EIGHT EIGHTIf all the year were playing holidays,
To sport would be as tedious as to work . . .
The two parts of Henry IV, written probably in 1597 and 1598, are an astonishing development of drama in the direction of inclusiveness, a development possible because of the range of the traditional culture and the popular theater, but realized only because Shakespeare’s genius for construction matched his receptivity. We have noticed briefly in the introductory chapter how, early in his career, Shakespeare made brilliant use of the long standing tradition of comic accompaniment and counterstatement by the clown.1 Now suddenly he takes the diverse elements in the potpourri of the popular chronicle play and composes a structure in which they draw each other out. The Falstaff comedy, far from being forced into an alien environment of historical drama, is begotten by that environment, giving and taking meaning as it grows. The implications of the saturnalian attitude are more drastically and inclusively expressed here than anywhere else, because here misrule is presented along with rule and along with the tensions that challenge rule. Shakespeare dramatizes not only holiday but also the need for holiday and the need to limit holiday.
It is in the Henry IV plays that we can consider most fruitfully general questions concerning the relation of comedy to analogous forms of symbolic action in folk rituals: not only the likenesses of comedy to ritual, but the differences, the features of comic form which make it comedy and not ritual. Such analogies, I think, prove to be useful critical tools: they lead us to see structure in the drama. And they also raise fascinating historical and theoretical questions about the relation of drama to other products of culture. One way in which our time has been seeing the universal in literature has been to find in complex literary works patterns which are analogous to myths and rituals and which can be regarded as archetypes, in some sense primitive or fundamental. I have found this approach very exciting indeed. But at the same time, such analysis can be misleading if it results in equating the literary form with primitive analogues. When we are dealing with so developed an art as Shakespeare’s, in so complex an epoch as the Renaissance, primitive patterns may be seen in literature mainly because literary imagination, exploiting the heritage of literary form, disengages them from the suggestions of a complex culture. And the primitive levels are articulated in the course of reunderstanding their nature—indeed, the primitive can be fully expressed only on condition that the artist can deal with it in a most civilized way. Shakespeare presents patterns analogous to magic and ritual in the process of redefining magic as imagination, ritual as social action.
Shakespeare was the opposite of primitivistic, for in his culture what we search out and call primitive was in the blood and bone as a matter of course; the problem was to deal with it, to master it. The Renaissance, moreover, was a moment when educated men were modifying a ceremonial conception of human life to create a historical conception. The ceremonial view, which assumed that names and meanings are fixed and final, expressed experience as pageant and ritual—pageant where the right names could march in proper order, or ritual where names could be changed in the right, the proper way. The historical view expresses life as drama. People in drama are not identical with their names, for they gain and lose their names, their status and meaning—and not by settled ritual: the gaining and losing of names, of meaning, is beyond the control of any set ritual sequence. Shakespeare’s plays are full of pageantry and of action patterned in a ritualistic way. But the pageants are regularly interrupted; the rituals are abortive or perverted; or if they succeed, they succeed against odds or in an unexpected fashion. The people in the plays try to organize their lives by pageant and ritual, but the plays are dramatic precisely because the effort fails. This failure drama presents as history and personality; in the largest perspective, as destiny.
At the heart of the plays there is, I think, a fascination with the individualistic use or abuse of ritual—with magic. There is an intoxication with the possibility of an omnipotence of mind by which words might become things, by which a man might “gain a deity,” might achieve, by making his own ritual, an unlimited power to incarnate meaning.2 This fascination is expressed in the poetry by which Shakespeare’s people envisage their ideal selves. But his drama also expresses an equal and complementary awareness that magic is delusory, that words can become things or lead to deeds only within a social group, by virtue of a historical, social situation beyond the mind and discourse of any one man. This awareness of limitations is expressed by the ironies, whether comic or tragic, which Shakespeare embodies in the dramatic situations of his speakers, the ironies which bring down the meanings which fly high in winged words.
In using an analogy with temporary king and scapegoat to bring out patterns of symbolic action in Falstaff’s role, it will be important to keep it clear that the analogy is one we make now, that it is not Shakespeare’s analogy; otherwise we falsify his relation to tradition.3 He did not need to discriminate consciously, in our way, underlying configurations which came to him with his themes and materials. His way of extending consciousness of such patterns was the drama. In creating the Falstaff comedy, he fused two main saturnalian traditions, the clowning customary on the stage and the folly customary on holiday, and produced something unprecedented. He was working out attitudes towards chivalry, the state and crown in history, in response to the challenge posed by the fate he had dramatized in Richard II. The fact that we find analogies to the ritual interregnum relevant to what Shakespeare produced is not the consequence of a direct influence; his power of dramatic statement, in developing saturnalian comedy, reached to modes of organizing experience which primitive cultures have developed with a clarity of outline comparable to that of his drama. The large and profound relations he expressed were developed from the relatively simple dramatic method of composing with statement and counterstatement, elevated action and burlesque. The Henry IV plays are masterpieces of the popular theater whose plays were, in Sidney’s words, “neither right tragedies nor right comedies, mingling kings and clowns.”
The fascination of Falstaff as a dramatic figure has led criticism, from Morgan’s essay onward, to center I Henry IV on him, and to treat the rest of the play merely as a setting for him. But despite his predominating imaginative significance, the play is centered on Prince Hal, developing in such a way as to exhibit in the Prince an inclusive, sovereign nature fitted for kingship. The relation of the Prince to Falstaff can be summarized fairly adequately in terms of the relation of holiday to everyday. As the non-historical material came to Shakespeare in The Famous Victories of Henry the Fifth, the prince was cast in the traditional role of the prodigal son, while his disreputable companions functioned as tempters in the same general fashion as the Vice of the morality plays. At one level Shakespeare keeps this pattern, but he shifts the emphasis away from simple moral terms. The issue, in his hands, is not whether Hal will be good or bad but whether he will be noble or degenerate, whether his holiday will become his everyday. The interregnum of a Lord of Misrule, delightful in its moment, might develop into the anarchic reign of a favorite dominating a dissolute king. Hal’s secret, which he confides early to the audience, is that for him Falstaff is merely a pastime, to be dismissed in due course:
If all the year were playing holidays,
To sport would be as tedious as to work;
But when they seldom come, they wish’d-for come . . .
(I.ii.228–230)
The prince’s sports, accordingly, express not dissoluteness but a fine excess of vitality—“as full of spirit as the month of May”—together with a capacity for occasionally looking at the world as though it were upside down. His energy is controlled by an inclusive awareness of the rhythm in which he is living: despite appearances, he will not make the mistake which undid Richard II, who played at saturnalia until it caught up with him in earnest. During the battle of Shrewsbury (when, in Hotspur’s phrase, “Doomsday is near”), Hal dismisses Falstaff with “What! is it a time to jest and dally now?” (V.iii.57). This sense of timing, of the relation of holiday to everyday and doomsday, contributes to establishing the prince as a sovereign nature.
