by Harold Bloom
Though I find it useful to analyze both Falstaff and Hal by means of the idea of self-otherseeing, I am aware that neither has much in common with the possible shock of otherseeing in some of its multiple senses. Falstaff is so capacious that his otherseeing embraces both self and the reception by others. Hal, though developed so fully in King Henry V, is by comparison almost simplistic. Not that he lacks enigmatic qualities, as here, in his prayer (to call it that) before Agincourt:
KING [Kneels.]
O God of battles, steel my soldiers’ hearts;
Possess them not with fear. Take from them now
The sense of reckoning, if th’opposed numbers
Pluck their hearts from them. Not today, O Lord,
O not today, think not upon the fault
My father made in compassing the crown.
I Richard’s body have interred new,
And on it have bestowed more contrite tears
Than from it issued forced drops of blood.
Five hundred poor I have in yearly pay,
Who twice a day their withered hands hold up
Toward heaven to pardon blood; and I have built
Two chantries, where the sad and solemn priests
Sing still for Richard’s soul. More will I do,
Though all that I can do is nothing worth,
Since that my penitence comes after all,
Imploring pardon.
On what level of self-deception does this proceed? Most scholars regard it as altogether sincere, a judgment that for me summons up the spirit of the divine Oscar Wilde, who taught us that all bad poetry is sincere. Try to imagine Falstaff, Hal’s prime victim, as listening to this speech. But, then, King Henry V abounds in such epiphanies. The best comes after the dialogue between the disguised king and the soldiers Bates, Court, and Williams, and makes me wonder again at the perplexities in Hal’s nature:
Upon the King! ‘Let us our lives, our souls,
Our debts, our careful wives,
Our children and our sins lay on the King!’
We must bear all. O hard condition,
Twin-born with greatness, subject to the breath
Of every fool whose sense no more can feel
But his own wringing! What infinite heart’s ease
Must kings neglect that private men enjoy!
And what have kings that privates have not too,
Save ceremony, save general ceremony?
And what art thou, thou idol ceremony?
What kind of god art thou, that suffer’st more
Of mortal griefs than do thy worshippers?
What are thy rents, what are thy comings-in?
O ceremony, show me but thy worth!
What is thy soul, O adoration?
Art thou aught else but place, degree and form,
Creating awe and fear in other men,
Wherein thou art less happy, being feared,
Than they in fearing?
What drink’st thou oft, instead of homage sweet,
But poisoned flattery? O be sick, great greatness,
And bid thy ceremony give thee cure!
Think’st thou the fiery fever will go out
With titles blown from adulation?
Will it give place to flexure and low bending?
Canst thou, when thou command’st the beggar’s knee,
Command the health of it? No, thou proud dream
That play’st so subtly with a king’s repose,
I am a king that find thee, and I know
’Tis not the balm, the sceptre and the ball,
The sword, the mace, the crown imperial,
The intertissued robe of gold and pearl,
The farced title running ’fore the king,
The throne he sits on, nor the tide of pomp
That beats upon the high shore of this world,
No, not all these, thrice-gorgeous ceremony,
Not all these, laid in bed majestical,
Can sleep so soundly as the wretched slave,
Who with a body filled and vacant mind
Gets him to rest, crammed with distressful bread:
Never sees horrid night, the child of hell,
But like a lackey from the rise to set
Sweats in the eye of Phoebus, and all night
Sleeps in Elysium; next day after dawn
Doth rise and help Hyperion to his horse,
And follows so the ever-running year
With profitable labour to his grave.
And but for ceremony such a wretch,
Winding up days with toil and nights with sleep,
Had the fore-hand and vantage of a king.
The slave, a member of the country’s peace,
Enjoys it, but in gross brain little wots
What watch the King keeps to maintain the peace,
Whose hours the peasant best advantages.
It is rather difficult not to locate dissimulation in the royal suggestion that a slave sleeps more soundly than the thrice-gorgeous ceremonial monarch. One hears something parallel to King Henry V’s stirring if self-serving promise that even his common soldiers will achieve gentility by standing with him at Agincourt:
And Crispin Crispian shall ne’er go by
From this day to the ending of the world
But we in it shall be remembered,
We few, we happy few, we band of brothers.
For he today that sheds his blood with me
Shall be my brother; be he ne’er so vile,
This day shall gentle his condition.
And gentlemen in England now abed
Shall think themselves accursed they were not here,
And hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks
That fought with us upon Saint Crispin’s day.
My former student and research assistant Lauren Smith aptly compares this to the oration of Ulysses in the Inferno, in which he urges his veteran mariners to transgress and go beyond the limits of the known world in quest of new thresholds. When Tennyson in his dramatic monologue “Ulysses” relies upon Dante’s false counselor, he compounds this eloquence with that of Milton’s Satan. It is not that the ambitious and ideal English king has any touch of the Satanic, yet, like Dante’s Ulysses, he seduces his auditors and by charisma renders hyperboles into sublimities. He knows, as we do, that the “happy few, we band of brothers,” will not mingle Bates, Court, and Williams with Harry the King, Bedford, Exeter, and the other highborn warriors. But, as William Hazlitt remarked, we like King Harry in the play, where he is a very amiable monster.
