The Shakespeare Wars

by Ron Rosenbaum

  But again the best, most complex defense of Falstaff I’ve found is Orson Welles’s Chimes at Midnight. Welles’s unspoken strategy is to play Falstaff as a kind of melancholy comic Lear, the fond, foolish old man revealed finally as a failed fantasist in the rejection scene at the close of Henry IV, Part 2. One of the most cruel, heartbreaking moments in all Shakespeare and perhaps Orson Welles’s finest moment on film.

  It comes at the close of the play as Falstaff charges into the coronation procession that will crown his old tavern buddy Prince Hal, King Henry V.

  It’s the moment Falstaff has been banking on, literally. He’s borrowed a thousand pounds from Justice Shallow on his supposedly rich prospects once his pal the Prince becomes King.

  But characteristically, he can’t contain himself. As soon as he spots the King he cries out, interrupting the solemn coronation procession: “God save thy Grace, King Hal! My royal Hal!… God save thee, my sweet boy!… My King, my Jove! I speak to thee, my heart!”

  To which the newly serious King replies with cold and controlled wrath:

  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.…

  I know thee not, old man. Even in its cruelty there is an echo of something more, something almost Bottom-like: “I have long dreamt of such a kind of man.” He says, “I do despise my dream.” And it is the antithesis of Bottom still enchanted by his dream. But in its very overstatement one almost hears a hint of regret and loss that must be surmounted.

  Bloom tells us we must choose sides as in a game show, we must “hate” Hal (as he does) for rejecting Falstaff. Or for using Falstaff and then rejecting him. But Falstaff would be less significant if he were not counterpoised against Hal’s calculation and Henry IV’s Machiavellian authority. If those powers were not real, if it were not a play about clashing perspectives rather than about the deification of Socrates, it would not be much of a play. It would be a one-man show.

  Jack O’Brien on the other hand doesn’t feel it necessary to take sides for or against Hal or Falstaff as Bloom does. Without saying so, I think he thinks it’s a little childish. O’Brien sees and values the complexity of both because their relationship is at the heart of the drama within the comedy within the history.

  And O’Brien sees not just the complexity, but the difficulty of Hal’s role when compared to the easier crowd-pleasing Falstaff’s. He told me he tells actors who play Hal that “your satisfaction is not going to be from getting the love of the audience at the curtain call, but afterward, backstage, when you’re removing the makeup and you realize what a difficult task you’ve pulled off.”

  What O’Brien said he was seeking when he cried out, “You can’t have him, Harold!” was to restore these complexities beyond simplistic love and hate to his Hal and his Falstaff.

  Perhaps this is another instance of what Jonathan Bate calls “both/and” ambiguity as opposed to “either/or” ambiguity. Or an instance of what Norman Rabkin, one of the most perceptive critics of the late twentieth century, called “the rabbit/duck” paradox. He was referring to the famous Gestalt psychology line drawing which looked at one way appeared to be a rabbit, while the same figure looked at another way appeared to be a duck. One pattern, two birds. Falstaff, a fat rabbit/duck.

  But for some, one must choose sides, and the debate continues: the entry in the 2002 Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare’s History Plays frostily declares that Falstaff comes to represent a world of “degeneracy” and that his “presumptuous” behavior and “unconcern,” even delight, at the death of others “cannot be condoned.”

  Strong moralizing words from a usually dispassionate academic source. Perhaps a “You can’t have him, Harold” reaction to Bloom’s suffocating sanctimonious embrace of his antinomian god.

  A judiciously compressed summary of the debate over Falstaff can be found in Columbia scholar David Scott Kastan’s introduction to his Arden edition of Henry IV, Part 1. He asks, is Falstaff “the vitalist truth teller who exposes the life-denying lies of power”—the Bloom view—“Or is he the disruptive force of misrule who threatens the hope for order and coherence?”

  Jack O’Brien has a slightly different slant on the “disruptive force of misrule” vision of Falstaff.

