The reader or theatregoer approaches Falstaff with joy and expectation, looking forward to that experience which all our old words describe – laughter, delight, charm: Falstaff is so perfectly the embodiment of Misrule, relaxing inhibitions, evading responsibilities, that we enter into his world as on a holiday. But the critic committed to discussing Falstaff in any detail regards him with some caution, perhaps afraid of giving in to that fatal relaxation which has produced so many misty-eyed celebrations of him: we may find newer words for the external experience (‘release’, ‘transference’) but it remains notoriously difficult to write about such a character and such humour, for both are immediately tangible and effective. The sense of frustration which the critic feels, his sense of incapacity to deal with a figure so real, so complex, so well-known, can be gauged by that radical break with his own decorum in which Dr Johnson dropped the formal objective manner that rules elsewhere in his notes on Shakespeare and wrote: ‘But Falstaff unimitated, unimitable Falstaff, how shall I describe thee?’.1 That splendidly direct address, familiar and personal as to a friend, conveys the sense which we all have that we know Falstaff: but the critic has little advantage over the common reader or the theatregoer in this, – and indeed unless he is also both those beings he will have less understanding. Perhaps for this reason modern criticism of Falstaff has tended to avoid the man himself, and to trace out the moral and theatrical traditions of the Vice figure tempting the hero; or to use anthropology as a basis for interpreting Falstaff as the spirit of holiday in a saturnalian inversion of normal order, or as a scapegoat to be ritually expelled. While such approaches have undoubtedly shed light on the play, they have concentrated too much on what happens to Falstaff in the end, and have neglected Falstaff as he is. But our prime and continuing experience of Falstaff is surely of a fully-thought out three-dimensional personality (the movement from clown to character is complete) and the history of the allusions to Falstaff since the seventeenth-century show how men have been fascinated by the idea of a Falstaff, and by Shakespeare’s complex union of wit and malice in his person.
It seems to me important for once to consider our basic literary experience of this character directly, and to address a steady look at Falstaff in terms of Shakespeare’s creation of him primarily through the words he speaks. The most penetrating account of his character is still that by Dr Johnson, a single paragraph which I should like to quote complete, and in which it is important to note how the good humour which provoked that affectionate opening direct address gradually evaporates:
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 pray 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 may be observed that he is with no enormous or sanguinary crimes, so that his licentiousness is not so offensive but that it may be borne for his mirth.
(loc. cit.)
Some of Johnson’s terms may seem excessive (‘supercilious and haughty’, ‘the prince that despises him’) but that analysis is as perceptive a piece of criticism as could be wished for, especially in its balancing of good and evil. Johnson’s gradual disillusionment also echoes Shakespeare’s deliberate construction of ‘The Rise and Fall of Sir John Falstaff’ to answer the question which he must have set himself when dramatizing the story: how to create a character with whom Hal can credibly be fascinated (granting the Prince those qualities of intelligence and liveliness which he traditionally showed on taking up his responsibilities), and how to give this character qualities which can be justifiably rejected. The curve of affection and withdrawal is seen most sharply in parts One and Two of King Henry IV, but as it is recalled in Henry V and as Falstaff and his rogues appear in The Merry Wives of Windsor, I should like to approach these four plays as a group (they show a unique continuity of character and mood) and try to see in the detail of the prose how Shakespeare has constructed this curve in our sympathies. Obviously I cannot comment on every piece of the prose produced with such vigour and invention here, so I will have to single out the most significant scenes and speeches, but I hope to treat it in some of the detail it deserves, even if my account may develop an alarming girth. Finally, I will not lay much stress on a particular scene or incident being amusing, for that will not help – we have all laughed, and we will again, – now I want to analyse just what it is in Falstaff’s wit that alternately fascinates and repels.
If we recall the various social connotations of the contrast between prose and verse in the Elizabethan theatre we can perhaps gauge something of the ironic effect which Shakespeare creates at the beginning of I Henry IV: in the first scene, King Henry’s verse expresses all the cares of office and the strain of resisting civil chaos:
So shaken as we are, so wan with care,
Find we a time for frighted peace to pant…
By a dramatic juxtaposition which no-one can miss, in the next scene we find degree inverted in that the King’s son speaks in prose, and in a world where care and clocks do not apply: ‘Now Hal, what time of day is it lad?’ (Falstaff is perhaps thinking of Gadshill’s assignation with Poins and their plan to ‘take a purse’ the following morning). As Hal in reply mocks Falstaff, Shakespeare develops the idea of timelessness in Falstaff’s world and reveals its real constituent parts in a speech where the traditional symmetries of syntax are used to create a massive expanding irony:2
Thou art so fat-witted with drinking of old sack,
and unbuttoning thee after supper,
and sleeping upon benches after noon,
that thou hast forgotten to demand that truly
which thou wouldst truly know.
| (*) What a devil hast thou to do with the time of the day? | ||
| 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-coloured taffeta, | ||
| (*) I see no reason why thou shouldst be so superfluous | ||
| to demand the time of the day. | ||
First impressions are crucial, and within that complex speech, in addition to establishing Falstaff’s milieu, and the extent of its inversion of normal codes-which is so thoroughgoing that to be aware of the time is a surprising deviation-the symmetries of Hal’s syntax are used with great flexibility (the patterns being broken by the two plainer sentences marked (*) which thus convey Hal’s increasing scorn) to set up what is the essential balance of the happy stage of Hal’s relationship with Falstaff, one in which the fat Knight is the object of wit. Hal’s symmetries seem spontaneous: as Mr Barish has said, they do not draw attention to themselves; but they do convey the feeling of Hal searching for satiric analogies for Falstaff. Thus we see at once the basic pattern of this stage of the relationship, whereby Hal attacks Falstaff, who tries to evade the issue. He does so immediately, as A. R. Humphreys in his ‘New Arden’ edition3 points out, by seizing on a sense of ‘day’ (the opposite of night) different from Hal’s (the returning of a different sense of a word is the figure asteismus), and by appearing to admit that this first attack has come near its target:
Indeed you come near me now Hal, for we that take purses go by the moon and the seven stars, and not by Phoebus, he, that wandering knight so fair.
But of course he moves off in a new direction, and in that sentence Shakespeare conveys economically both Falstaff’s own concept of his role in life (‘we that take purses’), and his ability to phrase any topic above or beneath its true value as he pleases (the sun now being the hero of a chivalric romance – this is his interpretation in direct opposition to Hal’s, Mars against Venus). This rhetorical skill of Falstaff, his power to use words as a gloss over deeds, is demonstrated again in his next speech as he continues with his classical mythology (the Pleiades, Phoebus) to propose a set of euphemistic and extremely affected titles for robbers:
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.
By that series of witty euphemisms for ‘thieves’ Shakespeare lets us see Falstaff’s expansive narcissistic confidence of what he expects from Hal when he is King, and also shows us his inventive tongue exercising itself – the symmetries define the variations. And Falstaff develops his final analogy with more of this relaxed confidence: ‘and let men say we be men of good government, being governed as the sea is, by our noble and chaste mistress the moon, under whose countenance we steal’. With that sequence of quibbles (as the Arden editor notes, ‘of good government’ meaning [a] well-behaved; [b] serving a good ruler; ‘countenance’ meaning [a] face; [b] patronage; ‘steal’ meaning [a] go by stealth [b] thieve) Shakespeare makes us see a still more fundamental part of Falstaff’s character, for his ability to use words as a gloss over deeds is matched by his power to tease out from words the sense which most flatters him: as he says himself, ‘A good wit will make use of anything’, – he always uses words to his own advantage. To take this point further (and it is one that is confirmed by our whole experience of the play) it can be said that all types of human communication are to him a way of evading responsibilities, whether of a moral or legal code or simply of argument. C. L. Barber shrewdly paraphrases La Rochefoucauld to say that ‘equivocation is the tribute that Vice pays to Virtue’ (p. 68), and though there are many cases where that aphorism would not apply, it is an exact description of the organic relationship between quibbling and Falstaff’s character. For whereas in earlier plays equivocation was essentially a clown’s trick to provide simple jokes, for Falstaff it is a way of life: there is a persistent doubleness in his whole attitude to life, a covering of one unflattering layer with another which will set it off with a glow. But Falstaff never repents, he never admits that his behaviour is anything but admirable, and given that he is allowed to persist with his un-shamed facade the challenging artistic problem for Shakespeare was how to convey this sense of his doubleness objectively, without resorting to introductory or continuous comment. The audience infers, always correctly.
Our feeling of Falstaff’s duplicity (I am trying to analyse the thing itself and not its surface effect, which in the theatre is often that of delighted laughter at our intuitive recognition of his deceit) is created partly by his actions and excuses, but with any such personality, as old-fashioned normative psychology would put it, a central deviousness in the character would express itself in language too, and I think that Shakespeare has worked on this principle (whether consciously or unconsciously) to show by means of a great number of linguistic minutiae the constant shuffling-off process which Falstaff is engaged in. If we have not perceived the fallacies concealed by Falstaff’s adaptable coat of language, Shakespeare makes them clearer by having Hal scoop them out. Indeed Hal’s role in this important first scene is largely to pick holes in Falstaff, and those critics who complain that Shakespeare makes him reject his former playmate too suddenly have obviously neglected the evidence of the words: Hal is fascinated with Falstaff and enjoys his wit, but is nevertheless critical of the many specious details of this wit, and in his constant mockery of Falstaff is shown from the beginning as being detached, and certainly not ‘seduced by Falstaff’ as Dr Johnson thought. Thus Shakespeare makes him take up Falstaff’s specious (and dangerously confident) analogy with the moon by seeming at first to agree to it (one of Falstaff’s tactics) and then deflating it by developing an attribute of the moon which Falstaff ignored, and by using the familiar tools of logic and rhetoric:
Hal’s logical ‘proof’ is in fact conducted by rhetorical symmetries, and is the more effective because of the sharpness of the antitheses between crime, dissolution, and punishment. It is an inescapable reminder of the consequences of crime, and since Falstaff cannot answer it he evades it:
By the Lord thou sayst true lad, and is not my hostess of the tavern a most sweet wench?
Here is another clown’s device, the non-sequitur (of Gobbo, or Bottom, or Juliet’s nurse) but now perfectly applied to a character reacting naturally – it becomes a tool with which Falstaff can get out of difficulties.
Another stylistic device which Shakespeare applies organically to this situation is that of repartee, and far from it being a display of wit it becomes the natural expression of Hal’s desire to prick Falstaff. So he takes up that non-sequitur with another apparent non-sequitur, but one which is related to his earlier reminder of punishment in that it refers to the constable’s dress and to imprisonment:
As the honey of Hybla my old lad of the castle, and is not a buff jerkin a most sweet robe of durance?
Falstaff becomes angry, as if seeing the implications of that riddle, and in his indignant reply Shakespeare inserts the ‘explicit comment’ on Hal’s wit:
FALSTAFF. How now, how now mad wag? What, in thy quips and thy quiddities? What a plague have I to do with a buff jerkin?
PRINCE. Why what a pox have I to do with my hostess of the tavern?
This is now a direct challenge and Falstaff evades it with his puns on ‘reckoning’ and ‘credit’: again Hal attacks and Falstaff defends – he it is that introduces new topics as a means of distraction. Having escaped from that predicament Shakespeare lands him in a more serious one by allowing his expansive wit to gloat once more on the power that thieves may expect when Hal is crowned. This time the affection which deflates him is that of over-expansive, rather mannered images, as he tries to devalue Justice:
but I prithee sweet wag, shall there be gallows standing in England when thou art King? And resolution thus fobbed as it is with the rusty curb of old father antic the law? Do not thou when thou art King hang a thief.
Hal deflates these pretensions by punning on ‘hang’: ‘Thou judgest false already; I mean thou shalt have the hanging of the thieves, and so become a rare hangman’. His role is to expose the glossed-over meaning, and he remains unshakeable.
The situation of Hal as the corrector of Falstaff is again developed through imagery, as Shakespeare – alternating the comic aspects of Falstaff’s duplicity with its more serious implications – gives the butt some fantastic over-reaching similes: ‘ ’Sblood I am as melancholy as a gib-cat, or a lugged bear’. The prince, as critical as ever, is at once made to parody this new fad – ‘or an old lion, or a lover’s lute’. Falstaff does not notice, and adds a further ridiculous simile: ‘Yea, or the drone of a Lincolnshire bagpipe’, to which Hal offers two more with an air of choice – ‘What sayest thou to a hare, or the melancholy of Moor-ditch?’ and Falstaff finally realizes that he is being mocked: ‘Thou hast the most unsavoury similes.’ Precisely the same comic effect is repeated later in the play (as so often in Shakespeare), when Falstaff, telling the alarming news of the rebels’ rising, ends with a grotesque simile – ‘you may buy land now as cheap as stinking mackerel’ (II, iv, 395). Hal parodies this with an even more ludicrous simile – ‘Why, then, it is like, if there come a hot June, and this civil buffeting hold, we shall buy maidenheads as they buy hob-nails, by the hundreds’ – but this time Falstaff does not notice the mock, and replies approvingly – ‘By the mass lad, thou sayest true, it is like we shall have good trading that way’ – the joke is on him. So Falstaff’s use of these inflated images has a double function in the play: it shows his constant tendency to exaggeration, and it gives the opportunity for Hal to stick some more pins into him, and for us to realize his flaws.
The final aspect of Falstaff to be stressed is his inversion of true values. So in one breath he rebukes Hal for being frivolous (he himself is Vanity personified) and goes on to lament that Hal cannot buy a reputation (one of the few things that cannot be bought): ‘But, Hal, I prithee trouble me no more with vanity, I would to God thou and I knew where a commodity of good names were to be bought’. This is a new weapon against Hal, who easily puts down the insinuating anecdote about being criticized in the street, only for Falstaff to pass from a comment on his wit to a tone of injured piety which involves the most fantastic inversion yet of the true state of affairs:
O thou hast damnable iteration, and art indeed able to corrupt a saint. Thou hast done much harm upon me Hal, God forgive thee for it. Before I knew thee Hal, I knew nothing, and now am I, if a man should speak truly, little better than one of the wicked. I must give over this life, and I will give it over. By the Lord an I do not, I am a villain. I’ll be damned for never a king’s son in Christendom.
(I, ii, 101–10; my italics)
It is ironic that Falstaff (using Puritan idiom, as Mr Humphreys shows) is given the remorse and wish to reform that the upper world of the play would think fitting for Hal, but after only a hundred lines of this scene we know Falstaff well enough to be sure that this is a grandiose lie. But Shakespeare does not expose it crudely or maliciously, nor by condemnation, but rather by showing how well Hal can forecast Falstaff’s behaviour as he says in reply:
PRINCE. Where shall we take a purse tomorrow, Jack?
FALSTAFF. Zounds where thou wilt lad, I’ll make one, an I do not, call me villain, and baffle me.
PRINCE. I see a good amendment of life in thee, from praying to purse-taking.
FALSTAFF. Why Hal, ‘tis my vocation, Hal; ‘tis no sin for a man to labour in his vocation.
The speed of the volte-face, which is made clearer by Falstaff using the same (italicized) phrase in each ‘resolve’ shows just how specious he has been, and in his last sentence the speciousness takes on a further coat of respectability in his use of Vocation’, a word which the play’s editors remind us had specifically Christian overtones, to cover any recurrent (sc. ‘habitual’) human behaviour (Swift might have provided a comprehensive list of such ‘vocations’). The ludicrous contrast between Falstaff’s pretended remorse and the alacrity with which he accepts robbery is given good dramatic point by the entry of Poins, who, unaware that Falstaff has just been in a repentant mood, comments mockingly as if this were a habit: ‘What says Monsieur Remorse? What says Sir John-Sack-and-sugar?’ That ironic collocation of sugar with a pun on ‘sackcloth and ashes’ is a fitting description of Falstaff’s double standard.
Into this relatively brief scene between Falstaff and the Prince Shakespeare has packed a remarkable amount of essential dramatic information, and by re-applying certain prose devices has established Falstaff’s characteristic speciousness, has shown that this is a source of wit which has serious under-tones, and has clarified Hal’s attitude as the critic of Falstaff. Now, with Poins present, he adds a few more details. As Poins and the Prince break some sharp jests on Falstaff he maintains a dignified silence, but when Hal refuses to join them in the robbery he shows (albeit comically) his inverted codes by saying ‘There’s neither honesty, manhood, nor good fellowship in thee’ if Hal does not come. The Prince agrees: ‘Once in my days I’ll be a madcap’, but as Falstaff approves of this he immediately contradicts himself as if to test Falstaff’s reaction: ‘Well, come what will, I’ll tarry at home’. And like a child having revenge on someone who has refused to play with him, Falstaff says spitefully: ‘By the Lord, I’ll be a traitor then, when thou art King’, to which Hal replies with the utmost brevity and independence: ‘I care not’. All the seeds of Falstaff’s hubris and Hal’s integrity have been planted in this scene, but Shakespeare has done this unobtrusively, in the context of theatrical laughter. One element is missing, for Hal does not yet know Falstaff completely: as Poins suggests that he and the Prince should rob the others Hal says, ‘Yes, but I doubt they will be too hard for us’. Poins rightly forecasts their cowardice: ‘Well, for two of them, I know them to be as true-bred cowards as ever turned back; and for the third, if he fight longer than he sees reason, I’ll forswear arms’, and the euphemism ‘than he sees reason’ is a typically Falstaffian evasion of the code. But comedy is going to be the main means of exposing Falstaff, and as ever when his characters lay a plot Shakespeare, who knows what is going to happen, prefigures it so that our expectations are heightened: ‘The virtue of this jest will be the incomprehensible lies that this same fat rogue will tell us when we meet at supper, how thirty at least he fought with. … ‘And the scene ends with the Prince stepping up to verse to affirm his real nature, a change of medium which always corresponds to his reclamation of dignity.