But the way Hal sees the relations is not the way other people see them, nor indeed the way the audience sees them until the end. The holiday-everyday antithesis is his resource for control, and in the end he makes it stick. But before that, the only clear-cut definition of relations in these terms is in his single soliloquy, after his first appearance with Falstaff. Indeed, it is remarkable how little satisfactory formulation there is of the relationships which the play explores dramatically. It is essential to the play that the prince should be misconstrued, that the king should see “riot and dishonor stain” (I.i.85) his brow, that Percy should patronize him as a “nimble-footed madcap” (IV.ii.95) who might easily be poisoned with a pot of ale if it were worth the trouble. But the absence of adequate summary also reflects the fact that Shakespeare was doing something which he could not summarize, which only the whole resources of his dramatic art could convey.
It is an open question, throughout Part One, as to just who or what Falstaff is. At the very end, when Prince John observes “This is the strangest tale that ever I heard,” Hal responds with “This is the strangest fellow, brother John” (V.iv.158–159). From the beginning, Falstaff is constantly renaming himself:
Marry, then, sweet wag, when thou art king, let not us that are squires of the night’s body be called thieves of the day’s beauty. Let us be Diana’s Foresters, Gentlemen of the Shade, Minions of the Moon; and let men say we be men of good government . . .
(I.ii.26–31)
Here Misrule is asking to be called Good Government, as it is his role to do—though he does so with a wink which sets real good government at naught, concluding with “steal”:
. . . men of good government, being governed as the sea is, by our noble and chaste mistress the moon, under whose countenance we steal.
(I.ii.31–33)
I have considered in an earlier chapter how the witty equivocation Falstaff practices, like that of Nashe’s Bacchus and other apologists for folly and vice, alludes to the very morality it is flouting.4 Such “damnable iteration” is a sport that implies a rolling-eyed awareness of both sides of the moral medal; the Prince summarizes it in saying that Sir John “was never yet a breaker of proverbs. He will give the devil his due” (I.ii. 131–133). It is also a game to be played with cards close to the chest. A Lord of Misrule naturally does not call himself Lord of Misrule in setting out to reign, but takes some title with the life of pretense in it. Falstaff’s pretensions, moreover, are not limited to one occasion, for he is not properly a holiday lord, but a de facto buffoon who makes his way by continually seizing, catch as catch can, on what names and meanings the moment offers. He is not a professed buffoon—few buffoons, in life, are apt to be. In Renaissance courts, the role of buffoon was recognized but not necessarily formalized, not necessarily altogether distinct from the role of favorite. And he is a highwayman: Shakespeare draws on the euphemistic, mock-chivalric cant by which “the profession” grace themselves. Falstaff in Part One plays it that he is Hal’s friend, a gentleman, a “gentleman of the shade,” and a soldier; he even enjoys turning the tables with “Thou hast done much harm upon me, Hal . . . I must give over this life, and I will give it over . . . I’ll be damn’d for never a king’s son in Christendom” (I.ii. 102–109). It is the essence of his character, and his role, in Part One, that he never comes to rest where we can see him for what he “is.” He is always in motion, always adopting postures, assuming characters.
That he does indeed care for Hal can be conveyed in performance without imposing sentimental tableaux on the action, provided that actors and producer recognize that he cares for the prince after his own fashion. It is from the prince that he chiefly gets his meaning, as it is from real kings that mock kings always get their meaning. We can believe it when we hear in Henry V that banishment has “killed his heart” (II.i.92). But to make much of a personal affection for the prince is a misconceived way to find meaning in Falstaff. His extraordinary meaningfulness comes from the way he manages to live “out of all order, out of all compass” by his wit and his wits; and from the way he keeps reflecting on the rest of the action, at first indirectly by the mock roles that he plays, at the end directly by his comments at the battle. Through this burlesque and mockery an intelligence of the highest order is expressed. It is not always clear whether the intelligence is Falstaff’s or the dramatist’s; often the question need not arise. Romantic criticism went the limit in ascribing a God-like superiority to the character, to the point of insisting that he tells the lies about the multiplying men in buckram merely to amuse, that he knew all the time at Gadshill that it was with Hal and Poins that he fought. To go so far in that direction obviously destroys the drama—spoils the joke in the case of the “incomprehensible lies,” a joke which, as E. E. Stoll abundantly demonstrates, must be a joke on Falstaff.5 On the other hand, I see no reason why actor and producer should not do all they can to make us enjoy the intellectual mastery involved in Falstaff’s comic resource and power of humorous redefinition. It is crucial that he should not be made so superior that he is never in predicaments, for his genius is expressed in getting out of them. But he does have genius, as Maurice Morgan rightly insisted though in a misconceived way. Through his part Shakespeare expressed attitudes towards experience which, grounded in a saturnalian reversal of values, went beyond that to include a radical challenge to received ideas.
Throughout the first three acts of Part One, the Falstaff comedy is continuously responsive to the serious action. There are constant parallels and contrasts with what happens at court or with the rebels. And yet these parallels are not explicitly noticed; the relations are presented, not formulated. So the first scene ends in a mood of urgency, with the tired king urging haste: “come yourself with speed to us again.” The second scene opens with Hal asking Falstaff “What a devil hast thou to do with the time of day?” The prose in which he explains why time is nothing to Sir John is wonderfully leisurely and abundant, an elegant sort of talk that has all the time in the world to enjoy the completion of its schematized patterns:
Unless hours were cups of sack, and minutes capons, and clocks the tongues of bawds, and dials the signs of leaping houses, and the blessed sun himself a fair hot wench in flame-colored taffeta, I see no reason why thou shouldst be so superfluous to demand the time of day.
(I.ii.7–13)
The same difference in the attitude towards time runs throughout and goes with the difference between verse and prose mediums. A similar contrast obtains about lese majesty. Thus at their first appearance Falstaff insults Hal’s majesty with casual, off-hand wit which the prince tolerates (while getting his own back by jibing at Falstaff’s girth):
And I prithee, sweet wag, when thou art king, as God save thy
Grace—Majesty I should say, for grace thou wilt have none—
Prince. What, none?
Falstaff. No, by my troth; not so much as will serve to be
prologue to an egg and butter.
Prince. Well, how then? Come, roundly, roundly.
(I.ii.17–25)
In the next scene, we see Worcester calling into question the grace of Bolingbroke, “that same greatness to which our own hands / Have holp to make so portly” (I.iii. 12–13). The King’s response is immediate and drastic, and his lines point a moral that Hal seems to be ignoring:
Worcester, get thee gone; for I do see
Danger and disobedience in thine eye.
O, sir, your presence is too bold and peremptory,
And majesty might never yet endure
The moody frontier of a servant brow.
