies age. He disputes death. Henry V’s new regime, though, will have no place for this licentiousness. “Look to thy prayers,” Henry tells the old man.
It is a politic decision to abandon Falstaff. An inevitable decision. Falstaff has no sense of the court, of the hard reality of ruling. “Have you your wits?” the Lord Chief Justice (a very unwitty man) asks him. Hal has no choice, once he is Henry.
Lord Warwick knew this all along.
The Prince but studies his companions
Like a strange tongue, wherein, to gain the language,
’Tis needful that the most immodest word
Be looked upon and learned; which, once attained,
Your Highness knows, comes to no further use
But to be known and hated. So, like gross terms,
The Prince will, in the perfectness of time,
Cast off his followers, and their memory
Shall as a pattern or a measure live,
By which his Grace must mete the lives of others,
Turning past evils to advantages.
Knowing Falstaff is preparation for being a good ruler when he must “mete the lives of others” according to what he learned from his time in the “immodest world.” Falstaff’s shows the young Prince the value of life. But good kings cannot become swollen like bladders and puffed up with sighs. The greatness of Falstaff is that he is beyond all courts, all wars, all practical affairs. He is wit. He is personality. He is a greatness unknown to puritans and pragmatists. He is incorrigible, irredeemable, incommensurable. He is the only person great enough to be a tutor to Hal, a surrogate father, to make the young Prince be a madcap once in his days. Without that greatness, Hal could not have become the greatest king, the mirror of all Christian kings. But with it, he cannot rule.
Admired but not esteemed
Falstaff’s greatness is too vast for the court. Falstaff as a lord, a true noble of the real, would be unbearable, to him and to us. Falstaff in the court would be a sorry thing. He has to go. He is too great, in every sense, to tolerate any other ending. He lives much larger in memory than many other men manage to in the flesh. Falstaff is not just Hal’s tutor of riots, but the young king’s sin eater also. He was the court jester—a figure notably lacking from Henry IV’s court. And like all the best fools, he ignored conventions and told us the truth. We know Hal did the right thing. We accept that the world is what it is. But Falstaff is who we want. It was only for him that the groundlings at the theatre stopped cracking their nuts. It is he who holds every stage.
And who are we? We are not Hal or Henry. We are not Hotspur. We will not make great decisions of state. We will not figure in history. Who then should we turn to? The nobles who start rebellions? The soldiers who slip to a muddy suffering death in the field? The hangers-on at court? Or should we be more like Falstaff, getting as much from life as possible?
He is, as Samuel Johnson said, a veteran in life. Has any critic outdone what Johnson said, in conclusion to his notes on the two parts of Henry VI?
But Falstaff unimitated, unimitable Falstaff, how shall I describe thee? Thou compound of sense and vice; of sense which may be admired but not esteemed, of vice which may be despised, but hardly detested.
Falstaff is a character loaded with faults, and with those faults which naturally produce contempt. He is a thief, and a glutton, a coward, and a boaster, always ready to cheat the weak, and prey upon the poor; to terrify the timorous and insult the defenceless. At once obsequious and malignant, he satirises in their absence those whom he lives by flattering. He is familiar with the prince only as an agent of vice, but of this familiarity he is so proud as not only to be supercilious and haughty with common men, but to think his interest of importance to the duke of Lancaster. Yet the man thus corrupt, thus despicable, makes himself necessary to the prince that despises him, by the most pleasing of all qualities, perpetual gaiety, by an unfailing power of exciting laughter, which is the more freely indulged, as his wit is not of the splendid or ambitious kind, but consists in easy escapes and sallies of levity, which make sport but raise no envy. It must be observed that he is stained with no enormous or sanguinary crimes, so that his licentiousness is not so offensive but that it may be borne for his mirth.
The moral to be drawn from this representation is, that no man is more dangerous than he that with a will to corrupt, hath the power to please; and that neither wit nor honesty ought to think themselves safe with such a companion when they see Henry seduced by Falstaff.
Those Johnson lines are magnificent. great piece, cheers.