When the Prince becomes king, Falstaff’s heart is broken because he is denied an opportunity for advancement. Yet opportunity gave him life, allowing him the liberty even to play the king and rebuke Hal for his misdeeds, but all that is part of the Saturnalian game, of an underworld that in reality is aware of the way the world works and doesn’t much like it. So there is an earthy common sense about self-preservation in the portrayal of a figure who actually questions the prevailing notions of ‘honour’ which lead to other men’s deaths and could lead to his own in war:
Well, ’tis no matter, honour pricks me on. Yea, but how if honour prick me off when I come on, how then? 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 a-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.
(1 Henry IV, 5.1.129–41)
Spotlight
In contrast with this underworld is the fragile political world of King Henry IV, a king troubled by the behaviour of his son Hal and the security of his throne. It would be wrong, however, to consider these two interweaving worlds as in competition with each other. The fact that the Saturnalian is incorporated into the political world at the end of 1 Henry IV does not invalidate its purpose. Do we believe that once the fairies have done the work expected of them in A Midsummer Night’s Dream they no longer exist?
We know fairies do not exist, of course, but they do in the context of the play in performance. We know that Falstaff dies in Henry V after being rejected by Hal at the end of 2 Henry IV, but he still retains a presence in the work of art, which is a point that Elizabeth I herself apparently registered.
During 2 Henry IV the King dies but the principle of kingship remains, sustained by the strategic advice to Hal to unite the country against a foreign foe. But by the end of Henry V, the Chorus tells us that all the victories secured by the new king are subsequently lost by Henry VI, as earlier the three Henry VI plays have shown.
Perhaps those who do not appreciate the Falstaffian world, seeing it only as a contributory factor to the development of a great prince, risk falling into the trap of believing that these characters on stage have an extra-theatrical existence and are ‘real’ people. Falstaff is not Sir John Oldcastle, nor is Shakespeare’s Prince Hal the Prince of Wales who became Henry V, the victor of Agincourt, and who tragically died young. They are linguistic representations, reconstructing the past as a means of understanding the present, and, as Kiernan Ryan has pointed out, extending the future.
‘In these works we perceive Elizabethan realities transposed into the history of Henry IV, then filtered through the lens of futurity, which twists the plays out of line with convention and into their proleptic form. Parts 1 and 2 of Henry IV afford us nothing less than a preview of the past. They project us forward to a point where we can grasp Shakespeare’s version of his times as the eventual past of a still unfolding future.’
Ryan, K. (2002: 66)
THE STORY IS NOT ENOUGH
These plays all work as great examples of art though the ages, like the anticipated fulfilment of love in the expectation of a kiss depicted in the static decoration of Keats’s ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’, or like the characters of Michelangelo’s Prisoners (Michelangelo died in 1564, the year that Shakespeare was born) – freeing themselves to emerge from the marble of which they were sculpted.
Spotlight
We have reached a point in our journey through Shakespeare where we perceive that the story is not enough. As a younger man in conversation with the contemporary abstract artist Bridget Riley, I asked her who was the most influential artist on her work, expecting her in my naivety perhaps to say Mondrian, but her razor-sharp reply was ‘Rembrandt, of course.’ I realized that she saw beyond the form of the Rembrandt self-portraits, for example, to the ways in which they were constructed and that within those constructions lay the real art. So it is with Shakespeare.
2 Henry IV opens with Rumour, who habitually distorts the truth when addressing the audience:
Open your ears; for which of you will stop
The vent of hearing when loud Rumour speaks?
(1–2)
and within that play we find Prince John of Lancaster accused of distorting his ‘word’ in order to gain victory without the bloodshed of his soldiers. The rebels, or traitors – and more later about the word ‘treachery’ in Chapter 20 on Macbeth – are immediately arrested once the army is dispersed. They had not listened to what Prince John has said to Hastings:
You are too shallow, Hastings, much too shallow,
To sound the bottom of the after-times
(4.2.50–51)
and so when they complain of their eventual treatment he is able to deflect their argument:
I promis’d you redress of these same grievances
Whereof you did complain; which, by mine honour,
I will perform with a most Christian care.
But, for you rebels, look to taste the due
Meet for rebellion and such acts as yours.
(4.2.113–17)
This is no distortion of the ‘word’ but rather the ‘word’ is defined by the powerful, those who draw up the contracts and then enact them. In Shylock’s case, in The Merchant of Venice, he tries, as we have seen, to be too clever in order to have his revenge on Antonio, but here Prince John is upholding the authority of his father, to whom he refers as God’s ‘substitute’ (4.2.28).
Henry V
The term ‘God’s substitute’ is one that causes Henry IV some anxiety since he had deposed and had murdered God’s substitute, King Richard II. Even though in Act 4 of Richard II Bolingbroke says ‘In God’s name I’ll ascend the regal throne’ (4.1.113), this anxiety remains throughout the Henry IV plays and accounts for the King’s political troubles. It is an issue that surfaces again in Henry V where King Henry V prays before the Battle of Agincourt:
Not today, O lord,
O not today, think not upon the fault
My father made in compassing the crown!