(I.iii.15–19)
Similar parallels run between Hotspur’s heroics and Falstaff’s mock-heroics. In the third scene we hear Hotspur talking of “an easy leap / To pluck bright honor from the pale-face’d moon” (I.iii.201–202). Then in the robbery, Falstaff is complaining that “Eight yards of uneven ground is threescore and ten miles afoot for me,” and asking “Have you any levers to lift me up again, being down?” (II.ii.25–28, 36). After Hotspur enters exclaiming against the cowardly lord who has written that he will not join the rebellion, we have Falstaff’s entrance to the tune of “A plague of all cowards” (II.iv.127). And so on, and so on. Shakespeare’s art has reached the point where he makes everything foil to everything else. Hal’s imagery, in his soliloquy, shows the dramatist thinking about such relations: “like bright metal on a sullen ground, / My reformation, glitt’ring o’er my fault” (I.ii.236–237).
Now it is not true that Falstaff’s impudence about Hal’s grace undercuts Bolingbroke’s majesty, nor that Sir John’s posturing as a hero among cowards invalidates the heroic commitment Hotspur expresses when he says “but I tell you, my lord fool, out of this nettle, danger, we pluck this flower, safety” (II.iii.11–12). The relationship is not one of a mocking echo. Instead, there is a certain distance between the comic and serious strains which leaves room for a complex interaction, organized by the crucial role of the prince. We are invited, by the King’s unfavorable comparison in the opening scene, to see the Prince in relation to Hotspur. And Hal himself, in the midst of his Boars Head revel, compares himself with Hotspur. In telling Poins of his encounter with the drawers among the hogsheads of the wine-cellar, he says “I have sounded the very bass-string of humility,” goes on to note what he has gained by it, “I can drink with any tinker in his own language during my life,” and concludes with “I tell thee, Ned, thou hast lost much honour that thou wert not with me in this action” (II.iv.5, 20–24). His mock-heroic way of talking about “this action” shows how well he knows how to value it from a princely vantage. But the remark cuts two ways. For running the gamut of society is an important action: after their experiment with Francis and his “Anon, anon, sir,” the Prince exclaims
That ever this fellow should have fewer words than a parrot, and yet the son of a woman! . . . I am not yet of Percy’s mind, the Hotspur of the North; he that kills me some six or seven dozen of Scots at a breakfast, washes his hands, and says to his wife, “Fie upon this quiet life! I want work.” “O my sweet Harry,” says she, “how many hast thou kill’d to-day?” “Give my roan horse a drench,” says he, and answers “Some fourteen,” an hour after, “a trifle, a trifle.” I prithee call in Falstaff. I’ll play Percy, and that damn’d brawn shall play Dame Mortimer his wife.
(II.iv.110–124)
It is the narrowness and obliviousness of the martial hero that Hal’s mockery brings out; here his awareness explicitly spans the distance between the separate strains of the action; indeed, the distance is made the measure of the kingliness of his nature. His “I am not yet of Percy’s mind” implies what he later promises his father (the commercial image he employs reflects his ability to use, after his father’s fashion, the politician’s calculation and indirection):
Percy is but my factor, good my lord,
To engross up glorious deeds on my behalf . . .
(III.ii.147–148)
In the Boars Head Tavern scene, Hal never carries out the plan of playing Percy to Falstaff’s Dame Mortimer; in effect he has played both their parts already in his snatch of mimicry. But Falstaff provides him with a continuous exercise in the consciousness that comes from playing at being what one is not, and from seeing through such playing.
Even here, where one world does comment on another explicitly, Hotspur’s quality is not invalidated; rather, his achievement is placed. It is included within a wider field which contains also the drawers, mine host, Mistress Quickly, and by implication, not only “all the good lads of Eastcheap” but all the estates of England.6 When we saw Hotspur and his Lady, he was not foolish, but delightful in his headlong, spontaneous way. His Lady has a certain pathos in the complaints which serve to convey how all absorbing his battle passion is. But the joke is with him as he mocks her:
Love? I love thee not;
I care not for thee, Kate. This is no world
To play with mammets and to tilt with lips.
We must have bloody noses and crack’d crowns,
And pass them current, too. Gods me, my horse!
(II.iii.93–97)
One could make some very broad fun of Hotspur’s preference for his horse over his wife. But there is nothing of the kind in Shakespeare: here and later, his treatment values the conversion of love into war as one of the important human powers. Hotspur has the fullness of life and the unforced integrity of the great aristocrat who has never known what it is to cramp his own style. His style shows it; he speaks the richest, freshest poetry of the play, in lines that take all the scope they need to fulfill feeling and perception:
oft the teeming earth
Is with a kind of colic pinch’d and vex’d
By the imprisoning of unruly wind
Within her womb, which, for enlargement striving,
Shakes the old beldame earth and topples down
Steeples and mossgrown towers. At your birth
Our grandam earth, having this distemp’rature,
In passion shook.
Glendower. Cousin, of many men
I do not bear these crossings. Give me leave
To tell you once again that at my birth
The front of heaven was full of fiery shapes,
The goats ran from the mountains, and the herds
Were strangely clamorous to the frighted fields.
(III.i.28–40)
The established life of moss-grown towers is in Percy’s poetic speech, as the grazed-over Welsh mountains are in Glendower’s. They are both strong; everybody in this play is strong in his own way. Hotspur’s humor is untrammeled, like his verse, based on the heedless empiricism of an active, secure nobleman:
Glendower. I can call spirits from the vasty deep.
Hotspur. Why, so can I, or so can any man;
But will they come when you do call for them?
(III.i.53–55)
His unconsciousness makes him, at other moments, a comic if winning figure, as the limitations of his feudal virtues are brought out: his want of tact and judgment, his choleric man’s forgetfulness, his sudden boyish habit of leaping to conclusions, the noble but also comical way he can be carried away by “imagination of some great exploit” (I.iii.199), or by indignation at “this vile politician, Bolingbroke” (I.iii.241). Professor Lily B. Campbell has demonstrated that the rebellion of the Northern Earls in 1570 was present for Shakespeare’s audience in watching the Percy family in the play.7 The remoteness of this rough north country life from the London world of his audience, as well as its aristocratic charm, are conveyed when Hotspur tells his wife that she swears “like a comfit-maker’s wife,”
As if thou ne’er walk’st further than Finsbury.
Swear me, Kate, like a lady as thou art,
A good mouth-filling oath; and leave ‘in sooth’
And such protest of pepper gingerbread
To velvet guards and Sunday citizens.
(III.i.255–259)
It is the various strengths of a stirring world, not deficiencies, which make the conflict in 1 Henry IV. Even the humble carriers, and the professional thieves, are full of themselves and their business:
I am joined with no foot land-rakers, no long-staff sixpenny strikers, none of these mad mustachio purple-hued malt-worms; but with nobility and tranquillity, burgomasters and great oneyers, such as can hold in, such as will strike sooner than speak, and speak sooner than drink, and drink sooner than pray; and yet, zounds, I lie; for they pray continually to their saint, the commonwealth, or rather, not pray to her, but prey on her, for they ride up and down on her and make her their boots.