In thinking back over this crucial first scene between Falstaff and the Prince we might admire either the way in which Shakespeare has extended the application of familiar prose devices – such as equivocation, repartee, deflating imagery, and symmetrical syntax – until they have become the real expression of the personalities involved; or we might be more impressed by his alternation of comic and serious overtones through the words spoken and the attitudes behind them. Either way this is the most subtle and resourceful prose-scene yet written, leaving us in no doubt as to his attitude to the parties involved, an attitude which is expressed most impressively in Hal’s constant refusal to follow any of Falstaff’s hints of inversion. We look forward to the development of the plot at Gadshill, but beforehand Shakespeare writes a sort of prelude to it in a dialogue between two petty crooks, Gadshill and the Chamberlain (II, i). The former boasts of his association with the ‘quality’ of the underworld, and is made to look ridiculous partly by his inflated language: ‘I am joined with … none of these mad mustachio purple-hued malt-worms, but with nobility and tranquillity, burgomasters and great onyers’ (this last technicality shows the airs he gives himself), and partly by his use of rhetoric (the chain-like figure gradatio) to suggest their inverted priorities: ‘such as can hold in, such as will strike sooner than speak, and speak sooner than drink, and drink sooner than pray’. But the most effective deflation is the curious development of ‘pray’ through puns and images:
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.
With his characteristic flexibility Shakespeare makes Gadshill step out of character to deliver a sardonic comment on the parasitic nature of Falstaff and all such, and his partner is made to deflate them by taking that final symbolic image literally: ‘What, the commonwealth their boots? Will she hold out water in foul way?’
GADSHILL. She will, she will, justice hath liquored her.
Such mistaking is normally a comic event, but here it is obviously applied to a serious purpose, and the exchanges now become more bitter as the Chamberlain mocks the crook’s pretensions:
GADSHILL. We steal as in a castle, cock-sure; we have the receipt of fern-seed, we walk invisible.
CHAMBERLAIN. Nay by my faith, I think you are more beholding to the night than to fern-seed, for your walking invisible.
GADSHILL. Give me thy hand, thou shalt have a share in our purchase, as I am a true man.
CHAMBERLAIN. Nay rather let me have it, as you are a false thief.
GADSHILL. Go to, homo is a common name to all men.
That series of deflating comments mimics Hal’s reaction to Falstaff, whose tone is heard again in Gadshill’s arrogance and euphemism. This little choric scene shows robbery in its true light, and is a sort of Elizabethan charm against the real robbery about to be performed. Prose and imagery are here being used thematically, as they are again in the similar scene in 2 Henry IV, where Shallow’s concession that his servant may ‘once or twice in a quarter bear out a knave against an honest man’ stands as a parody of Justice in the main plot.
As Falstaff has the first indignity played on him, being left alone without his horse, we meet for the first time in his soliloquy a tone of voice which is different from anything so far revealed, and which will recur, that of direct communication to us with no wit, no dissembling, little imagery, and no rhetorical symmetry:
I am accurst to rob in that thief’s company; the rascal hath removed my horse, and tied him I know not where. If I travel but four foot by the squier further afoot, I shall break my wind. Well, I doubt not but to die a fair death for all this, if I ‘scape hanging for killing that rogue. I have forsworn his company hourly any time this two and twenty years, and yet I am bewitched with the rogue’s company. If the rascal have not given me medicines to make me love him, I’ll be hanged.
The comedy lies of course in the fact that his abuse is being overheard by the person against whom it is directed, but the style of the speech is significant as showing Falstaff’s frankness, his laying aside of the coats of eloquence. But even here his distortions persist: Poins has not only not given Falstaff medicines to make him love him, but Falstaff does not in fact love anybody, and never has a good word to say about a person if they are absent, as Johnson saw: ‘he satirises in their absence those whom he lives by flattering’. In the robbery which follows the comedy is largely visual and theatrical, but there are two significant touches which reveal Falstaff’s real nature: when told that there are eight or ten travellers he exclaims, ‘Zounds will they not rob us?’; and as they attack them he mocks them for being fat and old, one of the most ironic of his many inversions: ‘Ah whoreson caterpillars, bacon-fed knaves, they hate us Youth.… On, bacons, on! what ye knaves, young men must live’. Shakespeare always engineers Falstaff’s pretensions so that we see them at once: here his delusions of youth have been undermined, not only by his presence on stage, but by Hal’s parting words in the first scene: ‘Farewell thou latter spring, farewell All-hallown summer’. As the thieves are easily bluffed Hal is given verse to show his complete superiority, with a mocking image effectively stretched out over the blank-verse line:
Away good Ned, Falstaff sweats to death,
And lards the lean earth as he walks along.
Were’t not for laughing I should pity him.
By immediate contrast the next scene (II, iii) shows a character from the nobility coming down to prose, as Hotspur reads out a letter from one of the rebels advising caution, and interposes his angry comments (letters taken seriously in Shakespeare are never interrupted). Hotspur, like Mercutio, has a consistent attitude to life whether he speaks prose or verse, and in both characters their imagery best expresses that attitude; both are witty, over-excitable, rash actors, and Hal – like Romeo – seems well-balanced by comparison. So Hotspur abuses the writer with contemptuous metaphors, which serve equally to characterize the speaker and to mock their object: ‘a lack-brain … a frosty-spirited rogue … a pagan rascal … an infidel!… a dish of skim-milk’. His direct rebuttal of the charge is expressed in that rather simple, emblematic type of image which Shakespeare seems to associate with soldiers: ‘I tell you, my lord fool, out of this nettle, danger, we pluck this flower, safety’. In his syntax we see the same energy expressed in impatient repetitions, which seem more disordered in comparison with the rather formal symmetries of the letter: ‘By the Lord, our plot is a good plot, as ever was laid; our friends true and constant. A good plot, good friends, and full of expectation; an excellent plot, very good friends’. And his energy comes out in the direct way he addresses the writer, as if he were present: ‘I say unto you again, you are a shallow cowardly hind, and you lie’. As to Hotspur’s later contributions to the prose of this play, they depend somewhat on the editors, who disagree as to whether his comments at the start of the rebel’s camp scene (III, i) should be printed in prose, as the Quartos and Folio generally do, or in verse with Pope and others. If it is verse, it is highly irregular for this stage of Shakespeare’s career, and more than the mere calculation of mislineation is involved: Hotspur is an extremely violent, unpredictable character, and it seems to me quite possible that Shakespeare might convey this stylistically, in his fluctuation between the media (and it would be a conventional ‘split’ scene such as we find elsewhere but which we could not expect Pope to understand). Furthermore with his constant mockery of affectation and formality, with his colloquialism and his bawdy, Hotspur is almost the Falstaff of the upper plot. In the scene where Glend-ower boasts about his supernatural gifts with an affectation which is similar in its way to that of the rogue Gadshill, Shakespeare deflates him by the content of Hotspur’s words, and I would argue, by their form, as the Folio text indicates:
| GLENDOWER. | At my Natiuitie, |
| The front of Heauen was full of fierie shapes, | |
| Of burning Cressets: and at my Birth, | |
| The frame and foundation of the Earth | |
| Shak’d like a Coward. | |
HOTSPUR. Why so it would haue done at the same season, if your Mothers Cat had but kitten’d, though your selfe had neuer beene borne.
When Glendower becomes angry and challenges him, Hotspur rises to verse as if on his mettle, but comes down again at the end of the scene alternating prose and verse to mock music and poetry, to reduce love to bawdy, and to deflate his wife’s prim oaths. Dissension within a camp is ominous, even at this level, and I think Shakespeare’s intentions in placing Hotspur’s discordant wit in this context of false solemnity and genuine pathos are expressed quite coherently in the division between forms.
For the Prince prose is not the medium for discord but for adaptation: he dons it to explore the great lower classes, studying the people like any good Renaissance ruler, and in the prelude to the Boar’s Head scene he shows himself able to ‘drink with any tinker in his own language’ (one can explain the function of such scenes, but not the exuberance which – here as with the carriers in II, i – prompts Shakespeare to pack in so much real contemporary idiom). This section, and that following where the Prince and Poins outwit Francis, act as an appetiser ‘to drive away the time till Falstaff come’, but they also show Hal’s superior wit and they bode ill for Falstaff as the Prince (having kept Falstaff waiting as if to raise the tension) is shown to be on top form: ‘I am now of all humours that have showed themselves humours since the old days of goodman Adam, to the pupil age of this present twelve a clock at midnight’. While they are waiting he dispatches Hotspur the fire-eater: ‘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 killed today?” “Give my roan horse a drench,” says he, and answers, “some fourteen”, an hour after, “a trifle, a trifle”‘. Hal is obviously going to be a formidable opponent, and our anticipation is worked still higher as he finally gives the word – ‘I prithee call in Falstaff … call in ribs, call in tallow’. Few entries have been better prepared for.
And few scenes less call for critical comment, the comedy of Falstaff’s angry dignity (he does not know that it was the Prince and Poins who beat him, but we do, and thus he is undercut from the beginning) and his ludicrous exaggerations being managed by Shakespeare with extraordinary directness and immediacy. A small but amusing detail is the way that Falstaff is made to support his ‘truth’ by calling himself – if he lies – the exact opposite of what he actually is, these extreme comparisons being grotesque images (that is, they are not simply ‘food’ or ‘animal’ images):
… if manhood, good manhood, be not forgot upon the face of the earth, then am I a shotten herring.
… if I fought not with fifty of them I am a bunch of radish; if there were not two or three and fifty upon poor old Jack, then am I no two-legged creature.
These images, besides mocking him (for we know that he lies) are also visual, the first of several comic juxtapositions. As the Prince puts the pressure on Falstaff for the first obvious inconsistency – we are all made to wait until Falstaff traps himself (‘it was so dark Hal, that thou couldst not see thy hand’) – Shakespeare engineers one clever evasion, as Falstaff appeals to his honour and takes refuge in a pun: ‘If reasons’ (pronounced ‘raisins’) ‘were as plentiful as blackberries, I would give no man a reason upon compulsion, I.’ But equivocation, the usual escape-route of the clown, will not be enough in the face of Hal’s determined enquiry, and the Prince’s abuse – ‘thou clay-brained guts’–’this huge hill of flesh’ – is both dramatically justified and re-establishes Falstaff’s actual figure. And for virtually the only time Falstaff is allowed to attack Hal (normally the abuse all goes his way, and decorum spares the Prince): ‘you starveling, you elf-skin, you dried neat’s tongue’. The trap is finally sprung as the real tale is told, Falstaff is driven inescapably into a corner, and the trap-image recurs as the Prince even invokes the possible escape-routes, being so confident that he is now caught:
What trick, what device, what starting-hole, canst thou now find out, to hide thee from this open and apparent shame?
POINS. Come, let’s hear Jack, what trick hast thou now?
By this means Falstaff is the centre of the stage, and all attention is focussed on the wonderfully specious reply: ‘I knew ye as well as he that made ye’. As before, Falstaff admits one part of the accusation but totally redirects the other: he was passive like a subject not a coward. The comedy here is a great combination of situation, character, and verbal wit as Falstaff shows better than ever that characteristic of his which has been well described by A. R. Humphreys as ‘landing himself in foreseeable quandaries and then unforeseeably extricating himself from them’ (p. xliv). His doubleness is shown throughout and especially in the euphemistic force given to ‘instinct’ by his usual specious rhetorical trick of repeating a word to justify himself, a trick which we are made more aware of as Hal and Poins use the word against him several times to recall the evasion.
Falstaff’s wit has saved his face here, but when he goes off to deal with the messenger from court the full shaming story (which made even Bardolph blush) is told: as often some damaging event happens to Falstaff while he is off-stage, and so his self-dignity is preserved in his own eyes, but we have the material whereby to gauge his falseness and thus to enjoy his deception. The comedy in this scene is obvious to all, but it should be noted that Shakespeare is extremely kind to Falstaff here and later (as with such things as the horrible deception of stabbing Hotspur and claiming to have killed him; the fleecing of Mistress Quickly and Shallow; the abuse of the recruits and their subsequent destruction), in that all these crimes are presented to us directly and are sometimes made to embarrass Falstaff, but they are not held in accusation or condemnation against him. We may draw our own conclusions, but the mingled reaction which Shakespeare produces of sympathy and criticism does not rub Falstaff’s nose in the dirt, and when he returns here it is to jokes about his invisible knees. But if he has evaded the issue this time, another confrontation awaits him, although he does not realize it, in the play scene, where the conventions of rhetorical symmetry are given their most complex application, starting with the selection of props:
| FALSTAFF. | This chair | shall be my state, |
| this dagger | my sceptre, and | |
| this cushion | my crown. | |
| PRINCE. | Thy state is taken | for a joint-stool, |
| thy golden sceptre | for a leaden dagger, | |
| and thy precious rich crown for a pitiful bald crown. | ||
By keeping to Falstaff’s patterns the Prince’s deflation is the sharper, and the same relationship between personalities and stylistic imitation will persist throughout.
The aspect of prose in this scene most often commented on is the parody of Euphuism, but it has not always been asked why Shakespeare should want to use a style which had been coined some sixteen years before this play was written, and which had been mocked as an obsolete affectation for the last six years or so (and in the hothouse development of stylistic fashions in this period both figures would have to be multiplied three or fourfold to convey a similar obsolescence today). One good reason is that Shakespeare must have a different and distinguishing style for an inset play, as he had already shown for the verse of Love’s Labour’s Lost and A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and was to do so brilliantly for Hamlet. So in a prose-play he must also find a style which will be, like the doggerel, the eight-and-six, and the antique blank verse of these plays, recognizably the style of an earlier generation. Indeed Falstaff begins in the vein of King Cambises (1569), which gives an added attraction to the scene in that they are going to mock old-fashioned drama too, and though the resulting style may be nearer Kyd and Greene (and may therefore also mock their styles, as J. C. Maxwell has suggested – New Arden ed. Appendix U) it is certainly obsolete by Shakespeare’s standards:
For God’s sake lords, convey my tristful queen,
For tears do stop the flood-gates of her eyes.
Thus one functional reason for mocking Lyly is the need for a style to set apart the play within the play. Another admirable reason for choosing this style (and therefore not simply mocking Lyly direct, which would be vieux jeu) is that it perfectly reflects the situation about to be enacted. The major part of the ornamented morality of Euphues is uttered by people – usually old men, or fathers, or sometimes reformed rakes – who are attempting (and always in vain) to shame admirably dissolute young prodigals into changing their way of life. So for Falstaff, himself a rake who has most certainly not reformed, to step into the matter and the manner of a father addressing his prodigal son, is an ironic transformation, and as Hal is a prodigal who has claimed that he is going to reform (an idea which Shakespeare keeps before us in other ways) the change is doubly pointed. I do not think that this is to ascribe too much subtlety to Shakespeare, for a glance at the notes to the ‘New Arden’ edition will show that the direct allusions to Lyly are so numerous in this scene that he must either have been racking his memory very efficiently, or had a copy of Lyly open before him. One last reason why this scene is not simply a parody of Lyly might be that Falstaff is himself being mocked for his preference for two out-of-date styles (like other comic braggarts, Bottom and Pistol in their verse), and this is certainly how it would look to some members of the audience, nor would this function be incompatible with the other two. Also Falstaff’s assumption of the grand manner may be mocked, although this would be more appropriate in Part Two.
At all events, whichever of these reasons we accept, the imitation of Lyly is excellent, catching the disjunctive tic (‘not only, but also’), the similes from ‘unnatural natural history’4 (and it is not often noted that these involve natural phenomena which react in antithetically opposed ways as desired), and best of all that use of symmetry to set up exact patterns which are carried to an obvious conclusion with no apology for their obviousness. (A small but acute point is how Falstaff drops his normal ‘Hal’ for the more dignified and fatherly ‘Harry’):
| Harry, I do not only marvel where thou spendest thy time, | ||
| but also | how | thou art accompanied. |
| For though the camomile, the more it is trodden on, | ||
| the faster it grows, | ||
| yet youth, | the more it is wasted | |
| the sooner it wears. | ||
Falstaff’s own wit comes out in the joke about the identification marks on Hal’s face, but the Euphuistic manner returns both for the pun on ‘point’ and for the tautologous rhetorical questions (which are in fact very similar to those used in Lyly’s Campaspe):
If then thou be son to me, here lies the point –
why, being son to me, art thou so pointed at?
Shall the blessed son of heaven prove a micher,
and eat blackberries? A question not be asked.
Shall the son of England prove a thief,
and take purses? A question to be asked.
The following sententia on the defiling nature of pitch is another direct parody of Lyly, and the final emotional swell is a creditable imitation of the Euphuistic grand manner (in addition to the three disjunctive clauses – ‘no … but’ being identical in structure, they are also quite symmetrical internally):
| for Harry, now I do not speak to thee in drink | ||
| but | in tears; | |
| not | in pleasure, | |
| but | in passion; | |
| not | in words only, | |
| but | in woes also. | |
For the praise of himself which follows Falstaff does not need Lyly, presenting his own admirable euphemisms (‘a cheerful look, a pleasing eye, and a most notable carriage, and as I think, his age some fifty, or’ – sensing an objection – ‘by’r lady inclining to threescore’), but in the moral application of his ‘virtue’ to Hal he is given another natural simile, sharpened into an antimetabole:
If then the tree may be known by the fruit,
as the fruit by the tree,
and his conclusion (which is very selfish, and prophetic in its concern) is also clarified by symmetry: ‘him keep with, / the rest banish’.
Thus the parody of Lyly as applied to Falstaff pretending to correct the prodigal (thus reversing the roles between Hal and himself, and prefiguring the correction to be enacted in the upper plot – and, possibly, on equally specious grounds, given Boling-broke’s guilt), is a complex piece of stylistic imitation which works on several planes. For the Prince’s reply Shakespeare must obviously maintain the decorum of the inset style, but he does not have so many ‘insets’ to control, and can thus step out of one receding frame by allowing the Prince to continue in his correction of Falstaff, with more of those ludicrous animal images for his bulk, given greater power by anaphora:
| Why dost thou converse with | |
| that trunk | of humours, |
| that bolting-hutch | of beastliness, |
| that swollen parcel | of dropsies, |
| that huge bombard | of sack, |
– and so on through half-a-dozen more clauses, rising to the loaded terms of the Morality Plays. Falstaff’s discomfiture is growing, and takes a steeper climb now as Hal adopts the Euphuistic style, as if mocking Falstaff with his own weapons, using the figure gradatio like Gadshill, and to an equally deflating effect:
| Wherein is he good, | but to taste sack and drink it? |
| Wherein neat and cleanly, | but to carve a capon and eat it? |
| Wherein cunning, | but in craft? |
| Wherein crafty, | but in villainy? |
| Wherein villainous, | but in all things? |
| Wherein worthy, | but in nothing? |
Falstaff preserves his aplomb amazingly well: ‘I would your Grace would take me with you, whom means your grace’, and when finally given the Lie Direct answers it with a clever piece of mirror-reflection: ‘to say I know more harm in him than in myself, were to say more than I know’ – so Falstaff seems to be exploiting the conventions of the situation (more outrageously for we know, as he does, that the disguise is purely verbal) in the same way that he elsewhere exploits the unwritten laws of language.