All that remains in the King of Falstaff’s mentorship is the fat knight’s beautiful, laughing mode of speech. William Butler Yeats said of Henry V, “He is as remorseless and undistinguished as some natural force.” Hazlitt charmingly remarked, “He was a hero, that is, he was ready to sacrifice his own life for the pleasure of destroying thousands of other lives.” One recalls the nice detail that this authentic English hero allows himself to order the throats cut of all the French prisoners, and yet this scarcely matters in Shakespeare’s glorious pageant of English triumph.
G. K. Chesterton’s observation that Chaucer’s ironies sometimes are too large to be seen is even truer of Shakespearean irony. There is a kind of distancing throughout Henry V, even if we are aware of it only in certain perspectives. It is Sir John Falstaff’s ironic vision, even though he is present only in Mistress Quickly’s prose elegy:
HOSTESS 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. ’A parted even j
ust between twelve and one, even at the turning o’th’ tide. For after I saw him fumble with the sheets and play wi’th’ flowers, and smile upon his fingers’ ends, I knew there was but one way; for his nose was as sharp as a pen, and ’a babbled of green fields. ‘How now, Sir John?’ quoth I, ‘what, man! be o’ good cheer.’ So ’a cried out ‘God, God, God!’ three or four times. 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. 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.
This is the death of Socrates, whose yielding to the hemlock is attested by the disciple tracing its upward chill. No one else in all the West’s literature dies with the precise aura of Falstaff playing with flowers and smiling upon his fingers’ ends. I hear no irony in Shakespeare’s farewell to his alter ego, except its extraordinary placement in the chronicle of Henry V, that hymn to the glory of arms.
Falstaff never ceases to contemplate all of the roles he could play if Shakespeare were to allow it. What shatters the great wit is seeing the multiple realities of Hal, or, to put it most plainly, the love he cannot evade for the only son he ever will have. Hal, who has learned from Falstaff the secrets of otherness, reduces them to the pragmatics of usurpation.
Falstaff, though scholars scarcely note this, is an emblem of Shakespeare’s resistance to all premature conceptualizations of human potential. In that regard, his only rival is Hamlet—another monarch of wit, but in so negative a mode that the primary Falstaff is another cosmos entirely.
I used to spend, both in New York City and in London, many a Fundador-soaked evening in the company of my friend Anthony Burgess, a fellow Falstaffian. Burgess, equally devoted to Shakespeare and to James Joyce, tended to find Falstaffian elements in Joyce’s work but did not persuade me. Falstaffian writers are sparse. Burgess was decidedly one of them and created his splendid alter ego, the drunken bard Enderby, as his contribution to this tradition of heroic vitalism. I recall telling Anthony that for me Falstaff’s true precursors were Alice the Wife of Bath in Chaucer, and Panurge in Rabelais, though Shakespeare probably never read that exuberant forerunner. Directly contemporary is the Sancho Panza of Cervantes, yet he seems to me less Falstaffian than Don Quixote. Chaucer’s the Wife of Bath uttered the great outcry: “I have had my world as in my time.” I hear Falstaff in that, except that the Wife of Bath did not have the ill-fortune of investing her affection in Prince Hal.
The essence of Sir John Falstaff is that he overturns all expectations. Since he refuses categorization, I dismiss with relish the tiresome scholarly tradition of attaching him to literary traditions of the braggart soldier. Freedom in every sense is the quest of Sir John Falstaff. He fights for freedom from the state, from time, from death.
The Fat Knight has seen through every illusion. So has Hamlet, and yet to some extent the Black Prince is subject to our perspectivism, since we can see things in and about him that he cannot see for himself. Falstaff, as much as the Rosalind of As You Like It, has mastered perceptivism to the absolute degree, so that he is not subject to dramatic irony. There is a price. Hamlet’s nihilism concerns ultimates, but Falstaff’s is comprehensive and embraces origins, middles, and endings.
The ultimate testimony to Falstaffian transvaluation of all value is his obsession with the inevitable rejection from Prince Hal. The richest strain in the Falstaffiad testifies to Shakespeare’s awareness that he had to be read as well as seen on a stage. No one, however perceptive, could hope as a playgoer to absorb fully Falstaff’s allusions to the terrifying parable that Jesus utters in Luke which I excerpt here as Shakespeare would have read it:
There was a certeine riche man which was clothed in purple and fine linen, and fared wel and delicately everie day.
Also there was a certeine begger named Lazarus, which was laied at his gate ful of sores,
And desired to be refreshed with the crommes that fell from the riche mans table: yea, and the dogs came and licked his sores.
And it was so that the begger dyed, and was caryed by the Angels into Abrahams bosome. The riche man also dyed and was buryed.
And being in hel in torments, he lift vp his eyes, and saw Abraham a farre of, & Lazarus in his bosome.
Then he cryed, and sais, Father Abraham, gaue mercie on me, and send Lazarus that he may dippe y typ of his finger in water, and coole my tongue: for I am tormented in this flame.