(II.i.81–91)
In his early history play, 2 Henry VI, as we have noticed, Shakespeare used his clowns to present the Jack Cade rebellion as a saturnalia ignorantly undertaken in earnest, a highly-stylized piece of dramaturgy, which he brings off triumphantly. In this more complex play the underworld is presented as endemic disorder alongside the crisis of noble rebellion: the king’s lines are apposite when he says that insurrection can always mobilize
moody beggars, starving for a time
Of pell-mell havoc and confusion.
(V.i.81–82)
Falstaff places himself in saying “Well, God be thanked for these rebels. They offend none but the virtuous. I laud them, I praise them.”
The whole effect, in the opening acts, when there is little commentary on the spectacle as a whole, is of life overflowing its bounds by sheer vitality. Thieves and rebels and honest men—“one that hath abundance of charge too, God knows what” (II.i.64)—ride up and down on the commonwealth, pray to her and prey on her. Hotspur exults that “That roan shall be my throne” (II.iii.73). Falstaff exclaims, “Shall I? Content. This chair shall be my state” (II.iv.415). Hal summarizes the effect, after Hotspur is dead, with
When that this body did contain a spirit,
A kingdom for it was too small a bound.
(V.iv.89–90)
The stillness when he says this, at the close of the battle, is the moment when his royalty is made manifest. When he stands poised above the prostrate bodies of Hotspur and Falstaff, his position on the stage and his lines about the two heroes express a nature which includes within a larger order the now subordinated parts of life which are represented in those two: in Hotspur, honor, the social obligation to courage and self-sacrifice, a value which has been isolated in this magnificently anarchical feudal lord to become almost everything; and in Falstaff, the complementary joie de vivre which rejects all social obligations with “I like not such grinning honour as Sir Walter hath. Give me life” (V.iii.61).
But Falstaff does not stay dead. He jumps up in a triumph which, like Bottom coming alive after Pyramus is dead, reminds one of the comic resurrections in the St. George plays. He comes back to life because he is still relevant. His apology for counterfeiting cuts deeply indeed, because it does not apply merely to himself; we can relate it, as William Empson has shown, to the counterfeiting of the king. Bolingbroke too knows when it is time to counterfeit, both in this battle, where he survives because he has many marching in his coats, and throughout a political career where, as he acknowledges to Hal, he manipulates the symbols of majesty with a calculating concern for ulterior results. L. C. Knights, noticing this relation and the burlesque, elsewhere in Falstaff’s part, of the attitudes of chivalry, concluded with nineteenth-century critics like Ulrici and Victor Hugo that the comedy should be taken as a devastating satire on war and government.8 But this is obviously an impossible, anachronistic view, based on the assumption of the age of individualism that politics and war are unnatural activities that can be done without. Mr. Knights would have it that the audience should feel a jeering response when Henry sonorously declares, after Shrewsbury: “Thus ever did rebellion find rebuke.” This interpretation makes a shambles of the heroic moments of the play—makes them clearly impossible to act. My own view, as will be clear, is that the dynamic relation of comedy and serious action is saturnalian rather than satiric, that the misrule works, through the whole dramatic rhythm, to consolidate rule. But it is also true, as Mr. Empson remarks, that “the double plot is carrying a fearful strain here.”9 Shakespeare is putting an enormous pressure on the comedy to resolve the challenge posed by the ironic perceptions presented in his historical action.
The process at work, here and earlier in the play, can be made clearer, I hope, by reference now to the carrying off of bad luck by the scapegoat of saturnalian ritual. We do not need to assume that Shakespeare had any such ritual patterns consciously in mind; whatever his conscious intention, it seems to me that these analogues illuminate patterns which his poetic drama presents concretely and dramatically. After such figures as the Mardi Gras or Carnival have presided over a revel, they are frequently turned on by their followers, tried in some sort of court, convicted of sins notorious in the village during the last year, and burned or buried in effigy to signify a new start. In other ceremonies described in The Golden Bough, mockery kings appear as recognizable substitutes for real kings, stand trial in their stead, and carry away the evils of their realms into exile or death. One such scapegoat figure, as remote historically as could be from Shakespeare, is the Tibetan King of the Years, who enjoyed ten days’ misrule during the annual holiday of Buddhist monks at Lhasa. At the climax of his ceremony, after doing what he liked while collecting bad luck by shaking a black yak’s tail over the people, he mounted the temple steps and ridiculed the representative of the Grand Llama, proclaiming heresies like “What we perceive through the five senses is no illusion. All you teach is untrue.” A few minutes later, discredited by a cast of loaded dice, he was chased off to exile and possible death in the mountains.10 One cannot help thinking of Falstaff’s catechism on honor, spoken just before another valuation of honor is expressed in the elevated blank verse of a hero confronting death: “Can honour . . . take away the grief of a wound? No. . . . What is honour? a word. What is that word, honour? Air.” Hal’s final expulsion of Falstaff appears in the light of these analogies to carry out an impersonal pattern, not merely political but ritual in character. After the guilty reign of Bolingbroke, the prince is making a fresh start as the new king. At a level beneath the moral notions of a personal reform, we can see a nonlogical process of purification by sacrifice—the sacrifice of Falstaff. The career of the old king, a successful usurper whose conduct of affairs has been sceptical and opportunistic, has cast doubt on the validity of the whole conception of a divinely-ordained and chivalrous kingship to which Shakespeare and his society were committed. And before Bolingbroke, Richard II had given occasion for doubts about the rituals of kingship in an opposite way, by trying to use them magically. Shakespeare had shown Richard assuming that the symbols of majesty should be absolutes, that the names of legitimate power should be transcendently effective regardless of social forces. Now both these attitudes have been projected also in Falstaff; he carries to comically delightful and degraded extremes both a magical use of moral sanctions and the complementary opportunistic manipulation and scepticism. So the ritual analogy suggests that by turning on Falstaff as a scapegoat, as the villagers turned on their Mardi Gras, the prince can free himself from the sins, the “bad luck,” of Richard’s reign and of his father’s reign, to become a king in whom chivalry and a sense of divine ordination are restored.
But this process of carrying off bad luck, if it is to be made dramatically cogent, as a symbolic action accomplished in and by dramatic form, cannot take place magically in Shakespeare’s play. When it happens magically in the play, we have, I think, a failure to transform ritual into comedy. In dealing with fully successful comedy, the magical analogy is only a useful way of organizing our awareness of a complex symbolic action. The expulsion of evil works as dramatic form only in so far as it is realized in a movement from participation to rejection which happens, moment by moment, in our response to Falstaff’s clowning misrule. We watch Falstaff adopt one posture after another, in the effort to give himself meaning at no cost; and moment by moment we see that the meaning is specious. So our participation is repeatedly diverted to laughter. The laughter, disbursing energy originally mobilized to respond to a valid meaning, signalizes our mastery by understanding of the tendency which has been misapplied or carried to an extreme.