  He doesn’t have a moralist’s disdain for Falstaff, he doesn’t share in Johnson’s denial of his generosity; my impression was that he wanted to rescue Falstaff’s roguishness from the kind of Higher Rectitude Bloom ascribes to him. And that “disruptive force of misrule” sounds almost a bit too principled and energetic. O’Brien sees him rather as more of a lounge lizard.

  He told me that when he was talking to Kevin Kline about Falstaff and Prince Hal, and how their relationship began, he evoked a kind of fifties Rat Pack Las Vegas analogue. JFK, the Young Prince hanging out with entertainers and “actresses” and rogues in some after-hours joint equivalent to Falstaff’s tavern, listening to some fat comic like Don Rickles crack Sinatra up, and thinking, “I want to hang out with this guy.”

  And “that guy” enjoying the fact that he had the heir on the hook, but not without some genuine friendship developing between the two.

  O’Brien sees Falstaff as someone who metaphorically knows how to sing for his supper—keeps the party going afterward, a knowing sycophant. What I liked about the notion was that it restored to Falstaff some of the venality of the character that gets lost in effusive delight in his subversive wit and celebration of hedonic existence.

  And O’Brien versus Bloom was a particularly interesting clash because most of the contentions I’ve dealt with herein have been between scholar and scholar or between director and director. But here it was scholar contending with director over the padded embodiment of an actor, over the way to construe the bloated and overlarded body of Falstaff. Or as the headline writer put it in the piece I did for the Times: “Corrupt Buffoon, or Joyous Liberator? Kevin Kline Waddles into the Falstaff Wars.”

  The Struggle

  I mention this because the piece was written and published while the struggle was still going on in rehearsals, before the first previews in fact, and so made public and probably more self-conscious the tug of war over the role.

  In the conclusion of The Times piece I’d asked Jack O’Brien if he was trying to wrest Falstaff away from Bloom’s imprisoning embrace.

  “Oh I assure you,” O’Brien said, “Falstaff doesn’t need my help at all.”

  But as it turned out, it wasn’t that easy. Not judging by some moments of the rehearsal process recounted to me by O’Brien and his dramaturge collaborator Dakin Matthews, who had done the three-and-three-quarters-hour-long conflation of the two parts of Henry IV.

  “One feature of Falstaff’s seductiveness,” O’Brien said at one point, one that he keeps discovering in rehearsal, “is this expansive quality: you know when you read something and then you get it up on stage it somehow changes, and even though … I’ve done this version before, when you get it into three dimensions, Falstaff keeps unfolding.”

  Unfolding and,
if not resisted, enveloping.

  Part of the challenge of containing Falstaff comes from the decision to compress the two Henry IV plays into a single evening with two intermissions. Compression itself is not uncommon but not uncontroversial.

  “My friend Nick Hytner,” O’Brien told me, referring to the new director of the Royal National Theatre in London, “was appalled when he heard we were cutting at all. Why not do it in two evenings? What I couldn’t say to him was that for them [in the U.K.] these characters are as familiar as Jefferson, Hamilton and Aaron Burr are to us. So it’s different.”

  In the United States, if a Henry IV play is done at all, it’s most often the more crowd-pleasing Part 1, which ends with Falstaff fraudulently triumphant and leaves out the more melancholy, dying fall of Part 2, with its climactic rejection scene in which Hal banishes his heartbroken fat friend when the Prince is crowned Henry V.

  It’s harder to get American theaters—and audiences—to commit to two evenings, two parts, Richard Easton (who played Henry IV in this production) told me. He thought it was these logistical hurdles that prevent the Henry IV plays from getting the level of appreciation they deserve—even though they represent Shakespeare at a peak of creativity that rivals the better-known Hamlet and Lear.

  Compression is one solution to putting the entire trajectory of the two plays before a single audience in a single night. It’s a tradition with a long history in fact: a manuscript of the two plays compressed into one long one, dating to 1622, just six years after Shakespeare’s death, has come to light (the “Dering manuscript”). Whole books have been devoted (without resolving the question) to the mystery of whether Shakespeare composed the two parts of Henry IV as separate plays or (as the late textual scholar Harold Jenkins argued) began writing a single play and then realized, halfway through what is now the first part, that he would need two parts to contain its richness.