(4.1.288–90)
and goes on to say that he has had Richard reburied and paid for prayers for his soul. Even though things have moved on, the issue remains and causes Hal some difficulty on the eve of the famous battle against the French.
POLITICAL JUSTIFICATION FOR WAR
What justification is there for this war? In the opening scenes of the play, the Church, represented by the Archbishop of Canterbury, makes a long and complex case for the war, which Henry needs in order to invade France. But why does Canterbury do so? Because, as the opening scene demonstrates, the Church is likely to lose ‘the better half of our possession’ (1.1.8) through an act going through the Commons (Parliament). The King has the power to prevent the act, so he has been promised money by the Church for the war on which he wishes to embark. Canterbury and Ely’s exaggerated admiration of the King in Act 1, Scene 1 shows the Bishops to be flatterers in the cause of their ecclesiastical self-protection, as much as the convoluted justification over the important issue of succession for going to war gives the King the authority for the invasion he wishes to undertake. This is the complex politics of yesterday, of today and of the future as time moves on at its steady pace.
THE PRICKING OF CONSCIENCE
A counterpoint to the dissembling is provided, however, when, before the great Battle of Agincourt, the King wanders in disguise among his troops. Here he encounters an ethical challenge from Michael Williams, one of his soldiers, who states:
…if the cause [of the war] be not good, the King himself hath a heavy reckoning to make when all those legs and arms and heads chopped off in a battle shall join together at the latter day and cry all ‘We died at such a
place’ – some swearing, some crying for a surgeon, some upon their wives left poor behind them, some upon the debts they owe, some upon their children rawly left…Now if these men do not die well it will be a black matter for the King that led them to it, who to disobey were against all proportion of subjection.
The King attempts to refute the soldier’s argument with different analogies, claiming that:
…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. Besides, there is no king, be his cause never so spotless, if it come to the arbitrement of swords, can try it out with all unspotted soldiers.
(4.1.132–9, 141–4, 153–9)
Does this exchange help to support a case for this being a subversive play, swinging the pendulum away from the Tillyardian heroic image we discussed in Chapter 12? Some critics, for example James Shapiro, Michael Wood and Katherine Duncan-Jones, direct attention from that line of questioning by pointing rather to the real expectation of the Earl of Essex as he sets out at the time of the play’s composition for what would prove his disastrous campaign to quell the Irish rebellion. The point, however, is that this dialogue raises some important questions about the responsibility of the monarch, and Hal’s response sounds hollow. It is worth noting that while Bates’ and Williams’ arguments are substantive, they remain loyal to the King. Here, in Henry V, the subversive role of Falstaff in questioning the values of war and honour (1 Henry IV, 5.1.129f.) is taken up by one of those ‘mortal men’ who, at Agincourt, could become ‘food for powder’ (1 Henry IV, 4.2.65–6).
‘For a populace increasingly weary of being ruled by a slow and cautious old woman [Elizabeth I], Henry V re-enacted the greatness England had once achieved under a young King who was full of energy and military zeal. Henry’s triumph at Agincourt also figured the triumph that many hoped would soon be achieved by Elizabeth’s young favourite, Essex, in crushing the rebellion of Tyrone O’Neill in Ireland.’
Duncan-Jones, K. (2010: 125), Shakespeare: An Ungentle Life. London: Methuen Drama
To an extent all the critics are right: Hal is a heroic king but there is also a subversion of that myth; there is an historical context but this play, as with the other plays, gestures towards a future in performance through the centuries, as it accumulates meanings that result from the pressures of historical context. This is the art of William Shakespeare’s theatre, more accomplished than any dramatist before or since, in anticipating future meanings, but at the time of composition and first production, no doubt the dramatist’s mind was able to turn quickly to the resurrection of Falstaff, if that was what the Queen, or even the market, required of him.
Key idea
We should regard and evaluate Shakespeare’s English history plays not as ‘histories’ but as works of art, which can be endlessly refashioned and reinterpreted, looking to the past, the present and the future.
The Merry Wives of Windsor
In 1893 Verdi premiered his opera Falstaff, with a libretto by Arrigo Boito, based on The Merry Wives of Windsor and elements of Henry IV. Boito wrote a commentary in which he states that this adaptation is true modern and Latin lyric drama (or lyric comedy), which allows for an outpouring of grace, strength and gaiety. What was happening with the musical reorientation of the Shakespearean drama was, it appears, a luxuriating in the essence of what Boito and Verdi saw as an Italian tradition behind even the Shakespearean text, to create something different, a new form of communication based on an old one, creating in the process a new artistic masterpiece.
FALSTAFF IN LOVE
However, what Shakespeare had done was exactly the same when he responded – if the story is true – to Queen Elizabeth’s demand that he should write a play about the character Falstaff in love. In 14 days, the legend goes, either after completing Henry V or between writing 1 Henry IV and 2 Henry IV, Shakespeare, luxuriating in what lay within the figure of Falstaff in his Henry IV plays, now created something different in The Merry Wives of Windsor. Using a different dramatic language and creating a different experience – and one that seems to have been heavily ironical – this play has an overweaning Falstaff being punished for his presumption by the honest (and ‘merry’) wives of Windsor.
