by Harold Bloom
And this same bias, this commodity,
This bawd, this broker, this all-changing word…
This memorable denunciation is fundamental though ironic for the Bastard and rather more ironical for William Shakespeare, in his career a quester after commodity. The Bastard concludes with a fierce quatrain, but one that he does not mean at all:
And being rich, my virtue then shall be
To say there is no vice but beggary.
Since kings break faith upon commodity,
Gain, be my lord, for I will worship thee!
In fact, the Bastard is a heroic warrior and patriot without whom the realm of King John would collapse. His attachment to his dubious uncle is extraordinary and reflects his search for the absent father Richard Lionheart, for whom John is an inadequate substitute. Throughout the play, the Bastard becomes an idea of order: generous, patriotic, comedic, and finally England’s only stay against destruction.
His most problematic moment comes in an exchange on the battlefield with his friend Hubert:
HUBERT Who’s there? speak, ho! speak quickly, or I shoot.
BASTARD A friend. What art thou?
HUBERTOf the part of England.
BASTARD Whither dost thou go?
HUBERT What’s that to thee? [Pause.] Why, may not I demand
Of thine affairs as well as thou of mine?
BASTARD Hubert, I think.
HUBERTThou hast a perfect thought:
I will upon all hazards well believe
Thou art my friend, that know’st my tongue so well.
Who art thou?
BASTARDWho thou wilt: and if thou please
Thou mayst befriend me so much as to think
I come one way of the Plantagenets.
This wry self-assertion is an expression of the Bastard’s pride at being Richard Lionheart’s natural son, but, more interestingly, it expresses a kind of dramatic skepticism unique to the Shakespeare of 1590 and afterward. The Bastard self-othersees, at once beholding a battle-blurred image of himself and a deeper realization of what he has called “the inward motion.”
He is aware of Hubert’s otherness, despite the phantasmagoria of battle, yet in seeing what endures of the selfsame (as Shakespeare named individual identity) the Bastard wonders a little at his own strong personality and its survival of all the chances attendant upon war. The first of all Shakespeare’s self-stagers, the Bastard suddenly apprehends that the flux of action threatens him, the only joyous and exuberant spirit in all of King John.
The Falstaffiad:
Glory and Darkening of Sir John Falstaff
It is in this particular sense that the Bastard is Falstaff’s direct forerunner. In the six years between King John and King Henry the IV, Part I, Shakespeare’s full power developed:
FALSTAFF Though I could scape shot-free at London,
I fear the shot here. Here’s no scoring but upon the
pate. Soft, who are you? Sir Walter Blount. There’s
honour for you. Here’s no vanity. I am as hot as molten
lead and as heavy too. God keep lead out of me; I need
no more weight than mine own bowels. I have led my
ragamuffins where they are peppered; there’s not three
of my hundred and fifty left alive, and they are for the
town’s end to beg during life.
Enter the Prince.
But who comes here?
PRINCE What, stands thou idle here? Lend me thy sword.
Many a nobleman lies stark and stiff
Under the hoofs of vaunting enemies,
Whose deaths are yet unrevenged. I prithee,
Lend me thy sword.
FALSTAFF O Hal, I prithee, give me leave to breathe
awhile. Turk Gregory never did such deeds in arms as
I have done this day. I have paid Percy; I have made him
sure.
PRINCE He is indeed—and living to kill thee.
I prithee, lend me thy sword.
FALSTAFF Nay, before God, Hal, if Percy be alive thou
gets not my sword. But take my pistol if thou wilt.
PRINCE Give it me. What, is it in the case?
FALSTAFF Ay, Hal. ’Tis hot; ’tis hot. There’s that will sack a city.
The prince draws it out, and finds it to be a bottle of sack.
PRINCE What, is it a time to jest and dally now?
He throws the bottle at him.
FALSTAFF Well, if Percy be alive, I’ll pierce him. If he do
come in my way, so; if he do not, if I come in his
willingly, let him make a carbonado of me. I like not
such grinning honour as Sir Walter hath. Give me life,
which I can save, so. If not, honour comes unlooked
for, and there’s an end.
The Falstaffian sublimity opens with his charming play on “shot-free,” meaning evading your bar bill, and then upon the “honour” of the late Sir Walter Blount, gallantly slain in the service of the two Henrys, father and son. Sir John Falstaff is only too aware of the madness of battle and of the hypocrisy of all kings and princes, including the beloved Hal. The old warrior’s wonderful contempt for battle could not be better exemplified than by carrying a bottle of sack in his holster and offering it to Hal in the midst of crisis. When Hal throws the bottle at the nimbly dodging Falstaff, the abyss between them opens wide and forever.
I recall the greatest Falstaff I shall ever see, Ralph Richardson in New York City in 1946, playing so marvelously that he eclipsed Laurence Olivier as Hotspur in Part I and as Shallow in Part II. I was a child of sixteen, and in two successive evenings I received the most profound Shakespearean education ever made available to me. Richardson was a revelation. His Falstaff was no mere glutton, boozer, scoundrel, but the greatest wit and dryly comic intelligence ever staged. Indeed this Falstaff was the Socrates of Eastcheap, rueful wisdom itself:
Exeunt all but the Prince and Falstaff.