Consider, for example, the use of magical notions of royal power in the most famous of all Falstaff’s burlesques:
By the Lord, I knew ye as well as he that made ye. . . . Was it for me to kill the heir apparent? Should I turn upon the true prince? Why, thou knowest I am as valiant as Hercules; but beware instinct. The lion will not touch the true prince. Instinct is a great matter. I was now a coward on instinct. I shall think the better of myself, and thee, during my life—I for a valiant lion, and thou for a true prince. But, by the Lord, lads, I am glad you have the money. Hostess, clap to the doors: watch to-night, pray to-morrow.
(II.iv.295–306)
Here Falstaff has recourse to the brave conception that legitimate kingship has a magical potency. This is the sort of absolutist appeal to sanctions which Richard II keeps falling back on in his desperate “conjuration” (R.II III.ii.23) by hyperbole:
So when this thief, this traitor, Bolingbroke, . . .
Shall see us rising in our throne, the East,
His treasons will sit blushing in his face,
Not able to endure the sight of day . . .
The breath of worldly men cannot depose
The deputy elected by the Lord.
For every man that Bolingbroke hath press’d
To lift shrewd steel against our golden crown,
God for his Richard hath in heavenly pay
A glorious angel.
(R.II III.ii.47–61)
In Richard’s case, a tragic irony enforces the fact that heavenly angels are of no avail if one’s coffers are empty of golden angels and the Welsh army have dispersed. In Falstaff’s case, the irony is comically obvious, the “lies are like the father that begets them; gross as a mountain, open, palpable” (II.iv.249–250). Hal stands for the judgment side of our response, while Falstaff embodies the enthusiastic, irrepressible conviction of fantasy’s omnipotence. The Prince keeps returning to Falstaff’s bogus “instinct”; “Now, sirs . . . You are lions too, you ran away upon instinct, you will not touch the true prince; no—fie!” (II.iv.29–34). After enjoying the experience of seeing through such notions of magical majesty, he is never apt to make the mistake of assuming that, just because he is king, lions like Northumberland will not touch him. King Richard’s bad luck came precisely from such an assumption—unexamined, of course, as fatal assumptions always are. Freud’s account of bad luck, in The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, sees it as the expression of unconscious motives which resist the conscious goals of the personality. This view helps to explain how the acting out of disruptive motives in saturnalia or in comedy can serve to master potential aberration by revaluing it in relation to the whole of experience. So Falstaff, in acting out this absolutist aberration, is taking away what might have been Hal’s bad luck, taking it away not in a magical way, but by extending the sphere of conscious control. The comedy is a civilized equivalent of the primitive rite. A similar mastery of potential aberration is promoted by the experience of seeing through Falstaff’s burlesque of the sort of headlong chivalry presented seriously in Hotspur.
In order to put the symbolic action of the comedy in larger perspective, it will be worth while to consider further, for a moment, the relation of language to stage action and dramatic situation in Richard II. That play is a pioneering exploration of the semantics of royalty, shot through with talk about the potency and impotence of language. In the first part, we see a Richard who is possessor of an apparently magical omnipotence: for example, when he commutes Bolingbroke’s banishment from ten to six years, Bolingbroke exclaims:
How long a time lies in one little word!
Four lagging winters and four wanton springs
End in a word: such is the breath of kings.
(R.II I.iii.213–215)
Richard assumes he has such magic breath inevitably, regardless of “the breath of worldly men.” When he shouts things like “Is not the king’s name twenty thousand names? / Arm, arm, my name!” he carries the absolutist assumption to the giddiest verge of absurdity. When we analyze the magical substitution of words for things in such lines, looking at them from outside the rhythm of feeling in which they occur, it seems scarcely plausible that a drama should be built around the impulse to adopt such an assumption. It seems especially implausible in our own age, when we are so conscious, on an abstract level, of the dependence of verbal efficacy on the social group. The analytical situation involves a misleading perspective, however; for, whatever your assumptions about semantics, when you have to act, to be somebody or become somebody, there is a moment when you have to have faith that the unknown world beyond will respond to the names you commit yourself to as right names.11 The Elizabethan mind, moreover, generally assumed that one played one’s part in a divinely ordained pageant where each man was his name and the role his name implied. The expression of this faith, and of the outrage of it, is particularly drastic in the Elizabethan drama, which can be regarded, from this vantage, as an art form developed to express the shock and exhilaration of the discovery that life is not pageantry. As Professor Tillyard has pointed out, Richard II is the most ceremonial of all Shakespeare’s plays, and the ceremony all comes to nothing.12 In Richard’s deposition scene, one way in which anguish at his fall is expressed is by a focus on his loss of names: he responds to Northumberland’s “My Lord—” by flinging out
No lord of thine, thou haught insulting man,
Nor no man’s lord. I have no name, no title—
No, not that name was given me at the font—
But ’tis usurp’d. Alack the heavy day,
That I have worn so many winters out
And know not now what name to call myself!
O that I were a mockery king of snow,
Standing before the sun of Bolingbroke
To melt myself away in water-drops!
(R.II IV.i.253–262)
His next move is to call for the looking glass in which he stares at his face to look for the meaning the face has lost. To lose one’s meaning, one’s social role, is to be reduced to mere body.
Here again the tragedy can be used to illuminate the comedy. Since the Elizabethan drama was a double medium of words and of physical gestures, it frequently expressed the pathos of the loss of meaning by emphasizing moments when word and gesture, name and body, no longer go together, just as it presented the excitement of a gain of meaning by showing a body seizing on names when a hero creates his identity. In the deposition scene, Richard says “mark me how I will undo myself” (IV.i.203). Then he gives away by physical gestures the symbolic meanings which have constituted that self. When at last he has no name, the anguish is that the face, the body, remain when the meaning is gone. There is also something in Richard’s lines which, beneath the surface of his self-pity, relishes such undoing, a self-love which looks towards fulfillment in that final reduction of all to the body which is death. This narcissistic need for the physical is the other side of the attitude that the magic of the crown should altogether transcend the physical—and the human:
Cover your heads, and mock not flesh and blood
With solemn reverence. Throw away respect,
Tradition, form, and ceremonious duty;
For you have but mistook me all this while.
I live with bread like you, feel want, taste grief,
Need friends. Subjected thus,
How can you say to me I am a king?
(R.II III.ii.171–177)
In expressing the disappointment of Richard’s magical expectations, as well as their sweeping magnificence, the lines make manifest the aberration which is mastered in the play by tragic form.