But Abraham said, Sonne, remember that thou in thy life time receiuedft thy pleasures, and likewise Lazarus paines: now therefore is he comforted, and thou art tormented.
Besides all this, between you and vs there is a great gulfe set, so that they which wolde go from hence to you, can not, nether can they come from thence to us.
Geneva Bible, Luke 16:19–26
Sir John makes three overt allusions to this frightening parable. A more concealed recall comes when Falstaff, kneeling in the dust, is rejected by King Henry V, clad in royal purple. Most pungently, there is a fifth, when Mistress Quickly tells us Falstaff is “in Arthur’s bosom,” with Arthur displacing Abraham. In England, this parable is traditionally known as the story of Dives and Lazarus, where Dives is the late-Latin dives, “a rich man.” The leper of this fearsome parable is a different Lazarus entirely than the saint resurrected by Jesus in the Gospel of John.
This is so intricate a pattern of image and idea that only deep reading or indeed otherseeing could apprehend it. Falstaff, in a rather mocking way, is a Bible reader, but though he would like to scoff at this parable, he is too wise and knows it is a reading of his dilemma. Questions crowd upon us. Why does Falstaff choose the harshest version of Jesus in the Gospels? His fear transcends rejection in any ordinary sense and opens onto vistas of death-in-life, which is less acceptable to him than to any other Shakespearean figures. Falstaff is sheer being, a real presence not to be put by. His fierce outcry, “Give me life!,” is totally antithetical to the cosmos of the parable from Luke.
It is even more inimical to the spirit incarnate in Hal/Henry V. Doubtless my Falstaffian animus against that clean and clever lad doing his best to get on darkens my own reception of what I acknowledge is another great Shakespearean personality. I remember my late friend Frank Kermode, who bridled when I said to him that Prince Hal essentially wanted three things: the death of Henry IV, so as to secure the crown; the killing of Hotspur, so as to inherit all the “honour” that the northern butcher boy had accumulated; and to hang Jack Falstaff, so as to rid himself of an inconvenient mentor. Though tempted, Hal decides that it would be better if Falstaff died in battle, thus redeeming his disreputable life, to some degree anyway.
Falstaff is a survivor. He is so rammed with life that he will not die for any man’s persuasion. We begin to be deep in the twenty-first century, and continuously I think of Falstaff as I read the horrors of contemporary terror and warfare, particularly of the religious variety. To affirm more life above all else is the Falstaffian mode of self-otherseeing, since it grants primacy to what Emily Dickinson eloquently called “another way to see.”
Hamlet’s Questioning of Shakespeare
TO WHAT EXTENT do Shakespeare’s prime protagonists practice a more intense degree of self-otherseeing than most of us do in our daily lives? We, all of us, frequently are startled by what happens to us or by our apparently unintentional acts. Afterward we ask: Were these events or fantasies, or were they actions in the life of someone else?
Since Shakespeare’s characters who most stimulate us to meditation—Falstaff, Hamlet, Iago, Cleopatra—are also his most inventive, the gift of self-otherseeing is progressively stronger in them as we move from Falstaff through Hamlet on to Iago and Cleopatra. As I have remarked elsewhere, and will proceed to show in more detail, the sheer sublimity of both Lear and Macbeth makes m
editation upon them singularly difficult. They are driven by forces both cosmological and beyond, which engender a self-otherseeing on the frontier of turning into something else.
Hamlet breaks the vessels Shakespeare prepared for him, whether we take those globes to be the Second Quarto text, 1604–5, or the 1623 First Folio. Indeed, even the more rudimentary First Quarto of 1603 can barely contain the Black Prince. In the graveyard—act 5, scene 1 of the Second Quarto—we encounter a riot of self-otherseeing, as the Prince watches the formidable Gravedigger at his labors:
HAMLET There’s another. Why, may not that be the skull of a lawyer? Where be his quiddities now, his quillities, his cases, his tenures, and his tricks? Why does he suffer this mad knave now to knock him about the sconce with a dirty shovel, and will not tell him of his action of battery? Hum, this fellow might be in’s time a great buyer of land, with his statutes, his recognizances, his fines, his double vouchers, his recoveries. Is this the fine of his fines and the recovery of his recoveries, to have his fine pate full of fine dirt? Will his vouchers vouch him no more of his purchases, and double ones too, than the length and breadth of a pair of indentures? The very conveyances of his lands will scarcely lie in this box, and must th’inheritor himself have no more, ha?
Shakespeare, a man quick with a lawsuit, expresses a frequent disdain for lawyers. Yet the lawyer here is Everyman and Everywoman, someone who sings a duet with the undertaker, as Wallace Stevens phrased it. Hamlet’s cheerful brutality addresses our common mortality. Reciting this now, I substitute the skull of a professor and experience the disquiet of Hamlet the questioner.
There are several registers to Shakespearean self-otherseeing. The most common is a momentary conviction that what one sees is someone else’s glimpse of appearances. Darker is Macbeth’s mode, which is hallucinatory and can lead to the extreme of “Is this a dagger that I see before me?” Hamlet, subtlest consciousness in Shakespeare, frequently sees as no one else does, including the divided others within Hamlet himself.