SAME APPEARANCE, DIFFERENT FUNCTION
If you compare the character of Falstaff in The Merry Wives of Windsor with that in the Henry IV plays, you may grasp that the creation of character involves both context and genre. Falstaff in a comic play serves a different function from Falstaff in a history play. He becomes, despite his name and outward appearance, a different character. He is in a different, not a sequential play.
The structure and ambience of The Merry Wives of Windsor, however, appears different also from other Shakespearean comedies. This is Shakespeare’s only middle-class (bourgeois) domestic comedy. It does not operate according to the formula he uses, for example, in many of the comedies or romances from The Comedy of Errors to The Tempest, where he employs particular comic templates to frame the structure. The structure of The Merry Wives of Windsor is different in the way it uses a number of strands that compete for our attention. Here we are not, as in the Henry IV plays, embroiled in debates about the ethics of political power struggles which in themselves expose either the ethical vacuity or the ethical uncertainty of a civilization. Rather, we are confronted with a tradition of stock types or dramatized figures that go back, as Boito says, to Latin lyric comedy, to Giovanni Fiorentino and to the tragic farce of commedia dell’arte which was later to spawn such nineteenth-century operas as Pagliacci and Falstaff.
We have in The Merry Wives of Windsor the man fearful of his wife’s infidelity, the female trickster, the affected lovers, the duping of a husband, the joy of a romp, an escape in a buck (laundry) basket, the cross-dressing of Falstaff as a woman, the conjuration of a fairy story, the darkness of a wood, all jumbled together and hinting at the traditional Shakespearean comic structure but finding it an impossible formula to follow for the farce that is being energetically enacted.
The play provides an opportunity in this regard for hilarious acting. Falstaff’s account to Ford of his plight in the ‘buck’ (laundry) is a great piece of comic writing for the actor playing the part (3.5.82–114). We also have the only Shakespearean scene where ‘drag’ definitely takes place as Falstaff, disguised as the old woman of Brentford, Mother Prat, is beaten out of doors by Ford, ‘I’ll prat her!’ (4.2.172–3). As Wells (2012: 111) notes, it is the single example in the Shakespearean canon where we can be certain that a man rather than a boy dresses as a woman. This is because the actor, who is a man, is in character and that character dresses as Mother Prat. Although not to the liking of Puritanical authorities, it is good popular entertainment, seen in comedy to the present day. Yet the stock characters themselves force on us the Saturnalian comic power of classical comedy, mixing it with English mythology: the fairies and the comic jolly fat man who in Victorian times becomes the image of Father Christmas.
Here in The Merry Wives of Windsor, perhaps a drama written for the Queen, we see the versatility of Shakespeare’s art as an example of the kaleidoscopic patterning prevalent throughout his writings in whatever genre. It rarely fails to please, allowing scope for some virtuoso comic acting but demonstrating also some often hilarious virtuoso scripting by an author enjoying the relief of writing something a little different.
16
Critical perspectives 4: Tragedy – some modern critical challenges; Titus Andronicus (1591–2)
Tragedy exposes, in one form or another, from one ideological viewpoint or another, issues relating to individual identity within or as framed by the society that produces it and participates in it – as performer, reader, student, actor or audience. This and the following chapters on tragedy are necessarily selective in the line of enquiry taken and are designed to stimulate your thoughts and reactions to Shakespearean tragedy.
Through
our discussion of the history plays you will have already encountered a modern critical movement known as new historicism. Stephen Greenblatt began his book, Shakespearean Negotiations (Oxford, 1988) with the sentence ‘I began with the desire to speak with the dead.’ No sooner, however, do you express the desire to engage with the past than your present ‘voice’ becomes entangled with those with whom you wish to converse. This is, perhaps, one of the paradoxes of the new historicist literary critical movement of the last two decades of the twentieth century and the first of the twenty-first: the history it seeks to uncover to elucidate an understanding of Shakespeare and his contemporaries is one being explored from the perspective of ‘the present’, and commentators impose their present sense of pattern and values on the past. But if this is so for us, it was also the case for Shakespeare, as we have seen in his history plays and indeed also in his tragedies, where he sees the past through the lens of his (and his culture’s) current concerns.
Aristotle
The title pages of the early editions of some of Shakespeare’s tragedies refer to them as ‘tragical histories’. To understand the nature of tragedy it is useful to keep in mind the paradox of reading history or, indeed, of reading critics reading history. Traditionally, critics, in attempting to define tragedy, have tended to go back to Aristotle’s Poetics and his definition of tragedy and particularly his notion of catharsis.
‘Tragedy is an imitation of an action that is admirable, complete and possesses magnitude; in language made pleasurable, each of its species separated in different parts; performed by actors, not through narration; effecting through pity and fear the purification of such emotions.’
Shakespeare- a Complete Introduction Page 19