The same sort of impulse is expressed and mastered by comic form in the Henry IV comedy. When Richard wishes he were a mockery king of snow, to melt before the sun of Bolingbroke, the image expresses on one side the wish to escape from the body with which he is left when his meaning has gone—to weep himself away in water drops. But the lines also look wistfully towards games of mock royalty where, since the whole thing is based on snow, the collapse of meaning need not hurt. Falstaff is such a mockery king. To be sure, he is flesh and blood, of a kind: he is tallow, anyway. He “sweats to death / And lards the lean earth as he walks along.” Of course he is not just a mockery, not just his role, not just bombast. Shakespeare, as always, makes the symbolic role the product of a life which includes contradictions of it, such as the morning-after regrets when Falstaff thinks of the inside of a church and notices that his skin hangs about him like an old lady’s loose gown. Falstaff is human enough so that “Were’t not for laughing, . . . [we] should pity him.” But we do laugh, because when Falstaff’s meanings collapse, little but make-believe has been lost:
Prince. Thy state is taken for a join’d-stool, thy golden sceptre for a leaden dagger, and thy precious rich crown for a pitiful bald crown.
(II.iv.418–420)
Falstaff’s effort to make his body and furnishings mean sovereignty is doomed from the start; he must work with a leaden dagger, the equivalent of a Vice’s dagger of lath. But Falstaff does have golden words, and an inexhaustible vitality in using them. He can name himself nobly, reordering the world by words so as to do himself credit:
No, my good lord. Banish Peto, banish Bardolph, banish Poins; but for sweet Jack Falstaff, kind Jack Falstaff, true Jack Falstaff, valiant Jack Falstaff, and therefore more valiant being, as he is, old Jack Falstaff, banish not him thy Harry’s company, banish not him thy Harry’s company. Banish plump Jack, and banish all the world!
(II.iv.519–527)
I quote such familiar lines to recall their effect of incantation: they embody an effort at a kind of magical naming. Each repetition of “sweet Jack Falstaff, kind Jack Falstaff” aggrandizes an identity which the serial clauses caress and cherish. At the very end, in “plump Jack,” the disreputable belly is glorified.
In valid heroic and majestic action, the bodies of the personages are constantly being elevated by becoming the vehicles of social meanings; in the comedy, such elevation becomes burlesque, and in the repeated failures to achieve a fusion of body and symbol, abstract meanings keep falling back into the physical. “A plague of sighing and grief! it blows a man up like a bladder” (II.iv.365–366). The repetition of such joking about Falstaff’s belly makes it meaningful in a very special way, as a symbol of the process of inflation and collapse of meaning. So it represents the power of the individual life to continue despite the collapse of social roles. This continuing on beyond definitions is after all what we call “the body” in one main meaning of the term: Falstaff’s belly is thus the essence of body—an essence which can be defined only dynamically, by failures of meaning. The effect of indestructible vitality is reinforced by the association of Falstaff’s figure with the gay eating and drinking of Shrove Tuesday and Carnival.13 Whereas, in the tragedy, the reduction is to a body which can only die, here reduction is to a body which typifies our power to eat and drink our way through a shambles of intellectual and moral contradictions.
So we cannot resist sharing Falstaff’s genial self-love when he commends his vision of plump Jack to the Prince, just as we share the ingenuous self-love of a little child. But the dramatist is ever on the alert to enforce the ironies that dog the tendency of fantasy to equate the self with “all the world.” So a most monstrous watch comes beating at the doors which have been clapped to against care; everyday breaks in on holiday.
In Part One, Falstaff reigns, within his sphere, as Carnival; Part Two is very largely taken up with his trial. To put Carnival on trial, run him out of town, and burn or bury him is in folk custom a way of limiting, by ritual, the attitudes and impulses set loose by ritual. Such a trial, though conducted with gay hoots and jeers, serves to swing the mind round to a new vantage, where it sees misrule no longer as a benign release for the individual, but as a source of destructive consequences for society.14 This sort of reckoning is what Part Two brings to Falstaff.
But Falstaff proves extremely difficult to bring to book—more difficult than an ordinary mummery king—because his burlesque and mockery are developed to a point where the mood of a moment crystallizes as a settled attitude of scepticism. As we have observed before, in a static, monolithic society, a Lord of Misrule can be put back in his place after the revel with relative ease. The festive burlesque of solemn sanctities does not seriously threaten social values in a monolithic culture, because the license depends utterly upon what it mocks: liberty is unable to envisage any alternative to the accepted order except the standing of it on its head. But Shakespeare’s culture was not monolithic: though its moralists assumed a single order, scepticism was beginning to have ground to stand on and look about—especially in and around London. So a Lord of Misrule figure, brought up, so to speak, from the country to the city, or from the traditional past into the changing present, could become on the Bankside the mouthpiece not merely for the dependent holiday scepticism which is endemic in a traditional society, but also for a dangerously self-sufficient everyday scepticism. When such a figure is set in an environment of sober-blooded great men behaving as opportunistically as he, the effect is to raise radical questions about social sanctities. At the end of Part Two, the expulsion of Falstaff is presented by the dramatist as getting rid of this threat; Shakespeare has recourse to a primitive procedure to meet a modern challenge. We shall find reason to question whether this use of ritual entirely succeeds.
But the main body of Part Two, what I am seeing as the trial, as against the expulsion, is wonderfully effective drama. The first step in trying Carnival, the first step in ceasing to be his subjects, would be to stop calling him “My Lord” and call him instead by his right name, Misrule. Now this is just the step which Falstaff himself takes for us at the outset of Part Two; when we first see him, he is setting himself up as an institution, congratulating himself on his powers as buffoon and wit. He glories in his role with what Dover Wilson has aptly called “comic hubris.”15 In the saturnalian scenes of Part One, we saw that it is impossible to say just who he is; but in Part Two, Falstaff sets himself up at the outset as Falstaff:
I am not only witty in myself, but the cause that wit is in other men. . . .
A pox of this gout! or, a gout of this pox! for one or the other plays the rogue with my great toe. ’Tis no matter if I do halt. I have the wars for my colour, and my pension shall seem the more reasonable. A good wit will make use of anything. I will turn diseases to commodity.
(I.ii.11–12, 273–278)
In the early portion of Part One he never spoke in asides, but now he constantly confides his schemes and his sense of himself to the audience. We do not have to see through him, but watch instead from inside his façades as he imposes them on others. Instead of warm amplifications centered on himself, his talk now consists chiefly of bland impudence or dry, denigrating comments on the way of the world. Much of the comedy is an almost Jonsonian spectacle where we relish a witty knave gulling fools.