We await Falstaff’s self-defence with interest for he now seems quite trapped. He begins with logic, speciously taking up the less disreputable accusations – ‘old’, ‘sack and sugar’ and evading each of them with a spurious enthymeme (Sister Joseph, p. 179):
if to be old and merry be a sin,
then many an old host that I know is damned;
if to be fat be to be hated,
then Pharaoh’s lean kine are to be loved.
That will satisfy the mind, Falstaff thinks, and he now appeals to the emotions with his most winning piece of symmetry, as he elaborates that selfish point which he had stated much more simply before: ‘him keep with, the rest banish’, and the juxtaposition of the original with the expansion shows us (as it had with Armado) just the amount of inflation which he brings to it:
Here Falstaff’s adopted Euphuism directly expresses his own attitude, and this most elaborate and specious oratory (for no other pleader in Shakespeare repeats a whole line merely for the ‘swell’) in addition to showing Falstaff’s imperturbable conceit and unscrupulous use of language, establishes two important dramatic effects: first, the seven times repeated ‘banish’ sets up an ominous idea (and if he pleads so against it then the possibility must be there) which is reinforced by the second effect, when after Falstaff’s swollen parcel of eloquence Hal’s reply takes exactly the same parallel form, but with a cold, hard brevity:
I do,
I will.
That is the most devastating of all the play’s many juxtapositions, the clash in personalities (and by extension, in styles) between effusive eloquence and unmoved integrity which was set up in the opening prose scene and should leave us in no doubt as to which way Hal will turn.
But Falstaff’s resilience defies such blows, and in his next scene we find another apologia pro vita sua couched in rhetorical form, but as this time he is with Bardolph he can afford to be more frank, and in place of the earlier swell, Shakespeare – humorously, and without condemnation – juxtaposes both surface virtue and actual vice, using the expectations of a pattern to deflate his self-righteousness:
I was as virtuously given as a gentleman need to be;
virtuous enough,
swore little,
diced not above seven times – a week,
went to a bawdy-house not above once in a quarter – of an hour,
paid money that I borrowed – three or four times,
lived well, and in good compass; and now I live
out of all order,
out of all compass.
(III, iii, 15–22)
That rare piece of self-knowledge could not have been engineered in any other way save by using symmetrical syntax, but Shakespeare has other methods to trap Falstaff. One is the recurrent string of ludicrous images applied to his person, here ironically by Falstaff himself:
Do I not dwindle? Why, my skin hangs about me like an old lady’s loose gown. I am withered like an old apple-john … An I have not forgotten what the inside of a church is made of, I am a pepper-corn, a brewer’s horse.
The juxtaposition of large Falstaff and small grotesque object is taken a stage further in that final collocation of the ‘minute, shrivelled, and worthless’ peppercorn (as Dover Wilson describes it in his edition) with the large decrepit hack; and it is typical of the progress of the play in that more and more frequently he is deflated out of his own mouth. This can happen if he becomes too arrogant at other people’s expense, and the long and amusing extemporization on Bardolph’s nose here (27–54) is the first of an increasingly sour series of ‘prose characters’ in which he mocks all and sundry. He can also be damned by his own tongue if he is caught out in his constant abuse of others, as Shakespeare frequently arranges, and his speciousness on such occasions is often shown by his misuse of logic. The use of mock logic has been the province of Shakespeare’s Clowns from the beginning, but Falstaff is more than a Clown (as he is less than a Fool, either in sophistication or detachment from the action), and so he is not given logic – as they are – to confuse himself, but to confuse others. For him the syllogism is another linguistic convention which can be manipulated to his own advantage, and we have already seen him rise superior to the situation with the help of an enthymeme or a syllogism, as to save his injured dignity after the play-scene:
FALSTAFF. Dost thou hear Hal, never call a true piece of gold a counterfeit. Thou art essentially made without seeming so.
PRINCE. And thou a natural coward without instinct.
FALSTAFF. I deny your major. If you will deny the sheriff, so; if not, let him enter.
Without stopping to discuss which premiss Falstaff denies,5 we can see that the mis-use of logic is not an additional comic attraction but the realistic expression of Falstaff’s speciousness in evading the issue.
Shakespeare now cleverly crosses both of the latter ways of mocking Falstaff by introducing the Prince to the scene where the Hostess defends herself from the charge of having picked Falstaff’s pocket. The Hostess is a usefully naive character, in that she reacts to his surface inexactitudes without seeing (as Hal does) that they are deeply typical of Falstaff: so she takes up his claim that the lost ring was worth forty mark – ‘O Jesu, I have heard the Prince tell him I know not how oft, that that ring was copper’, and Falstaff replies with one of his brave boasts in absentia: ‘How? The Prince is a Jack, a sneak-up. ‘Sblood an he were here, I would cudgel him like a dog if he would say so’. (At which point Shakespeare creates an ironic juxtaposition, for the Prince enters and Falstaff immediately erects his second surface, greeting Hal effusively. But the gap between tongue and heart has been shown, and Shakespeare makes the Hostess stumble into it again as Falstaff tries to exaggerate the ring’s worth to his own advantage) ‘and my lord, he speaks most vilely of you, like a foul-mouthed man as he is, and said he would cudgel you’. And though Falstaff manages to evade this trap by abusing the Hostess (‘She’s neither fish nor flesh, a man knows not where to have her’) the comedy of his scenes with Hal overlays a definite trapping movement: the jaws are for ever closing, and (so far) Falstaff wriggling out, but here with more difficulty as the prosecution now has a witness. So Mistress Quickly repeats another of his slanders of an absent Prince, that he ‘ought him a thousand pound’, and as Hal challenges him directly Falstaff slips out with a syllogism:
A thousand pound Hal? A million, thy love is worth a million, thou owest me thy love.
When the Hostess recalls yet another of his slanders, that of the cudgelling, Falstaff makes it turn on whether Hal says the ring is copper or not, and once again the Lie Direct is given:
PRINCE. I say ‘tis copper, darest thou be as good as thy word now?
FALSTAFF. Why Hal, thou knowest, as thou art but man I dare, but as thou art Prince, I fear thee as I fear the roaring of a lion’s whelp.
– and Falstaff’s subtlety seems to run ahead of us here by making a deliberate mistake so that he can redeem it with a new twist, ‘The King himself is to be feared as the lion’. The Prince now becomes more indignant that two such traps have been sprung, and his abuse of this ‘imbossed rascal’ seems to deliberately sustain that image, for A. R. Humphreys has noted the quibbles on both words, ‘embossed’ meaning a] swollen, b] slavering like a hunted deer, and ‘rascal’ meaning a] rogue, b] ‘the young, lean, or inferior deer’, the sarcasm of the latter pun adding to the structural significance of the image. In reply Falstaff has ready his most specious argument yet:
thou knowest in the state of innocency Adam fell, and what should poor Jack Falstaff do in the days of villainy? Thou seest I have more flesh than another man, therefore more frailty.
As Sister Joseph notes (p. 148)6 this is a fallacious use of the argument by comparison, equating size with moral susceptibility, but the speciousness has indirectly succeeded, for Hal admits to having picked Falstaff’s pocket. Shakespeare temporarily allows the rascal to get away.
It has often been noticed how serious and comic actions illuminate each other in this play, and there can be little doubt that Shakespeare is now deliberately darkening the comic mood, for in this scene we are reminded of Falstaff’s hopes of advancement as he proposes to Hal, ‘Rob me the exchequer the first thing thou dost, and do it with unwashed hands too’. The Prince deflects this remark, but makes no answer to the following, which would have alienated the sympathies of an Elizabethan audience (and, one hopes, a modern one too):
Where shall I find one that can steal well? O for a fine thief of the age of two and twenty or thereabouts; I am heinously unprovided. Well, God be thanked for these rebels, they offend none but the virtuous, I laud them, I praise them.
Damned out of his own mouth there, (‘they offend none but the virtuous’), Falstaff’s greed and unscrupulousness are increasingly stressed in the later stages of the play, partly by his actions, and partly by his style, for as the Prince – who has so far been the constant corrector of Falstaff’s less serious vices – is elevated to the role of soldier hero, Falstaff is left continually alone. Thus deprived of the possibilities of correction, Falstaff’s own nature comes out unashamed, and he communicates directly with the audience in soliloquies which reveal his unchecked malice, and in which his words rely more and more on the speciousness of logic. So he informs us that he has ‘misused the King’s press damnably’ (IV, ii), and though we are amused by his outrageous assurance, we are alienated by the content of the speech and by the images which show, as ever, his contemptuous attitude to others: ‘I pressed me none but such toasts-and-butter with hearts in their bellies no bigger than pin’s heads’ – for although they are meant to mock their object, these images in fact deflate Falstaff more. Two other consistencies in his character shown here are the ironic use, in his mouth, of comparisons drawn from the Bible; and a newer development, the contrast of whatever syntactical devices he may use in donning a particular role in his contact with the Prince or other attackers, with a completely plain naturalistic syntax in addressing us. So here, as he confidentially lets us in on his swindle, there is hardly any rhetorical symmetry, and what there is is of a commonplace, accidental kind. It is as if the movement across the levels of Falstaff’s style from complex patterning to simplicity correspond to the levels of his self-presentation, from duplicity to honesty. We have seen him earlier in the play dissembling his way out of a variety of situations with syntactical patterning (amongst other things): now he is brutally frank in plain prose.
His next soliloquy would seem to be an exception, for his catechism or ‘confession of Faith’, on honour (V, iv) is in fact quite symmetrical, but this is surely because it is a performance, which is not presented to us as ‘natural’ speech but as something which he has worked up for the occasion. If Falstaff is playing a part, he dissembles still further with his specious use of argument, and besides its relevance to the play as a whole (standing at the opposite extreme to Hotspur’s idea of the word, an equally excessive concept, which in its wish to have glory without a ‘corrival’ is not to be admired) this speech finally gives the lie to Falstaff’s boast of dignity. He takes a ludicrously materialistic, concrete view of this abstract concept:
| Can honour set to a leg? | No. |
| Or an arm? | No. |
| Or take away the grief of a wound? | No. |
| Honour hath no skill in surgery then? | No. |
He is right, of course, if you grant his premiss, but you must deny his major, for no word has any ‘skill in surgery’. His next line of argument is equally specious:
What is honour? A word.
What is in that word? Honour.7
What is that honour? Air. – a trim reckoning.
Any word can be reduced to ‘air’ by this process, as in the similar mock-syllogism constructed by Swift for the Aeolists: ‘Words are but wind; and Learning is nothing but Words; Ergo, Learning is nothing but Wind’.8 Having thus reviewed the uses and nature of honour to his own satisfaction, Falstaff considers where it may be found: ‘Who hath it? He that died a Wednesday’. This is again a specious point, for many men living have it, besides those who died with it. ‘Doth he feel it? No’ – of course not, all things are ‘insensible’ to the dead. His last point is equally specious, though with a grain of truth: ‘But will it not live with the living? No. Why? Detraction will not suffer it’ – true sometimes, but not all honourable men are slandered, nor are all slanderers believed. So for Falstaff to reduce honour to a ‘scutcheon’, or piece of heraldry exhibited at a funeral or on a tomb, is merely a sign that he has celebrated the funeral of his own mind, for anyone taken in by this argument must be a very simple wit. But these sophisms go deep into Falstaff’s character: to him equivocation is a way of life.
My objections to Falstaff’s reasoning may seem truisms, but they are seldom pointed out and I have not seen a full analysis of this speech (critics are usually content to quote it en bloc), although the detail of his shuffling-off is obviously crucial. Again they look obvious because Shakespeare has deliberately constructed an argument with loopholes for anybody to see, and although one could quote a precise list of his fallacies according to Aristotelian or scholastic logic, that would be to miss the point in terms of the theatre. In the larger pattern of Falstaff’s presentation the sight of him reasoning with – and, be it noted, defeating – himself, is another sign of comic hubris. For his third soliloquy Shakespeare develops other aspects, reminding us of Falstaff’s exploitation of his soldiers (‘I have led my ragamuffins where they are peppered’) but combining it with some laughs at his expense – ‘God keep lead out of me, I need no more weight than mine own bowels’, and recalling his attitude to honour over the corpse of Sir Walter Blunt. But for the final soliloquy, after he has pretended to be killed by Douglas and Hal has pronounced a premature epitaph over him, Shakespeare revives both the effect of specious logic, and its cause. Falstaff rises punning, to defend his cowardice: “Sblood ‘twas time to counterfeit, or that hot termagant Scot had paid me scot and lot too’, but as he uses the word ‘counterfeit’ unambiguously against himself he sees what he has done and hastens to retrieve it by adding those Falstaffian glosses: he depends on logic not only for self-preservation but for self-esteem. However we see immediately that his first premiss is weak:
Counterfeit? I lie, I am no counterfeit; to die is to be a counterfeit.
But once having given himself an inch Falstaff takes a mile, and now turns the whole situation round to his own credit:
for he is but the counterfeit of a man, who hath not the life of a man; but to counterfeit dying, when a man thereby liveth, is to be no counterfeit, but the true and perfect image of life indeed. The better part of valour is discretion, in the which better part I have saved my life.
To Falstaff words are but counters, positive or negative signs whose polarity can be reversed at will. But having achieved this total devaluation and inversion of the word ‘counterfeit’, Shakespeare takes it a stage further into the grotesque, for now that Falstaff has managed to separate word from deed he is made to see the consequence, that nothing is now stable, for the dead Hotspur might also be a counterfeit. That alone is a brilliant development within the conventions of Falstaff’s language, but Shakespeare then translates it into deeds in terms of his known unscrupulousness:
Zounds I am afraid of this gunpowder Percy, though he be dead. How if he should counterfeit too and rise? By my faith I am afraid he would prove the better counterfeit, therefore I’ll make him sure: yea, and I’ll swear I killed him. Why may not he rise as well as I?
This is his most far-reaching inversion, a mammoth evasion of the issue, and as if automatically, Shakespeare gives him the most glaring misuse of logic yet, in self-defence (Falstaff’s conscience is evidently a weak logician):
Nothing confutes me but eyes, and nobody sees me.
We deny your major, reader and spectator say: we have seen you.
The significance of this ironic self-deception and self-exposure of Falstaff in terms of ‘eyes’ is not a critic’s dream, but a deliberate theatrical exploitation of the boundary between illusion and reality. Furthermore, it has a still more ironic parallel in the main plot in the rebels’ camp, for Worcester urges that all rebels
Must keep aloof from strict arbitrement,
And stop all sight-holes, every loop from whence
The eye of reason may pry in upon us.
Here too the audience is given an ‘eye of reason’ superior to the characters’ deceptions. And whereas Northumberland’s absence ‘draws a curtain’, that all-revealing peep behind the scenes in Falstaff’s case is engineered by his own invocation of invisibility, and by the reasoning made to depend on it. The whole split in Falstaff’s character between tongue and heart has been shown us entirely through his own words, with hardly any external comment, a masterly use of the direct mode of presentation appropriate to drama. But the words with which the Prince accepts this greatest bluff could well be applied to Falstaff, and might be, by himself – if, say, we could imagine his Super Ego addressing his Id:
For my part, if a lie may do thee grace,
I’ll gild it with the happiest terms I have.
I have argued that throughout I Henry IV the presence of Hal ensures that Falstaff is constantly being reproved, and though this running correction is obviously not going to reform him permanently, it has the effect of releasing the Prince’s, and our, moral disapproval so that we can all enjoy the comedy of his evasions. We have seen how the various resources of prose are applied by Shakespeare to this realistic expression of personalities and the clash between them, and the isolation of these devices (repartee, imagery, syntax, logic) has helped to sharpen our sense of the complex balance of characters in this play, a balance which has been too often simplified. For whereas most accounts of the play suggest that the central figure is Hal, to whom Falstaff acts the part of Vice, Vanity, the Bad Angel, while the Good Angel is Hal’s own concept of duty and his responsibilities in the upper world, I would like to suggest that the reverse is also true, and as far as concerns the lower world and the prose of the play, is in fact more important. In the prose and therefore in the comedy, Falstaff is the central figure, and Hal is his Good Angel, while the unholy combination of Falstaff’s Appetite, Reason, and Conscience – the latter two easily blinded by the logic and rhetoric produced on the promptings of Appetite – this anti-Aristotelian triad represents the devil. When Hal is away, Falstaff, left alone, literally goes to the Devil. There is of course a continual interchange of roles in the play, particularly in the dazzling mirror-effects of the Play Scene,9 but they occur when Falstaff is trying to shuffle off the onus of this moral censor. It seems to me essential to recognize that the Prince’s attitude to Falstaff throughout this play is one of amused fascination, but also of a steady critical gaze, unflinching in its demands on ethical and logical consistency, for it recognizes that in Falstaff the two are organically related. The Prince’s correction often takes the form of laughter, for laughter is a good corrective, and although there are many ironic and serious parallels to the action of the upper plot, this is after all a comedy: I have been at pains to stress that while Shakespeare shows us some unpleasant aspect of Falstaff every time he is on stage, he does not forcibly confront Falstaff with it and humiliate him, as the more violent Elizabethan satirists might have done. Shakespeare is humane, and a great comic writer, but he deliberately presents Falstaff’s seamier side in order to motivate Hal’s rejection. When Hal has left Falstaff alone, Sir John sells his soul to the devil for a few syllogisms and half-a-dozen puns.
It has often been noticed that Falstaff is left more alone in 2 Henry IV, for whereas in the first part he is on stage with Hal for eight scenes and over nine hundred lines, in Part Two, Falstaff’s letter is their sole communication before the second Boar’s Head scene, and the mere eighty lines of that scene contain their only meeting before the rejection. But though the general effect of this isolation on Falstaff has been noticed, together with the gradual darkening of his world, the absence of Hal does not simply mean the absence of the one person of comparable wit and intellect to spar with him, but the absence of the moral censor who has been bringing him to book with laughter and gentleness, for Falstaff’s characteristic witty evasions have always occurred when he was being challenged for some moral failing, whether lies or slanders. Now he no longer has the witty sparring-partner of Part One, but more important, the people who try to bring Falstaff and his world to book in Part Two have the responsibilities of office, and although with charity, they do not have the freedom that Hal had to make the corrections merely verbal: the Lord Chief Justice, the officers arresting Doll, the new King – all must act. Further, in addition to being the target for moral reform through comedy, Falstaff actually performs best, is most witty and most lovable, when he is the comic butt: he is much more ‘the cause that wit is in other men’ than ‘witty in himself, for his unchecked wit is arrogant and abusive. He himself shows no charity. Thus the increasing number of soliloquies here, as at the end of Part One, show him abusing everyone with whom he comes into contact, and we laugh less with him.