  The problem with compressing the two parts, the problem that O’Brien and Dakin Matthews confront, is that most compressions, like Orson Welles’s Chimes at Midnight, tend to make the two plays into a single Falstaff play (indeed, Chimes was released in America under the title Falstaff).

  Matthews’s compression, first produced some thirty years ago (when Kline saw it as a student at Juilliard), has been a work in progress. O’Brien directed a version at the Old Globe in 1995, with John Goodman as Falstaff. The advantage of the Matthews version is that it preserves the balance between Falstaff and the other major characters. However, in the rehearsal process, the challenge is to control Falstaff’s expansiveness. That was the problem with the scene they had been working on the day I had dinner with O’Brien and he declared, “You can’t have him, Harold.”

  That scene is the long, comic confrontation (in Part 2) between Falstaff and the Lord Chief Justice, representative of order and good governance in the play. In which Falstaff, fresh from fraudulent heroics on the battlefield, repeatedly baits the Lord Chief Justice about his age and health. They had tried to cut it at a table reading, but “when we put it up on its feet” in rehearsal, O’Brien said, they couldn’t resist giving Falstaff more laugh lines back. Falstaff’s part fattened up, although eventually, according to Matthews, “we had to cut it back,” put Falstaff on a diet.

  That day it was O’Brien who couldn’t resist the enchantment of Falstaff’s stage turns; often it was Kline who wanted to allow Falstaff full Bloom, so to speak. “I practically have to flail Kevin with a cane because he keeps wanting to restore bits,” O’Brien told me.

  Matthews talked about several other strategies they have used to contain Falstaff’s seductiveness. One is to emphasize often-overlooked colder, darker notes in his character, those that emerge more saliently in the second part of Henry IV. There, as Matthews puts it, “he’s no longer expansive—he’s sponging off the powerful, he’s squeezing the powerless.”

  There’s the matter of Falstaff’s cold indifference to the fate of the draftees who serve under him in the civil war. He’s extracted bribes from those who can afford to buy their way out of the war, and then conscripts the poor and weak, dismissing them, at one point, as “food for powder,” mere cannon fodder. More likely to die because he’s taken the poor and unfit over the strong who pay to get out. He shows no remorse that their deaths fattened his purse. Nor at mutilating the dead body of Hotspur to bloody his sword, the better to fake his claim for the kill.

  “Jack [O’Brien] has been trying to contain the sentimentalism and emotionalism,” Matthews told me. “You know, most scholars disagree with Bloom’s view” that Falstaff’s life-affirming, personality-creating greatness is the heart of the matter in Henry IV, and that the Henry IV plays are a celebration of hedonic subversion, of wit and play as the supreme human qualities.

  In the attempt to achieve balance, Matthews says, Falstaff’s cruelly dismissive “food for powder” line “is still in there.”

  He adds, “It’s interesting, Kevin was kind of waffling on how badly he wanted Falstaff to be portrayed in the martial stuff, and he put a fair amount of the negative stuff back in, and then took some of it out.”

  Indeed the play would turn out to be defined by Mr. Kline’s mediation of all the complex contentions over the fat knight.

  The Outcome

  And so it was, but in a more complicated way than I could have imagined.

  I was fortunate to see both the third preview of the Lincoln Center production and the very last performance. Two Falstaffs separated by two and a half months. And I saw two different Falstaffs. Each played by Kevin Kline, each more or less paying respect to his two respective mentors.

  I have to admit I felt a genuine state of suspense when I settled into my seat awaiting the opening of that third preview at Lincoln Center. Just how would Kline’s Falstaff reflect or reject O’Brien, Matthews, Bloom and a whole host of other Falstaffs’ influence?

  I found myself absolutely riveted on the very first extended moment of Kline’s appearance.