It is this self-conscious Falstaff, confident of setting up his holiday license on an everyday basis, who at once encounters, of all awkward people, the Lord Chief Justice. From there on, during the first two acts, he is constantly put in the position of answering for his way of life; in effect he is repeatedly called to trial and keeps eluding it only by a “more than impudent sauciness” (II.i.123) and the privilege of his official employment in the wars. Mistress Quickly’s attempt to arrest him is wonderfully ineffectual; but he notably fails to thrust the Lord Chief Justice from a level consideration. Hal and Poins then disguise themselves, not this time for the sake of the incomprehensible lies that Falstaff will tell, but in order to try him, to see him “bestow himself . . . in his true colours” (II.ii.186). So during the first two acts we are again and again put in the position of judging him, although we continue to laugh with him. A vantage is thus established from which we watch him in action in Gloucestershire, where the Justice he has to deal with is so shallow that Falstaff’s progress is a triumph. The comedy is still delightful; Falstaff is still the greatest of wits; but we are constantly shown fun that involves fraud. Falstaff himself tells us about his game, with proud relish. Towards the end of the play, Hal’s reconciliation with his father and then with the Lord Chief Justice reemphasizes the detached vantage of judgment. So no leading remarks are necessary to assure our noting and marking when we hear Falstaff shouting, “Let us take any man’s horses; the laws of England are at my commandment. Blessed are they that have been my friends, and woe unto my lord chief justice!” (V.iii.140–144). The next moment we watch Doll and the Hostess being hauled off by Beadles because “the man is dead that you and Pistol beat among you” (V.iv.18).
Many of the basic structures in this action no doubt were shaped by morality-play encounters between Virtues and Vices,16 encounters which from my vantage here can be seen as cognate to the festive and scapegoat pattern. The trial of Falstaff is so effective as drama because no one conducts it—it happens. Falstaff, being a dramatic character, not a mummery, does not know when he has had his day. And he does not even recognize the authority who will finally sentence him: he mistakes Hal for a bastard son of the king’s (II.iv.307). The result of the trial is to make us see perfectly the necessity for the rejection of Falstaff as a man, as a favorite for a king, as the leader of an interest at court.
But I do not think that the dramatist is equally successful in justifying the rejection of Falstaff as a mode of awareness. The problem is not in justifying rejection morally but in making the process cogent dramatically, as in Part One we reject magical majesty or intransigent chivalry. The bad luck which in Part Two Falstaff goes about collecting, by shaking the black yak’s tail of his wit over people’s heads, is the impulse to assume that nothing is sacred. In a play concerned with ruthless political maneuver, much of it conducted by impersonal state functionaries, Falstaff turns up as a functionary too, with his own version of maneuver and impersonality: “If the young dace be a bait for the old pike, I see no reason in the law of nature but I may snap at him” (III.ii.356–359). Now this attitude is a most appropriate response to the behavior of the high factions beneath whose struggles Falstaff plies his retail trade. In the Gaultree parleys, Lord John rebukes the Archbishop for his use of the counterfeited zeal of God—and then himself uses a counterfeited zeal of gentlemanly friendship to trick the rebels into disbanding their forces. The difference between his behavior and Falstaff’s is of course that Lancaster has reasons of state on his side, a sanction supported, if not by legitimacy, at least by the desperate need for social order. This is a real difference, but a bare and harsh one. After all, Falstaff’s little commonwealth of man has its pragmatic needs too: as he explains blandly to the Justice, he needs great infamy, because “he that buckles him in my belt cannot live in less” (I.iii.159–160).
The trouble with trying to get rid of this attitude merely by getting rid of Falstaff is that the attitude is too pervasive in the whole society of the play, whether public or private. It is too obviously not just a saturnalian mood, the extravagance of a moment: it is presented instead as in grain, as the way of the world. Shakespeare might have let the play end with this attitude dominant, a harsh recognition that life is a nasty business where the big fishes eat the little fishes, with the single redeeming consideration that political order is better than anarchy, so that there is a pragmatic virtue in loyalty to the power of the state. But instead the dramatist undertakes, in the last part of the play, to expel this view of the world and to dramatize the creation of legitimacy and sanctified social power. Although the final scenes are fascinating, with all sorts of illuminations, it seems to me that at this level they partly fail.
We have seen that Shakespeare typically uses ritual patterns of behavior and thought precisely in the course of making clear, by tragic or comic irony, that rituals have no magical efficacy. The reason for his failure at the close of Part Two is that at this point he himself uses ritual, not ironically transformed into drama, but magically. To do this involves a restriction instead of an extension of awareness. An extension of control and awareness is consummated in the epiphany of Hal’s majesty while he is standing over Hotspur and Falstaff at the end of Part One. But Part Two ends with drastic restriction of awareness which goes with the embracing of magical modes of thought, not humorously but sentimentally.
It is true that the latter half of Part Two very effectively builds up to its finale by recurrent expression of a laboring need to be rid of a growth or humor. King Henry talks of the body of his kingdom as foul with rank diseases (III.i.39), and recalls Richard’s prophecy that “foul sin gathering head / Shall break into corruption” (III.i.76–77). There are a number of other images of expulsion, such as the striking case where the rebels speak of the need to “purge th’ obstructions which begin to stop / Our very veins of life” (IV.i.65–66). Henry himself is sick in the last half of the play, and there are repeated suggestions that his sickness is the consequence both of his sinful usurpation and of the struggle to defend it. Since his usurpation was almost a public duty, and his defense of order clearly for England’s sake as well as his own advantage, he becomes in these last scenes almost a sacrificial figure, a king who sins for the sake of society, suffers for society in suffering for his sin, and carries his sin off into death. Hal speaks of the crown having “fed upon the body of my father” (IV.v.160). Henry, in his last long speech, summarizes this pattern in saying:
God knows, my son,
By what bypaths and indirect crook’d ways
I met this crown; and I myself know well
How troublesome it sat upon my head.
To thee it shall descend with better quiet,
Better opinion, better confirmation;
For all the soil of the achievement goes
With me into the earth.
(IV.v.184–191)
The same image of burying sin occurs in some curious lines with which Hal reassures his brothers:
My father is gone wild into his grave;
For in his tomb lie my affections . . .
(V.ii.123–124)
This conceit not only suggests an expulsion of evil, but hints at the patricidal motive which is referred to explicitly elsewhere in these final scenes and is the complement of the father-son atonement.
Now this sacrificial imagery, where used by and about the old king, is effectively dramatic, because it does not ask the audience to abandon any part of the awareness of a human, social situation which the play as a whole has expressed. But the case is altered when Hal turns on “that father ruffian” Falstaff. The new king’s whip-lash lines stress Falstaff’s age and glance at his death:
I know thee not, old man. Fall to thy prayers.
How ill white hairs become a fool and jester!
I have long dreamt of such a kind of man,
So surfeit-swell’d, so old, and so profane;
But being awak’d, I do despise my dream.
Make less thy body, hence, and more thy grace;
Leave gormandising. Know the grave doth gape
For thee thrice wider than for other men.