The change is not sudden, of course, and if we could draw a graph of our sympathy towards Falstaff it would show a steady and gradual decline. But the difference between the two plays is marked, as is most quickly seen through the imagery, if this can be briefly separated from its context. The change in Hal’s attitude can be gauged by juxtaposing two classical images: in Part One he says of the sight of Falstaff drinking his cup of sack: ‘Didst thou never see Titan kiss a dish of butter’ (II, iv, 133); in Part Two he comments on Falstaff and Doll, at much the same point in the play: ‘Saturn and Venus this year in conjunction! What says the almanac to that?’ (II, iv, 287). That decline in affection is also mirrored in his other images for Falstaff, which now stress his bestial attributes, reduced to appetite: ‘I do allow this wen to be as familiar with me as my dog’ (II, ii, 116); ‘Doth the old boar feed in the old frank?’ (160); ‘Quickly and Doll are such kin to Falstaff as the parish heifers are to the town bull’ (171). The overhearing of Falstaff lowers him still further, and the images in the deflating prose asides here are as biting as that genre can be: ‘this nave of a wheel’ (II, iv, 281); ‘Look whether the withered elder hath not his poll clawed like a parrot’ (283), and most cutting, that revival of the earlier moral accusation, but now with a spectator’s detachment:
Why, thou globe of sinful continents, what a life dost thou lead!
The harshness of these images is significant, as is their sparseness: Falstaff becomes less and less the object of imagery – and imagination – for Hal, until in the rejection he is dismissed in plain, non-metaphorical statement. Hal himself is presented as being sick of his position (having once tasted the fruits of glory and leadership) and as having seen through the Boar’s Head world, being even disgusted at his former intimacy with Poins. This lassitude is felt throughout his appearance in this milieu, but, given Shakespeare’s consistency of style, is shown in the Prince’s language too, especially his imagery, as with his limp and overdrawn development of this image for the fluctuation in Poins’ linen:
But that the tennis court keeper knows better than I, for it is a low ebb of linen with thee when thou keepest not racket there, as thou hast not done a great while, because the rest of thy low countries have made a shift to eat up thy holland; and God knows whether those that bawl out the ruins of thy linen shall inherit his kingdom; but the midwives say the children are not in the fault, whereupon the world increases, and kindreds are mightily strengthened.
(II, ii)
Poins’ comment on that tedious elaboration is entirely just: ‘How ill it follows, after you have laboured so hard, you should talk so idly!’
If that speech is an example of ‘objective’ imagery backfiring on its coiner, the same could be said of Falstaff’s images for the Prince, for at his first mention of him the images are much more abusive (unjustifiably, as we know) than at any time in Part One (I, ii, 19–27), a contempt revealed again in his later description of him as ‘pantler’ (II, iv, 2 5 9). But whereas in Part One the language of abuse against Falstaff was almost the personal prerogative of Hal, now he is anyone’s butt, and abusive images come from all sides. The Lord Chief Justice is given several blows which come home (‘you are as a candle, the better part burnt out’); Poins describes Falstaff as a ‘canker’, a ‘dead elm’, and a ‘Martlemas’ (an animal fattened for slaughter in November), and he caps Hal’s image of Saturn and Venus with the most apt allusion for Bardolph and the Hostess:
And look whether the fiery Trigon his man be not lisping to his master’s old tables, his note-book, his counsel-keeper.
Mistress Quickly demands re-payment from Falstaff or threatens to ‘ride thee o’nights like the mare’, and his reply only fixes the ludicrous horse-image more strongly (II, i); the hostess is made to produce the most deflating image possible for Falstaff’s quarrels with Doll: ‘You are both i’ good truth as rheumatic as dry toasts’ (II, iv). Doll Tearsheet, drunk and as quarrelsome as ever, rejects his jest on her as a source of the pox with an equally bawdy and insulting image – ‘Hang yourself, you muddy conger,’ and she applies Quickly’s image of women as the weaker vessel with a devastating parallel: ‘Can a weak empty vessel bear such a huge full hogshead? There’s a whole merchant’s venture of Bordeaux stuff in him, you have not seen a hulk better stuffed in the hold’ (II, iv). The final indignity comes when she is comforting Falstaff after he has turned Pistol out, for even her affectionate metaphors for him are rather ludicrous – ‘you sweet little rogue … poor ape … you whoreson chops … Thou whoreson little tidy Bartholomew boar-pig’ – and when he grumbles at not having been able to catch Pistol: ‘The rogue fled from me like quicksilver,’ she is made to prick him with a most congruous simile: ‘I’faith and thou follow’dst him like a church.’ We have only to look back to Part One and the Prince’s image for Falstaff in similar flight to see the difference: ‘you carried your guts away as nimbly, with as quick dexterity, and roared for mercy, and still run and roared, as ever I heard bull-calf’ (II, iv, 286). Those modern critics who still calculate statistics for imagery on the basis of its sources tend to overlook its relevance to the particularity of dramatic structure: Shakespeare is not simply sprinkling ‘disease’ or ‘animal’ images into the play to darken the whole, like some forger applying coats of varnish to bring a painting to the appropriate tinge of brown, but is applying these images to a specific and consistent dramatic perspective, the gradual lowering of Falstaff”. And as we shall see, Falstaff’s own use of imagery and syntax will lower him still further.
The decline of Falstaff’s stature is also seen in the rise of the subsidiary characters of his world, a rise both in the quantity of prose given to them, their individualization, and also their dramatic interest. Whereas in Part One we could ignore these minor figures without doing much damage to the play as a whole, Shakespeare has obviously taken more trouble here – in a sense, he has had to, given Falstaff’s separation from the Prince, but also these characters serve to reduce the limelight given to Falstaff. Doll Tearsheet is characterized by the violence of her images, as in the torrent of abuse which she launches at Pistol (II, iv), exceeded in stench only by that addressed to the Beadles (V, iv). Mistress Quickly is individualized with the help of some familiar comic devices, particularly malapropism: ‘he’s an infinitive thing upon my score’, ‘thou honeysuckle villain … thou honey-seed rogue’; ‘By this heavenly ground I tread on’ (an inversion recalling Gobbo’s ‘my truebegotten father’), (all from II, iv), and best of all her praise of Doll, with its suggestions of sense in nonsense: ‘I’ faith sweetheart, methinks now you are in an excellent good temperality. Your pulsidge beats as extraordinarily as heart would desire ….’ (II, iv). She is also noted for repetition: ‘I have borne, and borne, and borne, and have been fubbed off, and fubbed off, and fubbed off, from this day to that day’ (II, i) a weakness which is amusingly exploited in her outraged reaction to ‘swaggerer’ and in her account of the Deputy’s ‘says he’ (II, iv). A last characteristic, often found with the other two in Shakespeare’s garrulous simpletons (Juliet’s Nurse, Pompey) is that of digression, as in her memorable account of how Falstaff proposed to her, where the wish to support the truth of her tale with corroborative circumstantial detail quite submerges the thread, but reveals the wonderfully arbitrary workings of what Coleridge called ‘the hooks and eyes of memory’:
Thou didst swear to me upon a parcel-gilt goblet, sitting in my Dolphin chamber, at the round table by a sea-coal fire, upon Wednesday in Wheeson-week, when the Prince broke thy head, for liking his father to a singing-man of Windsor, thou didst swear to me then, as I was washing thy wound, to marry me, and make me my lady thy wife. Canst thou deny it? Did not goodwife Keech the butcher’s widow come in then and call me gossip Quickly, coming in to borrow a mess of vinegar, telling us she had a good dish of prawns, whereby I told thee they were ill for a green wound? And didst thou not, when she was gone down stairs, desire me, to be no more so familiarity with such poor people, saying that ere long they should call me madam? And didst thou not kiss me, and bid me fetch thee thirty shillings?
Here though, a familiar stylistic device becomes touched with genius, for we are thus given a remarkably realistic impression of her memory – if pressed, she could probably say which dress she was wearing, and what they had for dinner. Further yet, that remarkable creative imagination of Shakespeare’s, having here formed an acute copy of this random-but-accurate-recall type of memory, lets us see through the various mirrors which Mistress Quickly pulls up into position, a diminished, but perfectly clear image of Falstaff going about his usual beguiling practices – lies, abuse, flattery, borrowing money which will never be repaid – all in parvo, in a wonderfully complex use of style.
Another stylistic peculiarity which Shakespeare makes good use of is the affected use of a new word which the user does not really understand: so Bardolph, who is the Boar’s Head character least individualized through his style (his red nose would be enough to set him apart on stage) is made to explain ‘accommodated’ with magnificent tautology, but does not know the simpler, and older, word ‘phrase’ (III, ii). A more consistent piece of characterization here is Pistol, who is individualized partly by his inflated threatening manner, although some of his tricks have been used before by Shakespeare for other ambitious men of action – Jack Cade’s portentous inversions, and more especially Bully Bottom, who with his melodramatic exit-line ‘Enough; hold or cut bow-strings’, and ‘Approach ye Furies fell’ is a nearer forerunner of Pistol’s ‘Hold hook and line, say I’ and ‘Untwine the Sisters Three’. But Pistol is a unique braggart, especially in this prose context, in that he is given verse, a stiff strutting Cambises style made more aggressive by the ominous pauses produced by an incomplete line:
Shall pack-horses, [x / x / x /]
And hollow pampered jades of Asia,
(II, iv)
– My knight, I will inflame thy noble liver,
And make thee rage, [x / x / x /]
(V, v, 31 ff.)
Shakespeare suggests the self-contained world of Pistol’s valour with a very inventive piece of style, for when Falstaff most wants to communicate with Pistol he is forced to speak his language, rising up to the same moth-eaten verse: ‘O base Assyrian Knight, what is thy news?’ (V, iii, 105). But the most original invention of the minor prose characters is Justice Shallow, who is immediately characterized as a harmless old dodderer by the first of his many repetitions: ‘Come on, come on, come on sir, give me your hand sir, give me your hand sir’ (III, ii, 1 ff.). (Again we see how flexible any device is in Shakespeare’s hands, for short-breathed repetitious syntax had also been the mark of Mercutio, and Hotspur.) Two other stylistic effects help to define him, first his rambling memory: in the conversation with Silence, as everybody has seen, his mind wanders incongruously between the price of livestock and memories of his dead friends and reflections on death. However, a more subtle detail is that the split is unequal, for the reminiscences of the past are circuitous but the questions concerning the present shrewd and direct:
Certain, ‘tis certain, very sure, very sure. Death as the Psalmist says, is certain to all, all shall die. How a good yoke of bullocks at Stamford Fair?… How a score of ewes now?
Secondly, his feeble wit is shown in the extravagant way he responds to Falstaff’s very obvious puns, as of Mouldy and “Tis the more time thou wert used’:
Ha, ha, ha, most excellent i’faith. Things that are mouldy lack use; very singular good, in faith well said Sir John, very well said. (III, ii)
Shakespeare’s invention seems unflagging, for even these recruits are characterized, Bull with his malapropism and his confused use of ‘for mine own part’, Feeble with his random heap of consolatory proverbs.
So Falstaff’s status is lowered by his isolation, by the stream of abusive images directed at him from all sides, and by the competing claims of other characters in his world, some who make greater appeals to our sympathy – Shallow, Mistress Quickly, some of whom – Pistol, Doll – he subdues with difficulty. In the gradual development of the plot he is more directly deflated by the characters who put him down, by the duplicity of his style, which matches that of his manner, and – in the absence of Hal to puncture it – by the bubble of his conceit constantly expanding until ‘all flies in fumo’. In his opening scene with the Page Shakespeare seems to re-establish his joviality and his size, with the splendidly self-mocking images which point up the visual juxtaposition:
I do here walk before thee, like a sow that hath overwhelmed all her litter but one. If the Prince put thee into my service for any other reason than to set me off, why then I have no judgment.
The tone of voice is that familiarly frank one, which is also expressed in his prose being formed with little symmetry, apart from a tricolon which mocks Bardolph but also himself (a healthy sign): ‘I bought him in Paul’s and he’ll buy me a horse in Smith-field. An I could get me but a wife in the stews, I were manned, horsed, and wived.’ But now the Lord Chief Justice, Falstaff’s severest moral censor, appears and Falstaff’s prose suddenly takes on elaborate syntactical patterns to assume a variety of tones, from the dignified to the self-righteous: thus by stylistic contrast we now see him ‘putting on the style’. The servant plucks him by the elbow, and Falstaff, in one of Shakespeare’s sharpest pieces of repartee, takes the worst possible interpretation: ‘What! a young knave, and begging?’, which he proceeds to develop with great pomposity:
| Is | there not wars? |
| Is | there not employment? |
| Doth | not the King lack subjects? |
| Do | not the rebels need soldiers? |
| Though it be a shame to be on any side but one, | |
| it is worse shame to beg than to be on the worst side, | |
| were it worse than the name of rebellion can tell how to make it. | |
That final fantastic contortion for the simple point ‘begging is worse than rebellion’ (which again may not have endeared him to some Elizabethans) shows both Falstaff’s desire to confuse this member of a now inferior class, and also his adopted mask of outraged dignity. The servant has the courage to reply to the repartee, and even to give Falstaff the Lie Direct, which he avoids by battening on to the introductory phrase ‘give me leave to tell you’ and rejecting it in his starchiest manner, expressed in symmetries and the inversion of active and passive:
If thou get’st any leave of me, hang me;
if thou tak’st leave, thou wert better be hanged.,
Having thus established Falstaff’s pretended dignity and style, Shakespeare now achieves an effective stylistic contrast, as on finally having to recognise the Justice, Falstaff moves from false stiffness to false smoothness, in sentences which bow and scrape:
My good lord! God give your lordship good time of day,
I am glad to see your lordship abroad,
I heard say your lordship was sick,
I hope your lordship goes abroad by advice.
Your lordship, though not clean past your youth,
hath yet some smack of age in you,
some relish of the saltness of time …
(I, ii, 106 ff.; my italics)
The effect of false effusiveness in the language is much increased by the structural arrangement, as the recurrence of the clauses is marked by anaphora on ‘I’, and having established this rhythm Shakespeare then produces the impression of Falstaff’s flattery speeding up by having him return ever more frequently to the insidious use of the title, and so ‘your lordship’ moves right across the page until it becomes the subject of the final sentence. Falstaff’s next ploy is to keep talking about the King, but when this is finally beaten down he produces another contorted speech designed to baffle the understanding, with its multiple puns on ‘potion’, ‘patient’, and ‘scruple’ (a riddling manner which Shakespeare has used briefly for Hal to Francis, and is to develop for Hamlet). In the repartee which develops Falstaff constantly uses equivocation (‘the tribute that Vice pays to Virtue’) to evade the reckoning, and also the effective figure antimetabole, which inverts and so diverts the blows:
JUSTICE. Your means are very slender, and your waste is great.
FALSTAFF. I would it were otherwise, I would my means were greater and my waist slenderer.
This is a figure which also fits Falstaff’s constant attempts to invert the roles: we later hear the Prince describe Falstaff as being ‘as familiar as my dog’, but Falstaff says here that ‘The young Prince hath misled me; I am the fellow with the great belly, and he my dog’, and he makes the inversion yet more exact with this mirror figure:
JUSTICE. Well, God send the Prince a better companion.
FALSTAFF. God send the companion a better prince …
The Lord Chief Justice is outwitted by Falstaff (who is however not given any specious logic, presumably because this opponent is more serious) and is several times forced back on to the concessive, defeated ‘Well’ to begin a speech.
Sensing that he is in the lead, Falstaff now begins to do the attacking in a longer speech which begins by lamenting the disappearance of virtue ‘in these costermongers’ times’:
true valour is turned bear-herd,
pregnancy is made a tapster
– if they are so, we are tempted to interpose, he has played his part in the devaluing. But his hubris carries him on to that vain inversion to which he is eternally prone:
| You that are old consider not the capacities of |
| us that are young; |
| you do measure the heat of our livers with |
| the bitterness of your galls, |
| and we that are in the vaward of our youth, |
| I must confess, are wags too. |
Once again the symmetry of the patterns reinforces the realization that Falstaff is putting on the style, and here, as in Part One, at the height of his pretence he is made to quote from Euphues, this time with even more point. Whereas the previous borrowing came from a section where Lyly was directly attacking spurious arguments, this quotation comes from the speech of the young prodigal Euphues himself, after he has been censured at length by an elderly moralist:
| Put you no difference between the young flourishing |
| Bay-tree |
| and the old withered |
| beach?… |
| Doe you measure the hot assaults of youth, by |
| the colde skirmishes of age? |
(ed. cit, p. 43)
This disingenuous defence of the flesh is clearly designed by Lyly to seem spurious, as the sequent antitheses between Youth and Age certainly mock Youth: ‘you testie without cause, we hastie for no quarrell; you carefully wee carelesse’, and so on. Thus for Falstaff to use the argument at all is specious, and as Euphues had at least the excuse of youth, to which Falstaff is patently a hopeless pretender, then the fat knight is doubly damned again. And Shakespeare stresses the deception at once by making the Lord Chief Justice attack this weakest point in crushingly symmetrical terms, made still sharper by the paired antitheses:
Again Falstaff’s weapons have been used against him, as with Hal’s speech in the play-scene, and like the parallel deceptions in both parts which finally deceive the master of deceit:
And gyle is bigyled & in his gyle fallen.
