Why Falstaff is fat.

Falstaff unimitated, unimitable Falstaff, how shall I describe thee?

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.)

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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.

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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.

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“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.