(V.v.51–58)
The priggish tone, to which so many have objected, can be explained at one level as appropriate to the solemn occasion of a coronation. But it goes with a drastic narrowing of awareness. There are of course occasions in life when people close off parts of their minds—a coronation is a case in point: Shakespeare, it can be argued, is simply putting such an occasion into his play. But even his genius could not get around the fact that to block off awareness of irony is contradictory to the very nature of drama, which has as one of its functions the extension of such awareness. Hal’s lines, redefining his holiday with Falstaff as a dream, and then despising the dream, seek to invalidate that holiday pole of life, instead of including it, as his lines on his old acquaintance did at the end of Part One. (Elsewhere in Shakespeare, to dismiss dreams categorically is foolhardy.) And those lines about the thrice-wide grave: are they a threat or a joke? We cannot tell, because the sort of consciousness that would confirm a joke is being damped out: “Reply not to me with a fool-born jest” (V.v.59). If ironies about Hal were expressed by the context, we could take the scene as the representation of his becoming a prig. But there is simply a blur in the tone, a blur which results, I think, from a retreat into magic by the dramatist, as distinct from his characters. Magically, the line about burying the belly is exactly the appropriate threat. It goes with the other images of burying sin and wildness and conveys the idea that the grave can swallow what Falstaff’s belly stands for. To assume that one can cope with a pervasive attitude of mind by dealing physically with its most prominent symbol—what is this but magic-mongering? It is the same sort of juggling which we get in Henry IV’s sentimental lines taking literally the name of the Jerusalem chamber in the palace:
Laud be to God! Even there my life must end.
It hath been prophesied to me many years,
I should not die but in Jerusalem . . .
(IV.v.236–238)
One can imagine making a mockery of Henry’s pious ejaculation by catcalling a version of his final lines at the close of Richard II (V.vi.49–50):
Is this that voyage to the Holy Land
To wash the blood from off your guilty hand?
An inhibition of irony goes here with Henry’s making the symbol do for the thing, just as it does with Hal’s expulsion of Falstaff. A return to an official view of the sanctity of state is achieved by sentimental use of magical relations.
We can now suggest a few tentative conclusions of a general sort about the relation of comedy to ritual. It appears that comedy uses ritual in the process of redefining ritual as the expression of particular personalities in particular circumstances. The heritage of ritual gives universality and depth. The persons of the drama make the customary gestures developed in ritual observance, and, in doing so, they project in a wholehearted way attitudes which are not normally articulated at large. At the same time, the dramatization of such gestures involves being aware of their relation to the whole of experience in a way which is not necessary for the celebrants of a ritual proper. In the actual observance of customary misrule, the control of the disruptive motives which the festivity expresses is achieved by the group’s recognition of the place of the whole business within the larger rhythm of their continuing social life. No one need decide, therefore, whether the identifications involved in the ceremony are magically valid or merely expressive. But in the drama, perspective and control depend on presenting, along with the ritual gestures, an expression of a social situation out of which they grow. So the drama must control magic by reunderstanding it as imagination: dramatic irony must constantly dog the wish that the mock king be real, that the self be all the world or set all the world at naught. When, through a failure of irony, the dramatist presents ritual as magically valid, the result is sentimental, since drama lacks the kind of control which in ritual comes from the auditors’ being participants. Sentimental “drama,” that which succeeds in being neither comedy nor tragedy, can be regarded from this vantage as theater used as a substitute for ritual, without the commitment to participation and discipline proper to ritual nor the commitment to the fullest understanding proper to comedy or tragedy.
Historically, Shakespeare’s drama can be seen as part of the process by which our culture has moved from absolutist modes of thought towards a historical and psychological view of man. But though the Renaissance moment made the tension between a magical and an empirical view of man particularly acute, this pull is of course always present: it is the tension between the heart and the world. By incarnating ritual as plot and character, the dramatist finds an embodiment for the heart’s drastic gestures while recognizing how the world keeps comically and tragically giving them the lie.
1. See above, pp. 12–13.
2. Fascination with the abuse of ritual is nowhere clearer than in Marlowe’s Tamburlaine and Dr. Faustus.
3. The use of analogies like the scapegoat rituals can be misleading, or merely amusing, if the pattern is not rigorously related to the imaginative process in the play. Janet Spens, a student of Gilbert Murray’s, wrote in 1916 a brief study which attempted to establish the presence of ritual patterns in Shakespeare’s work (An Essay on Shakespeare’s Relation to Tradition, Oxford, 1916). She throws out some brilliant suggestions. But her method for the most part consists of leaping intuitively from folklore to the plots of the plays, via the hypothesis of lost intermediary folk plays; and the plots, abstracted from the concrete emphasis of their dramatic realization, can be adjusted to square with an almost unlimited range of analogies. Miss Spens argues, for example, that because Antonio in The Merchant of Venice is enigmatically detached from personal concerns, and because in accepting the prospect of death at Shylock’s hands he says “I am the tainted wether of the flock,” he “is” the Scapegoat. To be sure, at a very general level there is a partial analogy to scapegoat rituals, since Antonio is undertaking to bear the consequence of Bassanio’s extravagance; and perhaps the pound of flesh motif goes back ultimately, through the tangle of legend and story tradition, to some such ceremonial. But there is no controlling such analogies if we go after them by catching at fragments of narrative; and one can understand, on that basis, the impulse to give up the whole approach as hopelessly capricious.
The case is altered, however, if attention is focused, not on this or that group of people in this or that story, but on the roles the persons are given in the play. When we are concerned to describe dramatic form—the rhythm of feeling and awareness in the audience which is focused through complementary roles in the fable and implemented by concrete patterns of language and gesture—then the form of rituals is relevant to the form of the plays as a parallel expression of the same kind of organization of experience.
4. See above, pp. 75–81.
5. Shakespeare Studies, pp. 403–433.
6. See Empson, Pastoral, pp. 42ff.
7. Lily B. Campbell, Shakespeare’s Histories, Mirrors of Elizabethan Policy (San Marino, 1947), pp. 229–238.
8. “A Note on Comedy,” Determinations, ed. by F. R. Leavis (London, 1934).
9. Pastoral, p. 46.
10. See James G. Frazer, The Scapegoat (London, 1914), pp. 218–223 and passim.
11. I am indebted to my colleagues Professor Theodore Baird and Professor G. Armour Craig for this way of seeing the relation of names to developing situations.
12. See Shakespeare’s History Plays (New York, 1946), pp. 245ff.
13. See above, pp. 75–81, for the relation of Falstaff to Nashe’s pageant figure of Bac- chus, to Shrove Tuesday and other mummery roles where the praise of food, drink, and folly was a traditional holiday exercise.
14. The ritual of Carnival in Italy and its relation to Italian comedy has recently been exhibited in Professor Paolo Toschi’s Le origini del teatro italiano (Torino, 1955) with a fullness and clarity made possible by the rich popular Italian heritage.
15. The Fortunes of Falstaff (New York, 1944), Ch. V, “Falstaff High on Fortune’s Wheel,” p. 94.
16. Ibid., pp. 17–22.