But as in that previous scene Falstaff’s discomfiture is soon evaded, if it was ever felt, by producing another apologia, this time a splendid combination of verificatory detail (like Quickly) and patently ridiculous excuses: ‘My lord, I was born about three of the clock in the afternoon, with a white head, and something a round belly. For my voice, I have lost it with hallooing, and singing of anthems.’ The tone of voice is again the frank, self-revelatory one, which seeks to convince by its very openness, by baring the heart, but Shakespeare has so constructed the loopholes in Falstaff’s facade that we see it as another trick. He now carries the war to the enemy, reminding the Lord Chief Justice of the notorious inversion that had occurred to him, and recalling Poins’s pun on ‘sack’ and ‘sackcloth’ for a cheeky conclusion:
| For the box of the ear that the Prince gave you, |
| he gave it like a rude prince, and |
| you took it like a sensible lord. |
| I have check’d him for it; and the young lion repents – marry, |
| not in ashes and sackcloth, |
| but in new silks and old sack. |
As his opponent concedes defeat Falstaff is able to relax from the symmetries into his unpatterned self-revelatory style, in which ‘I’ is always the most important word: ‘I take but two shirts out with me, and I mean not to sweat extraordinarily. If it be a hot day, an I brandish anything but a bottle, I would I might never spit white again.’ But as the Lord Chief Justice leaves, followed by an insult as soon as he is out of hearing (this is Falstaff’s invariable farewell), the symmetries are revived to mock his refusal to loan a thousand pounds in the formal vein of the moralist, and marvellously inappropriately
| A man can no more separate age and covetousness |
| than ‘a can part young limbs and lechery: |
| but the gout galls the one, |
| and the pox pinches the other; |
| and so both the degrees prevent my curses. |
Having established these two diseases as the curse of either extreme of age, Shakespeare creates a perfect ironic effect by making Falstaff reveal himself as possessing both, with the figure antimetabole now turned against himself:
| A pox of this gout, |
| or a gout of this pox, |
| for the one |
| or the other |
| plays the rogue with my big toe. |
Thus actuality and pretension come together, in disease.
That first scene with the Lord Chief Justice is an important confrontation, and Falstaff wins it, largely by using the resources of rhetoric. In their next meeting, however, over Mistress Quickly’s action, Falstaff is put down by authority even though he manages to fleece the Hostess again (‘Go, with her, with her, hook on, hook on.’), and is allowed a brilliant evasion after her history of broken contracts: ‘My lord this is a poor mad soul, and she says up and down the town that her eldest son is like you.’ His eternal speciousness in repartee now receives the most unsympathetic and most accurate description yet:
Sir John, I am well acquainted with your manner of wrenching the true cause the false way. It is not a confident brow, nor the throng of words that come with such more than impudent sauciness from you, can thrust me from a level consideration.
We spectators of both plays must admire the acumen shown by the Lord Chief Justice here in spotting on his little acquaintance a trick which has long been our delight, and although Falstaff revives sufficiently to produce a justification for repartee – ‘This is the right fencing grace, my lord, tap for tap, and so part fair’ – we feel that he has lost on points. If his plain syntax in this scene shows that he has not been allowed to get into his stride, left to himself he manages tolerably well, as his letter to Hal shows. After a pompous beginning dwelling on titles: ‘Sir John Falstaff knight, to the son of the King, nearest his father, Harry Prince of Wales, greeting – ‘(which is mockingly interrupted – ‘Why this is a certificate’) there follows the announcement of a new tactic: ‘I will imitate the honourable Roman in brevity.’ Now Falstaff assumes yet another stylistic cloak, with a sort of politic Tacitean brevitas as the appropriate style for a statesman:
I commend me to thee,
I commend thee, and
I leave thee.
But as with Mistress Quickly’s recollections, Shakespeare while achieving one stylistic effect can also remind us of the character involved, as Falstaff, who is ever trying to get his boot on to somebody else’s foot (‘But Hal, I prithee trouble me no more with vanity’) now says to the Prince, ‘Repent at idle times as thou mayest.’ Having delivered his warning about Points, Falstaff signs off with an apt union of his titular concerns and his symmetry:
| Jack Falstaff with my familiars, |
| John with my brothers and sister, and |
| Sir John with all Europe. |
This is a small incident, but it reminds us yet again that Falstaff’s pretensions are always conveyed in some change of style, usually the move from plain to patterned syntax being that from frankness to duplicity, though of course the former state can also be assumed.
The scene with the Page, originally Christian but now transformed ape, is designed to leave a nasty taste in the mouth (Shakespeare did not have to write it) and after the additional vanity of the letter it is natural that the Prince and Poins should want to see him ‘in his true colours’. But before they do, we do, in the sordid exchanges with Doll and Pistol. The whole richly conceived detail of this scene acts to make us out of love with vanity, but a significant verbal detail is the way Falstaff accuses Doll of causing the pox and develops the idea with a bawdy image (the familiar union of Mars and Venus in the phrase ‘naked weapon’, which we have seen in Romeo and Juliet and elsewhere). The abuse is bad enough, but it seems to me that Falstaff is alienated by the cruel and narcissistic way in which he develops a fairly obvious image, and with the leering repetition of ‘bravely’:
you help to make the diseases Doll, we catch of you Doll, we catch of you; grant that, my poor virtue, grant that.… for to serve bravely is to come halting off, you know, to come off the breach with his pike bent bravely, and to surgery bravely, to venture upon the charged chambers bravely –
Falstaff is obviously drunk, and I may be misjudging Elizabethan bawdy, but that exchange does seem to disgust rather than amuse. In a later use of bawdy imagery there can be no doubt as to Shakespeare’s suggestion, for when Pistol enters Falstaff puns on his name and also on the sex/war image already established: ‘Here Pistol, I charge you with a cup of sack; do you discharge upon mine hostess,’ and the fact that Pistol, who was not present, immediately sees the point of the jest (‘I will discharge upon her Sir John, with two bullets’ – ‘She is pistol-proof sir, you shall not hardly offend her’) – this instant intuitive acceptance of a bawdy image defines the present tone of the Boar’s Head with economy (and wit). But the union established here is temporary and false, for we have been shown Falstaff’s real opinion of Pistol before his entry (‘a tame cheater i’ faith, you may stroke him as gently as a puppy greyhound’) and more violently after his departure.
After our view of Sir John in his real element Hal and Poins are brought on to see an aspect of Falstaff’s character which by a fine dramatic stroke (for the presence of eavesdroppers always makes us the more intent to hear what will be said) is shown to them, and to us, for the first time, that is his real undisguised admission that he is ‘written down old’. There is a curious – and touching – mixture of pathos and ridicule in this scene: Falstaff’s pathetic words – ‘Peace good Doll, do not speak like a death’s head, do not bid me remember mine end’… ‘I am old, I am old’… ‘A merry song, come.’ ‘A grows late, we’ll to bed. Thou’lt forget me when I am gone’ – utterances which for the first time draw our sympathy directly to him as a mortal man. These are all undercut by the presence of the Prince and Poins, and still more by their sardonic comments. Yet even so our pity remains, and though their presence has probably prevented the scene becoming sentimental, we are nevertheless glad when Doll finally ‘comes blubbered’. There is too an almost Tchekhov-like mixture of laughter and tears in Mistress Quickly’s accurate and corroborative memory recalling the exact date and season of the year when she first ‘knew’ him: ‘Well, fare thee well, I have known thee these twenty-nine years, come peascod-time, but an honester and truer-hearted man –’ of course her memory has now given way to her emotions, but we forgive her. There is no need to become sentimental over this scene (Shakespeare has taken pains to prevent this) but nevertheless it does show real affection and feeling in this world for the first – and almost the last – time.
However, Shakespeare’s humane comedy does not exclude deflation, and Falstaff is trapped into slandering Poins and the Prince, his pretensions being once again undermined by our knowledge of some detail which is hidden from him (here their presence) and his style now again reveals his characteristic tricks. As he contemptuously lists all the reasons for Hal’s fondness for Poins he begins to build up a rhetorical structure with the help of parison (placing the verbs in corresponding order) and anaphora (on ‘and’):
| Because their legs are both of a bigness, |
| and ‘a plays at quoits well, |
| and eats conger and fennel, |
| and drinks off candles’ ends for flap-dragons, |
and so on, through six more trifling entertainments showing ‘a weak mind and an able body’. Their anger is justified, and as they drive him into a corner for the only time in this play he shows himself now to be a disappointing logician. Poins is made to comment on Falstaff’s normal escape tactics: ‘My lord, he will drive you out of your revenge and turn all to a merriment, if you take not the heat’ (II, iv, 323). But as the Prince again smells victory Falstaff escapes, with his specious repetitions (‘No abuse, lads’ half-a-dozen times) and with a logical argument that is both thin: ‘I dispraised him before the wicked, that the wicked might not fall in love with him’ – and involves him in the further complication of having to slander all his companions, as Hal is made to press the point: ‘See now whether pure fear and entire cowardice doth not make thee wrong this virtuous gentlewoman to close with us.’ That is a sharply accurate description of Falstaff’s willingness to slander others to save his own self-esteem (he goes on to do so, most wittily) but those are virtually the last words spoken to him by the Prince before the final confrontation: only at the end of the scene, as Falstaff seems caught in a cleft stick and is saved by the news of the rebels, does Hal address him again, now in verse: ‘Falstaff, good night.’ This whole scene has been presenting us with a balance of sympathies which it has become harder and harder to maintain for Falstaff, and though affectionate pathos is now added by Shakespeare it does not erase the memory of his egotism and abuse, and the rhetorical fluency which could even ‘turn diseases to commodity’ is muted.
Hereafter Falstaff takes to the wars again, and to a milieu where his wit, like his morality, is left to take care of himself. In addition to the serious implications of the bribed press system (and though it is a scene which always produces amusing comedy in the theatre we cannot forget its relevance to an Elizabethan audience, or to us) we have the feeling in the Gloucestershire scenes that his wit is being exercised on very inferior topics: it is the Clown versus Stooge pattern again, whether against the recruits or Shallow. This dangerous superiority is shown as in Part One, by the long speeches given to Falstaff as his conceit expands; but whereas there he was mainly concerned to defend himself from any charge of dishonour, now the speeches are constructed to abuse ‘in their absence those whom he lives by flattering’. In his first attack on Shallow the plain unpatterned prose takes us into his confidence, and his images deflate the old justice with wit but with no charity:
I do remember him at Clement’s Inn, like a man made after supper of a cheese-paring. When ‘a was naked, he was for all the world like a forked radish, with a head fantastically carved upon it with a knife. ‘A was so forlorn, that his dimensions to any thick sight were invisible.
This is all very amusing, indeed all these final soliloquies are justly famous for their wit, but they surely show Falstaff’s habitual love of derogatory comments on everyone else reaching outsize proportions. His superiority recalls the Lord Chief Justice’s words: ‘You speak as having power to do wrong.’ At the same time Falstaff becomes more of the Manipulator, a figure who – if he be doing so to his own advantage – Shakespeare always treats with contempt. So Falstaff announces his parasite intent plainly:
As I return, I will fetch off these justices. … I’ll make him a philosopher’s two stones to me. 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.
Having been constantly trapped by his Good Angel, the Prince, Falstaff’s Conscience is now being led off by the Devil, in the shape of Logic twisting a ‘reason’ out of that improbable analogy, to trap others.
The first person he traps is the rebel Colevile, and the bluff which was glossed over by the Prince at Shrewsbury produces the most grotesque example of his triumphant divorce of name from thing: ‘I think you are Sir John Falstaff, and in that thought yield me.’ Falstaff’s subsequent inflation of his heroic exploit is amusing, but though it deceives others, it is as ever undercut by our knowledge. He now wins a little sparring-match with the unwitty Prince John, and as that unattractive character leaves Falstaff expresses everybody’s reaction to him: ‘I would you had but the wit, ‘twere better than your dukedom.’ But if this is a universal reaction, Falstaff’s remedy is very much his own, and he launches into a long diagnosis and cure in the familiar, unpatterned style: ‘Good faith, this same young sober-blooded boy doth not love me, nor a man cannot make him laugh, but that’s no marvel, he drinks no wine,’ a syntactical flexibility which persists as he reviews the anaemia produced by abstinence, and then with his usual vanity, includes himself out: ‘They are generally fools and cowards, which some of us should be too, but for inflammation.’ But as he begins to develop his point, rhetorical structure appears, together with other devices of the orator; first there is a partitio, the formal announcement of a division:
A good sherris-sack hath a twofold operation in it;
which is correctly followed up: ‘The second property of your excellent sherris’; then parison shows the parallel stages of the process: ‘It ascends … dries … makes.’ The division was perhaps a shade too formal for Falstaff, as if he is putting on too high a style, and as he expands his argument the multiplicity and tautology of the epithets reveals a certain self-satisfied pomp. First they come in threes:
| all the foolish and dull and crudy vapours … |
| makes it apprehensive, quick, forgetive, |
| full of nimble, fiery, and delectable shapes |
Then they come in groups of two, but not less pleonastic:
| the blood, which, before cold and settled, |
| left the liver white and pale, |
| which is the badge of pusillanimity and cowardice. |
That Latinate word ‘pusillanimity’ helps to give the game away, for Shakespeare has imported it for this occasion, and never uses it again. Falstaff is here being made to pump up words out of self-pleasing eloquence, like Armado, and to a like damaging effect, for just as in the closing stages of Part One he was made to deflate himself by his pretentious use of logic, so here his weakness for rhetoric is fatal – as ever his tongue undoes him.
It is not simply the tautologies, the Latinisms, and the sound of his voice delighting in itself which give him away, but just what he says and how he words it, as a closer look than usual will, I hope, show. His argument under the second head is that sherris is the source of valour, and he goes on to illustrate it with the stock Elizabethan image of man the microcosm which is now taken absolutely literally, and from this initial misreading of abstract as concrete he develops subsidiary images in the same inflated language: sherris warms the blood,
and makes it course from the inwards to the parts extreme. It illumineth the face, which as a beacon gives warning to all the rest of this little kingdom, man, to arm; and then the vital commoners, and inland petty spirits, muster me all to their captain, the heart; who, great and puffed up with this retinue, doth any deed of courage.
(IV, iii; my italics)
These images are surely ridiculous, in their incongruous mixture of abstract and concrete (we can see the white corpuscles carrying their pikes, with the red corpuscles as archers, say); in their ingeniously prolonged elaboration; and in what they individually represent: the conceit of the face ‘lit up’ by drink, as a beacon to call to arms, is made by Shakespeare deliberately grotesque, and recalls nothing so much as Falstaff’s comparisons for Bardolph’s red nose. Further, as Falstaff dwells on the topic, we realize more and more strongly the outrageousness of what he is saying: valour is produced by drink; ‘Dutch courage’ is the only courage; without drink men are cowards. We may be tempted to apply the Porter’s more advanced reasoning: ‘it sets him on, and it takes him off … makes him stand to and not stand to’, but even without this reminder of the negative side we do not accept the argument. And he is made to push it out still closer to us by arguing tam Martio tarn Mercurio:
| So that skill in the weapon is nothing without sack, |
| for that sets it a-work, |
| and learning a mere hoard of gold kept by a devil, |
| till sack commences it, |
| and sets it in act and use. |
A drunken scholar (who has just ‘commenced’, or taken his M.A. in sack) is marginally more ridiculous than a drunken soldier, and therefore Falstaff’s speciousness may be more apparent – but in any case both points are inescapably sophistic.
The last stage of the speech is unequivocally disillusioning, as the orator recalls his analogy and begins to apply it. First he contrasts the other brother: ‘Hereof comes it, that Prince Harry is valiant’, for it is only by drinking ‘fertile sherris that he is become very hot and valiant’. It seems too obvious to say so, but we know that this is a shocking distortion of the truth, on the same scale as his reduction of ‘honour’ to ‘air’. But it does not look as if Falstaff knows this, for there are no signs that he is producing an argument which he knows to be outrageous: he is serious, though in jocular mood: and so is Shakespeare. In applying the analogy to the Prince he is given another ludicrously expanded image, that of Hal’s blood as land to be cultivated, and then it is pressed into those symmetrical tautologies:
| for the cold blood he did naturally inherit |
| of his father, |
| he hath like lean, sterile, and bare land, |
| manured, husbanded, and tilled. |
This weakness for repetition reaches its lowest point in the simple doubling of a word: ‘drinking good and good store of fertile sherris’, an effect rather like the repetition of ‘Banish not him thy Harry’s company’ in the play scene. The final blow comes with Falstaff’s erection of his distorted philosophy into a moral law to be passed on to the young (we have already seen it in action for his page): ‘If I had a thousand sons, the first humane principle I would teach them, should be to forswear thin potations, and to addict themselves to sack.’ Thus ends an amusing speech, a piece of virtuoso writing on Shakespeare’s part, but one – not to labour the point – which can only be a deliberate satire on Falstaff’s values, and a parallel mockery of his specious eloquence.
In Falstaff’s last soliloquy the undermining comes from a different quarter. His reflections on Justice Shallow and his servants (V, i) follow the same sequence as here: he starts in the familiar style, passes to more structured language which at the same time deflates him, and is finally condemned out of his own mouth – but this time more by association. He begins with a wonderfully abusive image which wins our admiration: ‘If I were sawed into quantities, I should make four dozen of such bearded hermits’ staves as Master Shallow.’ But as he develops his observation on this interchange of office the plain revelatory manner gives way to more self-conscious patterns, involving his favourite figure antimetabole, as we see best if the clauses are set out side-by-side:
| A | They, by observing of him, |
| B | he, by conversing with them, |
| A | do bear themselves like foolish justices; |
| B | is turned into a justice-like serving-man. |
This is extremely clever, too clever indeed, but as he continues Falstaff’s sense of superiority develops the point in a contemptuous image: ‘Their spirits are so married in conjunction with the participation of society that they flock together in consent, like so many wild geese.’ His wit now finds another and more obvious variation on their interchange, as he explains the manipulations he will make of each party (his previous soliloquy had ended with his boast that he has Shallow ‘already tempering between my finger and my thumb, and shortly will seal with him’):
If I had a suit to Master Shallow, I would humour his men with the imputation of being near their master;
if to his men, I would curry with Master Shallow, that no man could better command his servants.
The mirror-figure here reminds us of his revision of the Lord Chief Justice’s conclusion: ‘God send the companion a better prince.’