  It felt like Kline’s own invention and a beautiful one. A gesture really, a prolonged, painfully expressive, silent stage moment that spoke eloquently in silent pentameter of all the contradictions over Falstaff and all the complexities of Shakespearean pleasure.

  It was one of those moments that revealed how a gifted actor can find something Shakespearean between the lines on the page. Something that, once seen, is practically emblazoned in memory. It was the first moment we see Falstaff on stage, he’s sitting down on a bench. Kline’s heavy padding and the stiff leather jerkin over it had made him huge, a veritable rhinoceros. His wide white beard and graying pate had made him old.

  But it was his attempt, his infinitely labored, shuddering, gasping, grasping (on to others) attempt to lift his vast bulk—it was his attempt to stand up that made his Falstaff.

  You could hear the stiff leather creaking, you could almost hear the joints creaking, as he first once, then twice, tried to defy gravity and stand up. Defying gravity—in every sense of the word—has been what defined Falstaff. Defying gravitas. Suddenly gravity was having its cruel revenge: defying Falstaff. The entire arc of Falstaff’s life was compressed in that losing struggle to bear the unbearable weight of what the pleasures of the past had burdened him with. A revenge play starring gravity as the avenger.

  It was ridiculous at first, each oh-so-painful, oh-so-close failed attempt to levitate drawing more and more roars of laughter. It was at once sad and then pathetic. Then, somehow, courageous.

  It was the hangover from a sixty-year bender, ruefully acknowledged in his features, both the bender and the unbearable weight it has left behind in its wake. He was a wake for himself, gravity was digging his grave.

  He was an embodiment of the heavy burden of pleasure, the image of literally unbearable pleasure in Shakespeare.

  It’s all there in a kind of mini silent-Shakespearean comedy Kline had crafted. Almost like a Buster Keaton short: Falstaff Tries to Stand Up.

  Or was it a comedy? There is nothing in th
e playscript that calls for it. All we are told that is that scene 2 begins “Enter Prince of Wales and Sir John Falstaff.” Which seems to imply an already ambulatory Falstaff. Purists might object. But this moment could be said to precede that, it was done as a “reveal”—a previously darkened area of the stage suddenly lit to reveal the seated Falstaff beginning his struggle.

  A struggle that doesn’t work at first, it doesn’t work for several groaning attempts, it doesn’t work when assisted by a stout cane, it doesn’t work until he is helped unsteadily to his feet by members of his tavern retinue. (A subdued gesture toward the communal bonding of the libertine outlaws of Falstaff’s tavern world that have borne him up so that he was a kind of summation, or debauched emblem of their shared pleasures.)

  I don’t know, I was impressed by the balance, literal and metaphorical, brought to this moment, this Falstaff. Kline made that moment an essay about pleasure and the payment for pleasure, the complexities, the self-destructiveness of devotion to pleasure, the dark side of “unbearable pleasure.”

  And he played the rest of the role that night with that simultaneous evocation of both aspects of pleasure inflecting his words and being. I thought it was quite good, not a pure celebratory, neo-Bloomian Falstaff, not the attractive alternative melancholy Falstaff of Welles. Neither was it an anti-Falstaff one occasionally sees, merely corrupt and venal. But rather a rueful Falstaff, soldiering on in this jester role beyond the point of pleasure, into the realm of pain and regret for the sake of those depending on him for a laugh.

  I don’t want to oversimplify; I think Kline himself is responsible for what I liked best about his performance, but I thought I felt Jack O’Brien’s sensitivity to the duality of Falstaff and our response to him, the way he evoked, as Frank Kermode recently put it, “pleasure and dismay at Pleasure.”

  But this was a preview and I know performances evolve and so I made a point of seeing the very last performance of the extended run. This was nearly two months after the Times had published my piece about the contending visions of Bloom and O’Brien over Falstaff. In which I’d included some responses by Harold Bloom to Jack O’Brien’s “You can’t have him, Harold” outburst.