FALSTAFF Hal, if thou see me down in the battle and bestride me, so; ’tis a point of friendship.
PRINCE Nothing but a colossus can do thee that friendship. Say thy prayers, and farewell.
FALSTAFF I would ’twere bedtime, Hal, and all well.
PRINCE Why, thou owest God a death.
[Exit]
FALSTAFF ’Tis not due yet. I would be loath to pay him before his day. What need I be so forward with him that calls not on me? Well, ’tis no matter; honour pricks me on. Yea, but how if honour prick me off when I come on? 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. What is honour? A word. What is in that word ‘honour’? What is that ‘honour’? Air. A trim reckoning. Who hath it? He that died o’Wednesday. Doth he feel it? No. Doth he hear it? No. ’Tis insensible then? Yea, to the dead. But will it not live with the living? No. Why? Detraction will not suffer it. Therefore I’ll none of it. Honour is a mere scutcheon. And so ends my catechism.
Honor, which is the agon between Prince Hal and Hotspur, is blown away by Falstaff in a litany that reduces it to a word and then to a faltering breath. Hal is much given to accusing Falstaff of vanity, in the particular sense proclaimed by Ecclesiastes, whose Hebrew word hevel thus is mistranslated brilliantly. Hevel is a mere breath, a vapor of vapors, nothing at all. Hal, having bested Hotspur, addresses his corpse:
PRINCE For worms, brave Percy. Fare thee well, great heart.
Ill-weaved ambition, how much art thou shrunk!
When that this body did contain a spirit
A kingdom for it was too small a bound,
But now two paces of the vilest earth
Is room enough. This earth that bears thee dead
Bears not alive so stout a gentleman.
If thou wert sensible of courtesy
I should not make so dear a show of zeal.
But let my favours hide thy mangled face,
And even in thy behalf I’ll thank myself
For doing these fair rites of tenderness.
Adieu, and take thy praise with thee to heaven.
Thy ignominy sleep with thee in the grave
But not remembered in thy epitaph.
He spieth Falstaff on the ground.
What, old acquaintance! Could not all this flesh
Keep in a little life! Poor Jack, farewell.
I could have better spared a better man.
O, I should have a heavy miss of thee
If I were much in love with vanity.
Death hath not struck so fat a deer today,
Though many dearer in this bloody fray.
Embowelled will I see thee by and by;
Till then, in blood by noble Percy lie.
[Exit]
Falstaff riseth up.
FALSTAFF Embowelled? If thou embowel me today, I’ll give you leave to powder me, and eat me too, tomorrow. ’Sblood, ’twas time to counterfeit, or that hot termagant Scot had paid me, scot and lot too. Counterfeit? I lie; I am no counterfeit. To die is to be a counterfeit, 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. 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? Nothing confutes me but eyes, and nobody sees me. [Stabs the body.] Therefore, sirrah, with a new wound in your thigh, come you along with me. He takes up Hotspur on his back.
While Falstaff watches the battle between Hotspur and Hal, he is attacked by the fearsome Earl of Douglas. Fat Jack is a veteran warrior, but in his eighties and out of all reasonable compass. After a few defensive jabs at the hot termagant Scot, the wily sage of Eastcheap sensibly plays dead, thus saving his own life. There are few moments even in Shakespeare as glorious in depicting ambivalence. Hal has been saved the labor of handing Falstaff over to the hangman, and we do not wonder that his rueful farewell to his Socrates is rather less phrased in the accents of dignity than his salute to the once-fiery Hotspur.
Falstaff’s Resurrection is all the more magnificent as the great outcast rises up in the name of the true Blessing. Against Hotspur’s hysterical outcry of “Die all, die merrily,” we hear Falstaff’s “Give me life!” What scholars tend not to hear, the common reader and playgoer properly values as an affirmation of “the true and perfect image of life.”
The new Hal, now another heroic head-basher, makes clear his preference for Hotspur over Falstaff. Shakespeare does not take sides, but does any strong reader not prefer Falstaff to his renegade student Hal? I am concerned here, however, with Shakespearean self-staging by self-otherseeing, and that is precisely the Falstaffian triumph. He has staged his own death and resurrection by otherseeing Hal’s negative flowering into the royal dignity of power and broken friendship. Falstaff othersees what Hal is no longer concerned with accepting: the full range of human possibility. The Prince has absorbed more than enough from Falstaff to assist in the pragmatics of seducing his subjects:
PRINCE I know you all, and will awhile uphold
The unyoked humour of your idleness.
Yet herein will I imitate the sun,
Who doth permit the base contagious clouds
To smother up his beauty from the world,
That, when he please again to be himself,
Being wanted, he may be more wondered at
By breaking through the foul and ugly mists
Of vapours that did seem to strangle him.
If all the year were playing holidays,
To sport would be as tedious as to work;
But when they seldom come, they wished-for come,
And nothing pleaseth but rare accidents.