The complacency with which Falstaff has been contemplating his wit and his prospects now issues out in self-destructive form, as Shakespeare makes the vital transition to a conclusion which in fact embodies the warning due to him in his relations with Hal:
| It is certain, that either wise bearing, |
| or ignorant carriage, |
| is caught, as men take diseases one of another; |
| therefore let men take heed of their company. |
We note in passing the speciousness of the argument (‘wise bearing’ is only learned by association) but our major reaction is to see the unconscious irony, the relevance of this sentence to Falstaff’s own position – but he has long since ceased to attach word to thing with any consistency. To make sure that we have not missed the association Shakespeare at once introduces Hal’s name: ‘I will devise matter enough out of this Shallow to keep Prince Harry in continual laughter.’ The images which Falstaff has been using of others – ‘like so many wild geese … as men take diseases’ – are now seen to apply to him, as again the verbal weapon recoils against its user. And as we had seen how he would manipulate Shallow, so we now see how he thinks he has been manipulating Hal, by putting on the clown’s performance for the cosseted spectator:
| O it is much that a lie, with a slight oath, |
| and a jest, with a sad brow, |
| will do with a fellow that never had the ache in his shoulders. |
This betrays his true valuation of Hal, as the term ‘pantler’ had done earlier, and it comes just at the moment when the relationship changes for ever. Shakespeare, having prefigured the rejection of Falstaff since his first scene in Part One, and having separated him from Hal for all but eighty lines (or ten minutes) of this play, now in the scene before Hal’s emergence as Henry V, shows Falstaff’s grandiose delusions about himself which have been fed by language at the mercy of his self-esteem. At this moment he shows himself ripe for shaking, as his hubris looks forward to future triumphs: ‘O you shall see him laugh till his face be like a wet cloak ill laid up’. We don’t; we won’t.
The final ironic juxtaposition follows at once, as this scene is succeeded by the revelation of the new King liberating ‘the tide of blood’ from vanity, and that expected transformation gives way to Pistol and Falstaff thinking that their hopes are now on the flood: ‘I am fortune’s steward … the laws of England are at my commandment.’ But the ebb has already begun, and the vision of Riot here is soon cancelled by the inversion of inversion – as Mistress Quickly says, ‘O God, that right should thus overcome might!’. A characteristic Falstaffian speciousness is his surface reason for rushing to meet the King: ‘this doth infer the zeal I had to see him. … It shows my earnestness of affection – My devotion’, but his deeper reason, self-interest, is obvious to all (indeed, it could almost be said that here and elsewhere the surface reason is self-interest and that he has to rely on his wit to find a deeper reason). The way that his tongue hides what his heart should know persists, naturally enough, to the last: ‘I shall be sent for in private to him,’ ‘this that you heard was but a colour’ – and for the first time Master Shallow is made to see the bottom of Falstaff: ‘A colour that I fear you will die in Sir John.’ But we have seen through him for a long time, and though we have laughed with him and at him, Shakespeare has constantly kept before us by the wonderfully subtle development of his language the precarious basis on which he has existed. It is largely through our perception of Falstaff’s incomparably specious manipulation of logic and rhetoric in the service of appetite that we are prepared for the confrontation and its predictable outcome. We all miss him of course (but we can always re-read Part One, provided that we do not look at the words too closely), yet the sense of inevitability that we feel about Falstaff’s final deflation is a mark of the success with which Shakespeare has solved the artistic problem he set himself, how to present Hal’s fascination and then his disillusionment. The curve of our sympathies has followed the Prince’s, and that we should have enjoyed so much laughter and delight and yet feel that the rejection of these qualities to be correct if not quite painless – this is a veritable triumph of style.
Although the play designed to show Falstaff in love may in fact have been written after Henry V, it seems reasonable to consider it here, not only because of its approximate place in Falstaff’s biography but because his presentation continues the decline shown in Part Two. The triumphant wit of Part One has almost entirely disappeared, although we can just detect some traces of his usual tricks. Our sense of the decline of Falstaff is obviously conditioned by our knowledge of the Henry IV plays, and it is not to be explained by the traditional legend of the play being a special commission hastily turned out in a fortnight, for as Bertrand Evans has shown10 The Merry Wives of Windsor is carefully and ingeniously constructed, and one would suppose that if Shakespeare had been given an urgent job he would have found verse easier. The conception of Falstaff found here is necessitated by the plot, and any resistance or resilience on his part would have been fatal: he must be easily duped, as Ford is. These larger dramatic requirements determine the nature of the imagery applied to him and also affect the whole texture of the play’s plot and its language: style is simply the final manifestation of larger dramatic issues. Shakespeare has decided to write a prose comedy, limiting his characters to the middle and lower classes, and only making an exception to the norm by using verse for situations of more dignity (such as the final stages of the play, in the masking and the tribute to the Queen) or more imagination (as with the love of Fenton and Nan). Given this social equality there can be no clown to entertain the nobility, and none of the witty aristocratic repartee: the characters are all bourgeois, and their language must be that of ‘realistic’ conversation, a plain style with little imagery and with no rhetorical structure.
The obvious danger is that all the characters will talk alike, and though some are set apart by other means – the superior intellectual status of the Wives is reflected in their use of imagery, as is Ford’s abnormal condition – Shakespeare still has the problem of individualizing a great number of minor characters who are not just comic relief but are needed for the intricacies of the plot. He solves this problem by giving each of these characters a separate group of verbal tics, an individualizing group of oddities which are at the same time amusing (if one were to rewrite the play removing all distinctive signs it would be seen how much more than the individuality would be lost). The differentiation between characters is remarkably well done (as ever, Shakespeare specifically comments on what he is doing), and Pope’s claim that given any speech he could assign it to the correct character is here literally true, for only two or three lines would be enough for us to distinguish between Shallow, Slender, Pistol, Quickly, Bardolph, Nym, Evans, the Host, Caius, – and of course, Falstaff. This extraordinary gallery of grotesquely caricatured types is worthy of one of Dickens’s richest sub-plots, and indeed the other master of grotesque verbal caricature, Ben Jonson, is sometimes put forward as a possible influence on Shakespeare here. But though the play was produced during the vogue of the humour comedies (which are perhaps parodied in Nym), this anthology of linguistic oddities is also an obvious development from the exuberance of Love’s Labour’s Lost with its fantastics like Armado, Nathaniel, and Holofernes, its clowns Dull and Costard, and the witty page Moth. Shakespeare’s own development of language depended in part on the exercise of such verbal individualization, and it is an ability which he developed in prose long before he could in verse, albeit at a simpler and more schematic level. We may never regard The Merry Wives of Windsor with great relish, but we must concede that it shows a virtuoso control of styles.
Those characters already created in the other plays naturally retain their styles, although the humour is inevitably dissipated by being spread over five Acts. Shallow is at once introduced in his eternal relationship to Falstaff: ‘if he were twenty Sir John Falstaffs, he shall not abuse Robert Shallow Esquire’, and his repetitions are constant, sharper than ever as he stands on his dignity: ‘He hath wronged me, indeed he hath, at a word he hath. Believe me Robert Shallow Esquire saith he is wronged’ (I, i, 108–10). Mistress Quickly malaprops as usual, with her ‘allicholly’, ‘canaries’, (for ‘quandary’), ‘speciously’, and the fault is developed into a whole scene (IV, i; one of the few superfluities in the play) where her horrified comments on the grammar lesson (another situation which looks back to Love’s Labour’s Lost) are still amusing, as when William Page produces his ‘genitive case plural’:
WILLIAM. Genitive horum, harum, horum.
QUICKLY. Vengeance of Jenny’s case! Fie on her! Never name her, child, if she be a whore.
And as ever Shakespeare does not stop with the stylistic effect, but relates it to the characters involved, as with the following insight into Mistress Quickly’s report on experience as she reproves the schoolmaster:
You do ill to teach the child such words. He teaches him to hick and to hack; which they’ll do fast enough of themselves, and to call horum; fie upon you!
That is a tiny touch, but it shows Shakespeare’s constant empathy, his re-creation of the personalities and attitudes of his characters. Quickly is still given to repetition: ‘I warrant you, coach after coach, letter after letter, gift after gift’ (II, ii, 66; cf. I Henry IV, III, iii, 64–7), and of course to digression, as in her first message to Falstaff from Mistress Ford (II, ii) which eddies so much that he is made to comment on it: ‘Be brief, my good she – Mercury.’ Many other comments draw our attention to the characters’ misuse of speech, and present the normal reaction of anyone in real life offended by such indecorum: so Bardolph, whose nose again renders him stylistically neutral, is shown up in a malapropism. ‘I say the gentleman had drunk himself out of his five sentences,’ which is at once pounced on by Evans: ‘It is his five senses. Fie, what the ignorance is!’ (I, i). Evans is also given the deflating comment on Pistol’s affected tautology: ‘He hears with ears’ – ‘The tevil and his tam! What phrase is this? He hears with ear? Why, it is affectations.’ Pistol’s airs with language are seen again in his indignant objections to the normal word ‘steal’: ‘“Convey”, the wise it call. “Steel”? Foh! A fico for the phrase’ (I, iii). His blank verse is as stiff-jointed as ever, with a ridiculous inflation of a stock romantic image as he pursues Quickly:
This punk is one of Cupid’s carriers;
Clap on more sails, pursue. Up with your fights
Give fire. She is my prize, or ocean whelm them all.
(II, ii)
A new detail is his inspired invention of a piece of ‘eight and six’, rather like an epic poem’s ‘argument’, a fittingly high style for him (I, iv, 106–9). The last character to have come over from Henry IV is Falstaff’s page, and even he has picked up some peculiarities: ‘My master … hath threatened to put me into everlasting liberty, if I tell you of it; for he swears he’ll turn me away’ (III, iii).
Of the new characters, Nym is immediately recognized by his fondness for catch-phrases, especially the word ‘humour’, which he uses in almost every speech he utters, from the first – ‘Slice, I say; pauca, pauca. Slice, that’s my humour’ (I, i), to the last extraordinary solo:
And this is true. I like not the humour of lying. He hath wronged me in some humours. I should have borne the humoured letter to her; but I have a sword, and it shall bite upon my necessity … Adieu, I love not the humour of bread and cheese. And there’s the humour of it. Adieu.
(II, ii, 132–54)
Page is given the comment here: ‘The humour of it, quoth’a? Here’s a fellow frights English out of his wits.’ With his ominous military aggressiveness Nym is a sort of poor man’s Pistol, and in his final speech he actually ascends to Pistolian verse. Another parallel to these braggarts is provided by the Host, who is bluff and aggressive: his favourite phrase ‘bully’ links him with Bottom, and he shares with other verbal warriors the inversion portentous: ‘Bully Sir John! Speak from thy lungs military’ (IV, v). In addition to this aspect of his character he is given remarkably urgent language (as if he were always in a state of emergency), using short excessively clipped phrases, scarcely six words at a time, as in his first speeches (by their words you shall know them, and in this play immediately):
What says my bully-rook? Speak scholarly and wisely.… Discard, bully Hercules, cashier; let them wag; trot, trot.… Thou’rt an emperor, Caesar, Keisar, and Pheesar. I will entertain Bardolph; he shall tap; said I well, bully Hector?
(I, iii, 1–11)
In addition to joining the military circle by his brusqueness, like almost everyone in the play he malaprops: ‘For the which I will be thy adversary towards Anne Page’ (II, iii). The English language takes quite a beating here, and even those who set up as correctors are themselves tainted: thus when Slender says that he is ready to marry Nan, ‘that I am freely dissolved, and dissolutely’, the schoolmaster Evans reproves him but makes a mistake or two himself: ‘It is a fery discretion answer; save the fall is in the ort “dissolutely”‘(I, i): Quis custodiet? The effect, which was also seen in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, is of the blind leading the blind.
More originality has gone into the creating of Slender, who is an admirable younger version of Shallow, but still more spineless. He is well characterized in action, as the lover without initiative, who when he knows that he is about to have to court his intended exclaims: ‘I had rather than forty shillings I had my book of Songs and Sonnets here’ (I, i; one of Benedick’s quips which most infuriates Beatrice is that she had her ‘good wit of the Hundred Merry Tales’). When his mistress is absent, he can be love-sick, as we see in a scene where he remains quite silent but for three rapt asides: ‘Ah sweet Anne Page’ (III, i). But his childish incapacity comes out when she is present, and there is an excellent dramatic exploitation of this when she comes to invite him in to dinner, and he thinks that she means love-talk, excusing himself on ludicrous grounds:
I bruised my shin th’other day with playing at swords and dagger with a master of fence – three veneys for a dish of stewed prunes – and by my troth, I cannot abide the smell of hot meat since.
(I, i, 293–7)
He plucks up courage to tell her of his exploits with Sackerson the bear (like Shallow’s, and equally fictitious, we suspect), but when as usual Shakespeare repeats a successful situation later, and Slender has to woo again, he tries to hide behind Shallow and his repertoire of jests (III, iv). He is mocked by his language, too, and in this gallery of malapropists he is the most extreme, falling into the reversal of attributes, hypallage: ‘All his successors, gone before him, hath done’t; and all his ancestors, that come after him, may’ (I, i, 13–15), and into the absolute reversal of meaning as he considers his proposed marriage: ‘if there be no great love in the beginning, yet heaven may decrease it upon better acquaintance … I hope upon familiarity will grow more content’ (255). His lack of masculinity is also shown by his use of the exclamation ‘la’, which for Shakespeare seems a mark of feminine vulgarity (Cressida and Quickly use it), as he protests that Anne Page should go in before him: ‘Truly I will not go first. Truly la.… You do yourself wrong, indeed la’ (I, i). Slender is most amusing at the end of the play, where he is duped of his bride, the humour being that he cannot get over the contradiction of sex: ‘I came yonder at Eton to marry Mistress Anne Page, and she’s a great lubberly boy,’ and, still funnier, develops a confused bravado when told that he took the wrong one: ‘What need you tell me that? I think so, when I took a boy for a girl. If I had been married to him, for all he was in woman’s apparel, I would not have had him’ (V, v). He is the most Jonsonian character in the play, recalling Bartholomew Cokes, or Mr Stephen, the country gull.
The last two of these minor characters are in some respects the newest, for Shakespeare uses regional or foreign accents here for the first time: the Welsh parson, Sir Hugh Evans, and the French physician, Dr Caius. In his large-scale handling of them Shakespeare demonstrates again his principle of plot-doubling, for he develops them each separately (I, i; I, iv) and then brings them together for a comic confrontation (III, i), which is even more appropriate in that they are to fight a duel (Caius, with his ‘hornmad’ jealousy is also a parallel to Ford). As with all the individualizations, explicit comment is made on their linguistic oddities: Caius, like Armado, is characterized before he appears: ‘If he … find anybody in the house – here will be an old abusing of God’s patience, and the king’s English’ (I, iv, 3); Evans, after the whole action has shown his eccentricities, becomes the final straw for Falstaff: ‘Have I lived to stand at the taunt of one that makes fritters of English?’ And Shakespeare (who seems incidentally to be more conscious of the linguistic norm here than anywhere else, possibly as a result of writing so much naturalistic conversation – or possibly as a kind of insurance policy against the charge of excessive eccentricity) fittingly comments yet again before the duel: ‘Disarm them, and let them question. Let them keep their limbs whole, and hack our English’ (III, i). Both are of course characterized by their pronunciation, Evans in addition by his curious syntax: ‘It were a goot motion if we leave our pribbles and prabbles’; ‘Anne Page … which is pretty virginity’; ‘He is a good sprag memory’ (I, i, 56, 47; IV, i, 85). Caius is shown by his violence and by his mixture of French, as at his first appearance:
Vat is you sing? I do not like dese toys. Pray you go and vetch me in my closet un boitier vert; a box, a green-a box. Do intend vat I speak? A green-a box.
(I, iv)
(Shakespeare has even caught the habit that Romance language speakers learning English have, of inserting an ‘a’ before words beginning with consonants). The foreigner is made fun of, as was usual on the Elizabethan stage (see e.g. the good-humoured Englishmen for my Money (1598) by William Haughton) and here by unconscious bawdy resulting from his pronunciation:
EVANS. If there is one, I shall make two in the comedy.
CAIUS. If dere be one, or two, I shall make-a the turd.
(III, iii)
This is simple enough humour, but the scene where the two foreigners meet for a duel but are deceived by the Host and so form an unholy alliance against him (III, i) is a masterly piece of writing: on stage at one time are seven characters behaving in consistency with their personalities, and completely differentiated in terms of their speech alone.
The largest of the characters from the lower world is of course Falstaff, but although we can perceive some of his old tricks they are now faded. Far from dominating repartee he becomes the butt, and of all people, of Pistol (I, iii, 34–70), though he gets some revenge later with a series of puns and abusive images (II, ii, 1–30). His only piece of logic is a pathetically pale echo of his original sophistic comparison of his failings to Adam’s:
When gods have hot backs what shall poor men do?
(V, v, 11)
But the echo only exposes more clearly his decline, and throughout the play he is cannon-fodder, helpless as a child – as he is made to say himself: ‘Since I plucked geese, played truant, and whipped top, I knew not what ‘twas to be beaten, till lately’ (V, i, 27). Easily deceived and humiliated by repetitive plots (perhaps the weakest aspect of the play is that he is made to fall into three traps running, without a moment’s hesitation), Falstaff becomes the target for a series of predictable images, mostly from the women in the earlier part of the play: he is ‘well-nigh worn to pieces with age’, a ‘Flemish drunkard’ with ‘guts made of puddings’, a ‘whale with so many tuns of oil in his belly’, he is ‘grease’, this ‘unwholesome humidity, this gross watery pumpion’ – abuse which culminates in a set denunciation of him by Ford, Page, Mrs Page, and Evans: ‘What, a hodge-pudding? A bag of flax?’ – ‘A puffed man?’ – ‘Old, cold, withered, and of intolerable entrails?’ No more one-sided scene of abuse has been written since the courtiers mocked the pageant in Love’s Labour’s Lost, especially Holofernes, and the formal nature of this railing is recognized in Falstaff’s dejected comment: ‘Well I am your theme. You have the start of me, I am dejected.… Use me as you will.’ He is finally made to recognize himself as a passive butt, in an image which sums up the metaphors of hunting used for his pursuit: ‘I am glad, though you have ta’en a special stand to strike at me, that your arrow hath glanced’ – but it is like bear-baiting with a paralysed bear. Besides these external attacks, as the play develops he is made to use mocking images to describe himself, and whereas in Henry IV the same device suggested a strength which could afford to invoke its own weakness, here it is simply another wounding arrow. These self-deflations occur after each of the two humiliations (III, v, IV, v), and are repeated, first by himself in soliloquy, then to the go-between Quickly and yet again, though with more irony to Ford. As they are all very similar, to quote the first will be enough:
Have I lived to be carried in a basket like a barrow of butcher’s offal? And to be thrown in the Thames? Well, if I be served such another trick, I’ll have my brains ta’en out and buttered, and give them to a dog for a new-year’s gift.
– and so on. And as he is served such a trick again, the image returns: ‘Have I laid my brain in the sun, and dried it, that it wants matter to prevent so gross o’er reaching as this?’ (V, v, 143–5). Such duplication is a measure of the repetitiveness of this aspect of the play.
Falstaff is allowed to show more life in his longer speeches, both in soliloquy and to Ford, but even here the wives’ plot has already undercut him. Before the plot begins to work his images reveal his self-deluded vanity, as he describes how Page’s wife
examined my parts with most judicious oeillades. Sometimes the beam of her view gilded my foot; sometimes my portly belly.
PISTOL. Then did the sun on dunghill shine …
FALSTAFF. O she did so course o’er my exteriors with such a greedy intention, that the appetite of her eye did seem to scorch me up like a burning-glass.
(I, iii)
Pistol’s cruel comment reminds us that it is Falstaff alone who thinks that all who look on him love him, but his love-letter sent to the Wives shows his supreme confidence that they share his interest. He begins with an affected pseudo-Petrarchan personification: ‘Ask me no reason why I love you, for though Love use Reason for his precisian, he admits him not for his counsellor.’ Then his dissimulation comes out as usual in rhetorical symmetries, although this time Shakespeare abandons the stiffness of his letter to Hal and allows him a more familiar manner, which he then abuses with his crude vulgarisms:
You are not young, no more am I:
go to then, there’s sympathy:
You are merry, so am I:
ha, ha, then there’s more sympathy:
You love sack, and so do I:
would you desire better sympathy?
The incongruity is partly due to the argument (what they have in common, according to him, is that they are old, merry, tipplers), but more to the structure, as the collocation of formal and familiar is mutually destructive, and the use of epistrophe highlights the pressure he is putting on ‘sympathy’. This time he signs off in verse, but with remarkably banal multiple rhymes on the same simple sound:
By me, thine own true knight, by day or night:
Or any kind of light, with all his might,
For thee to fight.
John Falstaff.
Shakespeare’s ability to parody a character while remaining recognizably within his probable style is a remarkable feat of empathy.
The only other time in the play that Falstaff rises beyond the norm of unpatterned conversational prose is, appropriately enough, when he is disguised as Herne the Hunter and thinks that his hour has at last come (V, v, 1–32). But he wears the horns in a double irony: he is himself being hunted, and the symbol of cuckoldry which he has long attributed to Ford now sticks to him: the cuckolder cuckolded, even though he is not married. If Falstaff is ‘over-reached’ (he uses the appropriate Machiavellian word here) by his own devices, he is also self-condemned by his own language, as he appeals for classical exempla for his deeds (like Armado) and having naturally thought of Jove, twists his conclusion into an antimetabole:
O powerful love,
that in some respects makes a beast a man;
in some other a man a beast.
The audience alone sees the relevance of this to him. As he continues to develop the analogy with Jove his forced and crude puns make him look ridiculous: ‘You were also, Jupiter, a swan, for the love of Leda. O omnipotent love, how near the god drew to the complexion of a goose. A fault done first in the form of a beast – O Jove, a beastly fault – and then another fault, in the semblance of a fowl, think on’t Jove, a foul fault.’ Shallow might have laughed, but we see it as another symptom of hubris. When the wives appear Falstaff rises to the occasion, and his invocatory appeal for aphrodisiacs falls naturally into a parallel symmetrical structure, and is thereby made more ridiculous:
Let the sky rain potatoes;
let it thunder, to the tune of Greensleeves,
hail kissing-comfits, and
snow eryngoes.
Let there come a tempest of provocation,
I will shelter me here.
After these high astounding terms the tempest is bound to come, but before he is finally crushed he is again made to use symmetrical structure to a ludicrous effect, as he develops the image of himself as a stricken deer (how right he is) with the potent parts to be given to the wives:
Divide me like a bribed-buck, each a haunch.
I will keep my sides to myself,
my shoulders for the fellow of this walk, and
my horns I bequeath your husbands.
The identification, in Falstaff’s case, of hubristic pretensions with syntactical symmetry was never more complete.
Despite the necessity of subordinating Falstaff to the general design of the play, we may nevertheless feel slightly resentful towards Shakespeare for having so consciously diminished and restrained that personality and power of wit. However there is some consolation in the presence of Ford, who is the centre of the imaginative exploration in this play. The presentation of Ford’s mad jealousy is done partly through his images and partly through his syntax. Our awareness of his jealousy is established directly by the wives’ comments but also by a revealing detail after Nym has delivered his ‘humoured’ announcement that Falstaff loves Mistress Ford. Page reacts naturally to Nym’s ludicrous speech, Ford with growing jealousy:
PAGE. I never heard such a drawling, affecting rogue.
FORD. If I do find it – well.
PAGE. I will not believe such a Cataian, though the priest o’th’ town commended him for a true man.
FORD. ‘Twas a good sensible fellow – well.
(II, i)
By this contrast we see that Ford actually approves of Nym, being pleased to find confirmation for his jealousy, and for the rest of this scene he is set aside in his fixation (‘A man may be too confident. I would have nothing lie on my head’). In the next scene he bribes Falstaff ‘lay an amiable siege to the honesty of this Ford’s wife’, and his dissimulation is also shown by his language which is now that fluent but anonymous type of prose which Shakespeare generally creates for courtiers, or for gentlemen retailing important news, with rather formal disjunctions and politely expanded imagery (II, ii, 170–261). In reply Falstaff shows his to-be-expected confidence that his attractions will overpower her ‘embattled’ defences, and not knowing who this ‘Master Brook’ actually is, begins to abuse Ford in violent images:
I will use her as the key of the cuckoldy rogue’s coffer, and there’s my harvest-home.… Hang him, mechanical salt-butter rogue, I will stare him out of his wits. I will awe him with my cudgel; it shall hang like a meteor o’er the cuckold’s horns.
This is a magnificent dramatic situation, and has been extremely well exploited, particularly with Falstaff’s usual vaunting in absentia being most sharply undercut.
Ford responds in agony, at first in imagery: ‘What a damned Epicurean rascal is this! My heart is ready to crack with impatience’, but as his passion grows it forces itself into hypnotized symmetries:
My wife hath sent to him,
the hour is fixed,
the match is made.
He catches up Falstaff’s boasts in a still more rigid pattern:
My bed shall be abused,
my coffers ransacked,
my reputation gnawn at …
The thought of the double abuse now bites him (two longer sentences linked by the like ending ‘this wrong’) and he thrusts both the names of devils and the proverbial infidelities of nations into the same angry mould. The structure becomes more intense still as he returns to his wife and to thoughts of revenge:
Then she plots,
then she ruminates,
then she devises;
and what they think in their hearts they may effect;
they will break their hearts but they will effect.
Heaven be praised for my jealousy! Eleven o’clock the hour.
I will prevent this,
detect my wife,
be revenged on Falstaff,
and laugh at Page.
I will about it; better three hours too soon
than a minute too late.
Fie, fie, fie!
Cuckold, cuckold, cuckold!
The content alone of this speech would be enough to convey Ford’s manic jealousy, but the force of his fragmented, self-hunted syntax and his incoherent repetitions – this is all immeasurably increased by the stiff obsessional mould which syntactical symmetry here assumes.
In his next soliloquy Ford’s hypersensitive jealousy sees in the innocent page Robin a most sinister meaning: ‘Why, this boy will carry a letter twenty miles as easy, as a cannon will shoot point-blank twelve score’ (III, ii, 30). The image is ludicrous in that he compares two such dissimilar things (and we realize that anyone can take a message a longer distance without mistaking) but also in the suggestion that for his insanity a mere letter would be as accurately destructive as a cannon. Perhaps too behind the image lies the idea of himself as a target: if so he is right, for by an ironic juxtaposition Mistress Ford is made to describe Robin as ‘my eyas-musket’ – now however the dimensions are better matched. But although Ford tries to reverse the image for his hunt of Falstaff: ‘to these violent proceedings all my neighbours shall cry aim’, (III, ii), after his next meeting with Falstaff the image of shooting, penetrating, is still with him: ‘there’s a hole made in your best coat, Master Ford’ (III, v). It is through his images that we can now best gauge his unbalance, for once he knows that Falstaff has been hidden in a linen-basket his imagination plays fevered variations on that theme: ‘He cannot ‘scape me; ‘tis impossible he should. He cannot creep into a halfpenny purse, nor into a pepper-box. But lest the devil that guides him should aid him, I will search impossible places.’ The ultimate absurdity in this direction, and an image worthy of Nashe in its evocation of minuteness, is his reduction of himself to a proverbial simile, as he confidently informs the assembled company:
Help to search my house this one time. If I find not what I seek show no colour for my extremity, let me for ever be your table-sport. Let them say of me, ‘as jealous as Ford, that searched a hollow walnut for his wife’s leman’.
(IV, ii, 169)
That fantastic image is the more ironic in his mouth.
If Ford’s images let us see into his disordered imagination, his syntax expresses his consuming anger, the violence of his revenge:
I will take him, then
torture my wife,
pluck the borrowed veil of modesty from the so-seeming
Mistress Page,
divulge Page himself for a secure and wilful Actaeon …
and the confidence that he is right in this assured equality:
The clock gives me my clue,
and my assurance bids me search.
But that control vanishes in his excitement when he thinks he’s discovered Falstaff, as the demented repetitions show: ‘Buck, buck, buck, ay, buck; I warrant you buck,’ and as his hasty orders to the servants are reduced to a parisonic list of verbs: ‘Here, here, here be my keys, ascend my chambers, search, seek, find out. I’ll warrant we’ll unkennel the fox.’ In his final soliloquy the repetitions and the short jumpy syntax reappear: ‘Is this a vision? Is this a dream? Do I sleep?’ (III, v), and his fixations even take the form of an antimetabole: ‘Master Ford, awake; awake, Master Ford.’ And as he stares hypnotically at the idea, his ludicrous conclusions about the opportunities for infidelity (which, by the way, are remarkably similar to Thomas Rymer’s ‘morals’ from Othello) are more obvious by their parallelism:
This ‘tis to be married;
this ‘tis to have linen and buck-baskets.
His quickening anger is admirably expressed by his accelerating short clauses: ‘Well, I will proclaim myself what I am. I will now take the lecher. He is at my house. He cannot ‘scape me; ‘tis impossible he should.’ And the confused syntax of his last words shows up the chaotic state of his mind: ‘Though what I am, I cannot avoid; yet to be what I would not, shall not make me tame. If I have horns to make one mad, let the proverb go with me, I’ll be horn-mad.’ If there were a medium below prose, one feels, then he should drop into it.
After Shakespeare’s brilliant application of prose and its detailed devices of imagery and symmetrical syntax to Ford’s insane jealousy, it is a relief to read his lines when, having been purged for ever of his mad fit, he is raised to verse and to the first ennobling image of the play:
Pardon me, wife, henceforth do what thou wilt.
I rather will suspect the sun with cold,
Than thee with wantonness. Now doth thy honour stand,
In him that was of late an heretic,
As firm as faith.
(IV, iv, 4–8)
But nevertheless the application of prose to such an intense and realistically developed emotional state is the major success of the play, for despite Shakespeare’s great ventriloquism in creating that host of minor figures, and despite his flexible use of rhetorical structure for the extreme poles of Falstaff’s clumsy letter and his erotic apotheosis, it is in the creation of Ford that the development of his prose is greatest. Here for the first time, excluding a few speeches from Shylock, prose is used for a character and situation of some seriousness: of course Ford is also comic (perhaps more to the Elizabethans than to us) but he is not a clown, a wit, or a rogue, and the emotions he presents are deeper than anything yet given to prose. In this respect The Merry Wives of Windsor is an improvement on the Henry IV plays, and in an important direction.
Falstaff’s association with this play is tenuous, more so than had been planned, for at some stage in its composition Shakespeare, having promised in the Epilogue to 2 Henry IV a continuation ‘with Sir John in it’, decided to leave him out, and became involved in some hasty alterations. But his death is reported, his presence is often felt, and there is even a formal apologia for him given to Fluellen in his imitation of Plutarch’s ‘Parallel Lives’:
as Alexander killed his friend Cleitus, being in his cups; so also Harry Monmouth, being in his right wits, and his good judgements, turned away the fat knight with the great-belly doublet; he was full of jests, and gipes, and knaveries, and mocks; I have forgot his name.
(IV,vii)
So this is our last glimpse of Falstaff’s world – not that anything has changed, for his cronies continue their downward paths while their styles remain the same. Nym, although he later revives his favourite ‘that’s the humour of it’, now has a new catch-phrase, involving the ominous permissive ‘as it may’, but with the same enigmatic defiant brevities, each of which would be suitable to sum up a piece of rational speech,11 though they are now lumped together indifferently, with some sawn-off proverbs:
I cannot tell. Things must be as they may. Men may sleep, and they may have their throats about them at that time, and some say, knives have edges. It must be as it may. Though patience be a tired mare, yet she will plod; there must be conclusions. Well, I cannot tell.
(II, i, 22–28, 5–17, 57–63)
Pistol has his usual stiff armour-plated verse, with a touch in Cambises’ vein which Falstaff had mocked: ‘Go clear thy crystals’ (II, iv, 56); with more poetic inversions: ‘I thee defy again’ (II, i, 76; IV, i, 62), and with more internal line-pauses than ever, as if his note is getting higher and more ominous:
Let senses rule. The word is pitch and pay.
Trust none;
For oaths are straws, men’s faiths are wafer-cakes …
(II, iii, 52; also II, i, 72; III, vi, 43, 47; IV, i, 45; V, i, 76)
Shakespeare is always ready to make comedy out of linguistic deficiencies: ‘It is not enough to speak, but to speak true,’ and he involves Pistol in situations where his curiously corrupt view of language comes into collision with quite innocuous users. Thus he is as ignorant as ever of some phrases, as in his fury over Nym’s use of ‘solus’, and as enamoured of others, as ‘couple a gorge’ (II, i). His distorted ear makes nonsense both of the King’s ‘Harry le Roy’ (‘a Cornish name’), and – still more amusing – of the captured prisoner’s French (‘… la force de ton bras?’ – ‘Brass, cur? / Thou damned and luxurious mountain goat, / Offer’st me brass?’; IV, iv).
Mistress Quickly is the malapropist still: ‘we shall see wilful adultery and murder committed’, ‘a burning quotidian tertian’ (II, i). But for her account of Falstaff’s death Shakespeare puts her characteristic habits of speech to good dramatic purpose. The effect of our meeting in this sad context the eccentricities which we have previously laughed at is to create a curiously mixed mood, which may be less sentimental than that created by an unambiguously sorrowful epitaph, but which is in some respects more touching. In her first few sentences she mistakes ‘Abraham’ and ‘chrisom’, but the feeling behind the words comes through all the same:
Nay sure, he’s not in hell; he’s in Arthur’s bosom, if ever man went to Arthur’s bosom. ‘A made a finer end, and went away an it had been any christom child.
Then the way she passes without distinction from direct reported speech to indirect would normally be amusing: ‘How now Sir John, quoth I, what man, be o’good cheer: so ‘a cried out, God, God, God, three or four times’ – but the report of Falstaff finally repenting does not make us laugh. And there would normally be more humour in the way she reports herself with a curious confusion at ‘I hoped’, as if it were a normal verb with which to report speech, like ‘said’ perhaps: ‘now I, to comfort him, bid him a’ should not think of God; I hoped there was no need to trouble himself with any such thoughts yet’ – but it also might convey her own hope. Her slightly ridiculous fondness for repetition is seen in the first sentence and again in the next with its doubling of ‘even’: ‘ ’a parted ev’n just between twelve an one, ev’n at the turning o’th’tide’ – but it is not ridiculous now. These mingled comic effects alternate with more straight-forwardly serious points, as in her listing of the symptoms of mortal decay, given more finality by the symmetry:
| for after I saw him fumble with the sheets, | ||
| and play | with the flowers, | |
| and smile | upon his finger’s end, | |
| I knew there was but one way; for his nose was as | ||
| sharp as a pen, | ||
| and a’babbled of green fields. | ||
In addition to these ominous details Shakespeare finds two images which suggest Falstaff’s alteration, as they embody completely the qualities not found in him when he was alive; ‘his nose was as sharp as a pen’, ‘and all was cold as any stone’.
Gradually moving away from this pathos, Shakespeare gives her more repetition for that reminiscence of the death of Socrates, but makes it tragicomic by her unwitting bawdy (the unconscious pun on ‘stone’):
so ‘a bade me lay more clothes on his feet: I put my hand into the bed, and felt them, and they were as cold as any stone; then I felt to his knees, and so up’ard, and up’ard, and all was as cold as any stone.
The incomprehending bawdy appears again:’ ‘A did in some sort, indeed, handle women; but then he was rheumatic,’ and her malapropism for the last time in her misunderstanding of ‘devil incarnate’–’ ‘A could never abide carnation, ‘twas a colour he never liked.’ These mistakings would normally create a laugh, but one wonders if they do so now – even the recollection of one of the dead Falstaff’s deflating similes for Bardolph is now pathetic:
BOY. Do you not remember ‘a saw a flea stick upon Bardolph’s nose, and ‘a said it was a black soul burning in hell.
BARDOLPH. Well, the fuel is gone that maintained that fire.
So the transition to a less valedictory mood has been made. By the simple device of placing familiar linguistic characteristics in a dramatic context where they act both with and against the dominant mood, Shakespeare has created a wonderfully mixed feeling, and, keeping complete decorum with Mistress Quickly’s character, has given Falstaff one of the most moving of epitaphs.
But though we lament his passing we are not encouraged to admire the milieu he has left behind, for just as in both parts of Henry IV, Shakespeare writes a choric scene here which leaves us in no doubt as to our proper attitude to roguery and corruption. After the ‘three swashers’ have been forcibly propelled towards the breach, their Boy steps forward to deliver a long, cool, and carefully structured anatomy of their crimes. He is first made to bring out their inversion of manliness and courage, placed more sharply into an antimetabole which becomes an antithesis (on ‘boy’/’man’):
I am boy to them all three, but all they three, though they would serve me, could not be man to me; for indeed three such antics do not amount to a man.