So when this loose behaviour I throw off
And pay the debt I never promised,
By how much better than my word I am,
By so much shall I falsify men’s hopes;
And, like bright metal on a sullen ground,
My reformation, glittering o’er my fault,
Shall show more goodly and attract more eyes
Than that which hath no foil to set it off.
I’ll so offend to make offence a skill,
Redeeming time when men think least I will.
[Exit]
One hardly knows which aspect of this soliloquy is most admirable: its audacious honesty or its palpable hypocrisy. It is a tribute to Shakespeare’s conception of Hal that his proud proclamation of hypocritical behavior helps persuade us of his emotional honesty of self-redemption. I take it that his reference to Saint Paul’s Ephesians 5:16, “Redeeming the time, because the days are evil,” is deliberately a touch blasphemous, though once he is crowned Henry V is much given to proclaiming his virtues as a Christian monarch. He is not Hamlet or indeed Falstaff, whom he destroys with sadistic zest in his public rejection. You could endlessly discuss both Hamlet and Falstaff on the questions of belief and disbelief, but Hal’s Falstaffian education falls away, and his inward being becomes as opaque to us as to the magnificent Henry V himself. No one in all of imaginative literature is as little concerned with rescuing himself from the flux of time and change as is the ever-early Socrates of Eastcheap. Time of course necessarily triumphs over Falstaff throughout Part II, until at last he kneels to the newly crowned King Henry V and is subjected to the public humiliation of rejection:
FALSTAFF God save thee, my sweet boy!
KING My Lord Chief Justice, speak to that vain man.
CHIEF JUSTICE Have you your wits? Know you what ’tis you speak?
FALSTAFF My King! My Jove! I speak to thee, my heart!
KING I know thee not, old man. Fall to thy prayers.
How ill white hairs becomes a fool and jester!
I have long dreamt of such a kind of man,
So surfeit-swell’d, so old, and so profane;
But being awak’d I do despise my dream.
Make less thy body hence, and more thy grace;
Leave gormandizing; know the grave doth gape
For thee thrice wider than for other men.
Reply not to me with a fool-born jest;
Presume not that I am the thing I was;
For God doth know, so shall the world perceive,
That I have turn’d away my former self;
So will I those that kept me company.
When thou dost hear I am as I have been,
Approach me, and thou shalt be as thou wast,
The tutor and the feeder of my riots.
Till then I banish thee, on pain of death,
As I have done the rest of my misleaders,
Not to come near our person by ten mile.
For competence of life I will allow you,
That lack of means enforce you not to evils;
And as we hear you do reform yourselves,
We will, according to your strengths and qualities,
Give you advancement. [To the Lord Chief Justice] Be
it your charge, my lord,
To see perform’d the tenor of my word.
Set on.
Exit King [
with his train]
FALSTAFF Master Shallow, I owe you a thousand pound.
I have winced at this all my life, particularly when I remember the expression on Ralph Richardson’s countenance as he suffered the shock and hurt of these bombasts. King Henry is all too aware of having mastered the public art in which self-righteousness congratulates its celebrator. There is a deeper drama playing out its final moment between Falstaff and his ungrateful foster son. It is hardly accidental that Falstaff, squatting in the dust, addresses the former Hal as “My Jove,” thus invoking the ancient myth of Old Father Time or Saturn being castrated by Jove, the leader of the Olympian gods. Falstaff, who knows everything, so knowingly sees and darkly accepts the end of his manhood at the hands of the only love he has been able to understand.
Return to Henry V’s rhetoric. It depends upon just the kind of social cant that power is constrained to use if we were to take this glorious monarch’s verbiage at all literally. Instead we are to read it as his self-otherseeing. Once, he was Hal, and now that role is forever gone. A newly crowned king, he stands between past and future. What looms ahead is the conquest of France, and lasting fame as the first true English king. Falstaff, however, kneels before a discarded past and a likely future wasting away into an early grave. Even at his worst moment he remains a true immanence, though now present to virtually no purpose. One wonders what Shakespeare would want us to feel and think as his most extraordinary creation, except perhaps for Hamlet, so suddenly reaches a full stop. But the dialectics of what I have called self-otherseeing give us a troubled awareness of Shakespeare’s drive beyond the pleasure principle. King Henry V’s icy dismissal of Falstaff has elements of a new strangeness, even in Shakespeare. The king assigns his Falstaffian phase to a bad dream, one that he despises after waking. He retains a curious anxiety in regard to Falstaff, who is not allowed to say anything: “Reply not to me with a fool-born jest.” And his new precautions in regard to his tutor are weirdly excessive. Falstaff is not to get within ten miles of the royal person on pain of death. The self-otherseeing here is of a mystery still dormant in the king.
Falstaff, for once in his entire career reduced to silence, heartbreakingly cries out, “Master Shallow, I owe you a thousand pound.” There is a story that Shakespeare achieved his financial independence by buying a full share in the Globe with that rather large sum advanced to him by the Earl of Southamptom, most certainly his patron and perhaps his lover.