He now reviews their characters separately, and together with the mockery of his puns a most carefully arranged parallel structure brings out the same vices and dissimulation in all three:
| For Bardolph, he is white-livered, | |
| and red-faced; | |
| by the means whereof ’a faces it out, | |
| but fights not. | |
| For Pistol, he hath a killing tongue, | |
| and a quiet sword; | |
| by the means whereof, ’a breaks words, | |
| and keeps whole weapons. | |
| For Nym, he hath heard that men of few words | |
| are the best men, and therefore he scorns to say his prayers, | |
| lest ’a should be thought a coward: but his few bad words | |
| are matched with as few good deeds; | |
(III, ii, 29–58)
The antithetical puns fix very clearly the gap between surface and reality in Bardolph and Pistol, and the pattern set up for those two was broken for Nym, the surprise effect of this unsymmetrical movement being capped by the return of a pattern later than we had expected, and in a different form – ‘few bad words … as few good deeds’. The clowns’ list of ludicrous human attributes from the early comedies is here applied to a pungent anatomy of the dregs of war. After the clarity of that exposure the Boy is given more naturalistic syntactical patterns, but the puns reappear, simple yet grisly, to continue the moral condemnation, culminating in the prophetic dismissal: ‘Their villainy goes against my weak stomach, and therefore I must cast it up.’ Bardolph is deflated for ever with his theft of the pyx, and Pistol is also brought down, but more humorously, in his comic confrontation with Fluellen and in the apt images applied to him by the Boy again in another choric soliloquy: ‘Bardolph and Nym had ten times more valour than this roaring devil i’th’old play, that every one may pare his nails with a wooden dagger’ (IV, iv); and by Gower just before he is humiliated: ‘here he comes, swelling like a turkey-cock’ (V, i).
The more genuine soldiers in the play are also individualized in prose, but with the simple devices used in the Merry Wives, mainly regional accents. The Irishman MacMorris is easily caught by his pronunciation of ‘s’ as ‘sh’: ‘By Chrish la tish ill done; the work ish give over,’ by his repetition of these phrases and by his haste to get on: ‘there is throats to be cut, and works to be done’, and by the speed with which he takes affront when Fluellen mentions his ‘nation’ (III, ii). The Scot Jamy is done with more variety of pronunciation: ‘By the mess, ere theise eyes of mine take themselves to slomber, ay’ll do gud service, or ay’ll lig i’th’grund for it; ay, or go to death.’ Fluellen is clearly a martial version of Sir Hugh Evans, both in his pronunciation: ‘There is no tiddle-taddle nor pibble-pabble in Pompey’s camp’ (IV, i), and in his odd habit of equating nouns and adjectives: Fortune is ‘turning and inconstant and mutability, and variation’ (III, vi). But Fluellen is much more of a character than anyone else in this milieu (the King is made to praise his ‘care and valour’, IV, i), and his stylistic individualization is thus more complex. As a scholar and lover of rhetoric he is much given to symmetrical syntax, heaping up parallel clauses: ‘you shall find the ceremonies of the wars, and the cares of it, and the forms of it, and the sobriety of it, and the modesty of it, to be otherwise’ (IV, i; also III, vi; IV, viii; V, i). But the fluency and tautology of these repetitions point to a rather over-inflated love of language which is seen throughout, but particularly in his extravagant military analogies: Exeter is ‘as magnanimous as Agamemnon’, Pistol ‘as valiant a man as Mark Antony’ (III, vi), a weakness shown best in his ambitious and over-reaching comparison of the King with Alexander (IV, vii) – but once again Shakespeare puts a stylistic oddity to good dramatic purpose, for that rather ludicrous comparison issues out into the apology for Falstaff, and having reached that effective climax is broken off by the entry of the King (Shakespeare often builds up movements within a scene to reach a climax, followed by a fresh arrival which changes the subject-as with Falstaff’s play-scene). But if Fluellen’s vanity is well applied there, it is also quietly mocked through his fondness for catch-phrases, which he is made to repeat in unsuitable contexts: so one favourite phrase (IV, i) is later undermined by the parts added to it: ‘an arrant traitor as any’s in the universal world, or in France, or in England!’ (IV, viii), and better still he defends his mistaken respect for Pistol by using a phrase correctly: ‘ ’a uttered as prave words at the pridge, as you shall see in a summer’s day’ (III, vi – already ‘see’ is rather silly), but when he discovers what he thinks to be Williams’ treasonous plot he is made to use the phrase ludicrously, for something one would not desire to see: ‘a most contagious treason come to light, look you, as you shall desire in a summer’s day’ (IV, viii). This is the last of a great number of linguistic oddities in these four plays, and it is significant that although the other comic devices continue to appear Shakespeare never again attempts characterization through peculiarities of English accents or through a fondness for catch-phrases: having learned how to apply these schematic devices economically, and having frequently tied them in to the dramatic structure of the play, he abandons them for more human, more organic methods of individualization.
Although prose is well fitted for these realistic lower levels of the play, the world presented here is much wider than that of The Merry Wives of Windsor, and prose is used across all strata of society and to complex effects with a flexibility not seen since The Merchant of Venice. Characters from the upper plot are brought down to prose for some comic effects, most notably for the French language-lesson between Katharine and Alice (III, iv) which develops into that perennially amusing situation of a foreigner unwittingly speaking bawdy, although here it is reversed in that Katharine is merely suspecting bawdy (editoris are still rather coy about glossing this scene, and those who do not understand the joke should consult Eric Partridge). The French Lords normally speak verse, but they are brought down to prose for the scene before Agincourt (III, vii) to create an atmospheric effect and also for stylistic contrast. They are shown breaking abusive images on each other, and their bawdy repartee and destructive puns both alienate our sympathies and suggest that the dissension in the camp will be fatal: it is a scene similar to that in the rebels’ camp in I Henry IV, or more closely, the way its self-deflatory discordance acts as a preparative for succeeding dignity reminds us of the scene between Solanio and Salerio in The Merchant of Venice. Thus, as there, one of the speakers is made to use inflated images, which make him look ridiculous, as the Dauphin rhapsodizes on his horse:
He bounds from the earth, as if his entrails were hares.12… When I bestride him, I soar, I am a hawk; he trots the air; the earth sings When he touches it; the basest horn of his hoof is more musical than the pipe of Hermes.
As before, one of the other characters is given the sarcastic comment, as when the Dauphin launches into a sonnet written to his horse, only for his affectation to be speedily brought to earth (and to bawdy) by Orleans. Surrounded as this scene is by majestic English heroic verse their petty quibbling prose makes them seem more puerile still.
The same use of prose for a contrast to more dignified verse had been applied in the previous scene, where the French herald is made to deliver a speech in which the images are pallid and ineffectual: ‘Thus says my King. Say thou to Harry of England, though we seemed dead, we did but sleep; advantage is a better soldier than rashness.’ The images follow as prepared ‘amplifiers’ to the sense, and in the most obvious, commonplace form: ‘Tell him, we could have rebuked him at Harfleur, but that we thought not good to bruise an injury till it were full ripe. Now we speak upon our cue, and our voice is imperial.’ Shakespeare uses two other devices to make the speech ineffective: first, symmetries which are so flat and formal that they are not worth quoting, and secondly a curious use of reported speech (the same linguistic device as had been used to a totally different effect for Mistress Quickly’s epitaph) by means of which the defiant words expressed are set back a stage and so seem like a rather mechanical recipe: ‘To this add defiance; and tell him for conclusion, he hath betrayed his followers, whose condemnation is pronounced’ – the injunctions delivered to Aguecheek for his challenging letter have more spirit. Thus Shakespeare has subtly applied several devices to take the wind out of the French sails even when they seem most threatening, and this dehydrated prose is a perfect foil for the King’s vigorous and superior verse.
It is around the person of King Henry V that, suitably enough, the most varied application of prose is made. As he goes through the camp on the eve of Agincourt, dressed ‘but as a common man’, he puts aside his verse with his dignity, and as if in recognition of his disguise is made to speak prose to the soldiers (IV, i). But although this conversation begins in the semi-realistic language of conversation, a serious and complex issue is at stake and the King’s prose is given all the appropriate devices to clarify the argument. To begin with, and for ironic effect to an audience knowing of his disguise, he establishes the King’s humanity by comparing him to himself:
I think the King is but a man, as I am;
the violet smells to him as it doth to me;
the element shows to him, as it doth to me.
and so on through his human form, his passions, and his fears, all in this steady rational tone, the syntactical symmetries showing the correspondences in his argument. By contrast Williams, in his evocation of the horrors of battle, is made to appeal directly to the emotions with his parallel clauses listing the diverse fates of ‘all those legs, and arms, and heads, chopped off in a battle’ and their reactions if revived again:
some swearing;
some crying for a surgeon;
some upon their wives, left poor behind them;
some upon their children rawly left.
In reply to that powerful reminder of the horrors of war and the ruler’s responsibility for it, Shakespeare deliberately gives the King a cool, non-emotional beginning, developing an analogy without any patterning:
So, if a son that is by his father sent about merchandise, do sinfully miscarry upon the sea, the imputation of his wickedness, by your rule, should be imposed upon his father that sent him. Or if a servant, under his master’s command, transporting a sum of money.…
The function of this plain style is simply to be non-rhetorical, to establish an impersonal basis to the argument.
But as Henry begins to apply the comparisons, the tone of the argument begins to rise, and the symmetries appear:
| But this is not so. | |
| The King is not bound to answer | |
| the particular endings of his soldiers, | |
| the father | of his son, |
| nor the master | of his servant; |
| for they purpose not their death, | |
| when they purpose their services. | |
That last symmetrical clause sums up the first part of the argument, and the parallelism gives it the greatest possible clarity. The King now begins to attack William’s argument directly, urging that ‘no king, be his cause never so spotless’ could have ‘all unspotted soldiers’, and in so doing he uses the soldier’s weapon (anaphora on ‘some’) to list the diverse crimes:
| Some, peradventure, have on them the guilt | |
| of premeditated and contrived murder; | |
| some, of beguiling virgins with the broken seals of perjury; | |
| some, making the wars their bulwark, that have before | |
| gored the gentle bosom of peace with pillage and robbery. | |
And in this dramatic context the force of the argument is increased by the presence, as we have seen, of several offenders in the last category. The argument moves on, built around logical conjunctions: ‘So’ – ‘but’ – ‘for’ – ‘besides’ – ‘Now’ – ‘so that’ – ‘therefore’ and using symmetry to reinforce its points, as for those criminals who have escaped the civil law:
| though they can outstrip men, | |
| they have no wings to fly from God. | |
| War is his beadle, | |
| war is his vengeance. | |
The rhetorical structure becomes more concentrated as the King enlarges this point, with the antitheses matching the concept of the equality of Justice being expressed, and this second part of the argument is summed up in a sentence given inescapable clarity by its symmetry:
Every subject’s duty is the King’s,
but every subject’s soul is his own.
We may find the argument repugnant, and we may find the soldiers’ consent to it dramatically unconvincing, but we must concede that the rhetorical symmetries of prose have been applied to this progression with considerable effect. Yet on the other side we must notice the restricted expressive potential of this prose by contrast with the King’s powerful soliloquy which follows, as left alone he returns to verse and that theme of the discomfort of the individual holding great office which has been for Shakespeare a constant source of human sympathy – and thus of greater poetry – throughout the History Plays. In retrospect his prose seems cool, and again acts as a spring-board for the intensity of verse.
But for one important scene in this play prose is used not as a contrast to verse but for its own potential, in the King’s witty courtship of Katharine (V, ii). This is his longest prose scene, and Shakespeare has evidently taken considerable trouble with it, yet modern critics have been either puzzled or displeased with it, their judgments, ranging from seeing it as ‘laughs for the groundlings’ at one extreme to ‘the approved Christian pattern of marriage for rulers’ at the other. Both alternatives seem excessive, and the view that Henry is here shown in his common humanity may seem nearer the truth, for as Miss Tschopp has noted, he always lays aside his majesty with his verse. However this view is also unsatisfactory in that the King is so much more than the common man, for the wit and brilliance of his wooing language look forward to the high comedies which follow, and even to the gallantry of Restoration comedy. It seems that Shakespeare, having decided to show Henry actually wooing Kate, was intent on making this theatrically convincing – and also adding another string to this ideal ruler’s bow – by showing him as the eloquent witty courtier. Furthermore, the dramatic situation forces him to develop Henry’s wit more than would have been necessary if he had married an English Queen, for although we have seen Katharine trying to learn English we know just how much she has yet to learn, as their first exchanges confirm: ‘You Majesty shall mock at me, I cannot speak your England.… Pardonnez moi, I cannot tell what is “like me”.’ So she is going to be the weak partner in the dialogue, and as it would not do for the King’s success here to be cut down to some brief, possibly ambiguous victory, justice must be seen to have been done, and so the scene must be longer, and he must do all the talking. Thus the versatility which he displays with Shakespeare’s verbal tools for love-making, wit and rhetoric, is not a sign of insincerity but rather one of excellence in the proper sphere, developed according to the needs of the play.
He begins with some simple courtly language: ‘An angel is like you, Kate, and you are like an angel,’ (a complimental antimetabole) but although the King protests his plainness – if she understood English better she would think he had ‘sold my farm to buy my crown’ – he nevertheless produces several long and witty speeches (this contradiction is not a sign of dissimulation as it is for other Shakespeare characters who protest that they cannot ‘cog’ yet immediately proceed to do so – Richard III, say, or Falstaff to Mistress Ford). The effect of Henry’s eloquence in terms of our reaction in the theatre is, I suppose, that we think that he rises to the occasion, producing eloquence when it is needed, as he has done in war. The structure of his longest speech resembles that to the soldiers: it has two main parts (the first to urge that he is a plain soldier, the second that he is constant), and also advances along a series of logical turning-points: ‘If’, ‘But’, ‘If’, ‘while’, ‘for’. However the tone and movement are completely different, even though the same rhetorical structures are used; now they demonstrate his wit, as when he pleads inability to make verses or to dance:
| for the one I have neither words nor measure, | |
| and for the other I have no strength in measure, | |
| yet a reasonable measure in strength. | |
In addition to the parallelism and disjunction he concludes with a witty antimetabole which belies his protestation of plainness: this is artifice concealing artifice. The lightly mocking mood thus established is continued in the playful comparisons of his love-making to winning her at leap-frog or buffeting, and in the account of his face being so ugly that her eye must be her ‘cook.’ The syntactical patterning is here subdued to the imagery and wit, with only such simple balances as ‘downright oaths, which I never use till urged, nor never break for urging’, but as he concludes the first part of his argument he produces a very complex sequence:
| I speak to thee plain soldier. | |
| If thou canst love me for this, take me; | |
| if not, to say to thee that I shall die, is true; | |
| but for thy love, by the Lord no; | |
| yet I love thee too. | |
That riddling denial of Romantic infatuation keeps the mood light, not portentous.
In the second part of his speech he urges that his constancy will be strengthened by his lack of eloquence, because he will not have ‘the gift to woo in other places’, and he mocks poets for their fluency:
for these fellows of infinite tongue,
that can rhyme themselves into ladies’ favours,
they do always reason themselves out again.
If that is more than competent eloquence his next ploy is a remarkably eloquent deflation of all qualities except love and truth:
There has not been such a long sequence of parallel clauses since the earlier comedies, but this is no display-piece, being quite in the character of a plain soldier, or indeed any lover. – However, it is remarkably eloquent, and the rhetoric becomes still more brilliant as he uses ‘a pretty Epanorthosis’ to correct that last image:
| or rather the sun, and not the moon; |
| for it shines bright, |
| and never changes, |
| but keeps his course truly. |
The crowning touch now is his very assured use of the figure gradatio, the chain effect which sums up the argument and relates it to his own person:
If thou wouldst have such a one, take me.
And take me, take a soldier.
Take a soldier, take a King.
That is as regal a piece of eloquence as you could wish for in a summer’s day.
As the dialogue continues (and there is nearly two hundred lines more of it) the King does not reach those heights of eloquence again, but there are moments of witty elegance, as when his straightforward inversion: ‘it is not possible you should love the enemy of France, Kate; but in loving me, you should love the friend of France’, then produces this dazzling sequence:
| And Kate, when France is mine, | ||
| and I | am yours; | |
| then yours | is France, | |
| and you | are mine. | |
– where any simply mathematical expectations we might have had of the symmetry are over-ridden by the meaning. The King’s playful wit ensures that the mood does not cloy, as in the image with which he mocks his inability to speak French, and which is still more mocking in terms of his immediate situation: a language ‘which I am sure will hang upon my tongue, like a new-married wife about her husband’s neck, hardly to be shook off’. This gaiety produces the most human reference to Bolingbroke yet: ‘Now beshrew my father’s ambition, he was thinking of civil wars when he got me, therefore was I created with a stubborn outside, with an aspect of iron, that when I come to woo ladies, I fright them.’ But for his final appeal rhetorical structure must lend a more formal and serious note:
| Thou hast me, | |
| if | thou hast me, at the worst; |
| and | thou shalt wear me, |
| if | thou wear me, better and better, |
leading up to the proposal with epistrophe: ‘I am thine … England is thine … Ireland is thine’, and so on, pressing his worth with antimetabole again:
if he be not fellow with the best King,
thou shalt find the best king of good fellows
and demanding a reply with a series of twists on ‘broken English’. The courtship is successful, justice is seen to have been done, the lover has proved himself – and at this point Shakespeare brings Burgundy on to share a sparring-bout of bawdy with Henry, who as ever gets the better, but with some quite disillusioning images. The function of this sequence is partly anti-romantic, partly to establish Henry’s superior wit, partly (as at the end of The Merchant of Venice) to invoke and so release the normal sexuality of this situation, but also perhaps to complete an aspect of kingship which Henry touched on in his debate with the soldiers:
his ceremonies laid by, in his nakedness he appears but a man; and though his affections are higher mounted than ours, yet when they stoop, they stoop with the like wing.
In this, as in everything, he is the complete Elizabethan, and the lowering truth implicit in that image having been established (and with wit) the King can revert to verse and to state dignity, while we are confident that he is more than a suit of robes.
The prose of Henry V, although the scenes in which it is used are often dispraised by critics, runs across all levels of society and across almost all the dramatic resources open to Shakespeare, from serious argument to witty love-talk. If we add the extraordinary esemplastic power of his prose to create the very real personality of Falstaff with all its ingenious duplicity with language, and with equal conviction the tortured emotional state of Ford, then we can gauge the progress made by Shakespeare through this group of plays. Henry V is also significant in that it is an almost exact transition: schematic characterization by foreign accents and catch-phrases is used for the last time, and for the first time prose is used for witty love-talk at a high social and intellectual level. And in this respect it points directly on to the world of the comedies.