A Pelican Book: This Is Shakespeare

by Emma Smith

  Falstaff’s claim to Hal’s – and our – affections here is in the claim that he is representative of ‘all the world’. No wonder then, in that age newly fascinated by globes, that he is fat. The suggestion that Falstaff represents a physical, self-centred enjoyment of existence identifies him with popular archetypes such as the Lord of Misrule or the embodiment of carnival. These operate within structures of inversion or excess that challenge normal hierarchies and protocols of self-discipline. An analogy with Homer might be helpful. Not, on this occasion the epic author, but the cartoon figure Homer Simpson. We all know that Homer Simpson is a loser, wastrel, an inadequate father and a positively dangerous worker at the Springfield Nuclear Power Plant. Here’s a few choice Homerisms: ‘Lisa, if you don’t like your job you don’t strike. You just go in every day and do it really half-assed. That’s the American way’; ‘Son, when you participate in sporting events, it’s not whether you win or lose: it’s how drunk you get. If something’s hard to do, then it’s not worth doing’; ‘Kids, you tried your best and you failed miserably. The lesson is, never try.’

  These are funny because they are counter-cultural. Their rhetoric is to set up a statement that seems to demand a pious answer. We have all heard – perhaps even heard ourselves delivering – the standard line: it’s not the winning, it’s the taking part. If at first you don’t succeed, try, try, try again. Homer’s rhetoric is funny because it is anti-climactic. He sets up a cliché morality, but completes it with his own realist, bathetic conclusion. That makes him attractive, precisely because he is not up to the ideals with which our culture bombards us, and because he therefore allows us, too, the leeway to fail. Now let’s compare these with one of Falstaff’s musings at the end of Act 5.1. Amid the chaos of the battle between the forces of the king and the rebellion of Hotspur and his associates, Falstaff is alone for a brief soliloquy. We are prepared. This is the point heavily cued by a structure of repentance elsewhere in the play, when we expect that the no-mark, the selfish, the drunk is going to come good. Falstaff is going to find reserves of honour, courage, nobility. He will be like that alcoholic Vietnam vet pilot who takes the suicide mission in Independence Day (directed by Roland Emmerich, 1996): a man who grasps a final chance at redemption when he realizes what’s really important, sets aside his selfishness and narcissism, and goes out in a blaze of glory.

  ‘What is honour?’ asks Falstaff rhetorically, at this moment of anticipated moral renewal. And then the bathos. ‘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’ (5.1.131–5). Falstaff ends this manifesto by describing it as his ‘catechism’ – a nicely ironic and subversive use of a statement of belief to puncture pious and clichéd definitions of honour and replace them instead with the pragmatic and selfish concerns of the vulnerable body. Like Homer, Falstaff sets up a rhetoric of piety and draws on our familiarity with the way we know we ought to behave; and like Homer again he deflates that expectation and tells the self-interested, taboo truth. Since this pragmatism would be so offensive to the martyr Sir John Oldcastle’s memory, it is easy to see how his family took exception.

  Falstaff’s popularity, then, is in part related to the fact that he is unapologetic and unrepentant. He embodies the larger anti-moralistic energy of theatrical production in this period that so annoyed preachers fulminating against theatres as ‘Satan’s synagogue’. But Falstaff also features as one aspect of a structuring principle of repentance, apology and recidivism in the play. 1 Henry IV is organized, like a number of dramatic and prose texts from the 1590s, around the popular biblical theme of the prodigal son. The theme of the prodigal comes from a parable in Luke’s Gospel. Jesus tells how the younger son of a rich man claimed his share of the inheritance before his father’s death and spent it in profligate city living. Brought to absolute penury by his reckless spending, he realizes that his father’s servants have a better life than he, and vows to return and throw himself on his father’s mercy, not as his son but his servant. But on his arrival home his father is so overjoyed to see him that he orders a great feast and the killing of the fatted calf in celebration, much to the chagrin of the older brother, who has had no such reward for his loyalty and consistency. The theme is a prominent one in 1 Henry IV: the prince’s impressive dedication to excess and riot rather than obedience to his father makes the paradigm clear. Implicit in the theme is the expectation of reformation: as in the parable, the prodigal will repent.

  We get an early indication that Hal intends to use this theology entirely strategically. At the end of his first scene (1.2), the prince delivers an unexpected soliloquy. He has been laughing and joking in prose with his tavern companions, particularly Falstaff, their banter in pronounced contrast to the constipated formal verse of the opening court scene. But after the others have left, he stays on stage to deliver a long speech about his intentions:

  I know you all, and will a while 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 promisèd,

  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, glitt’ring 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.

  (1.2.192–214)

  It’s a wonderful speech, riffing on the contrast between the prince’s apparently dissolute lifestyle and his steely determination to change his ‘loose behaviour’ when the time comes. Like the sun – a traditional symbol of monarchy – he allows clouds to obscure his majesty so that he shines more brightly when people are eager to see him. Like precious metal set off against a dull background or foil to make it look more desirable, his ‘reformation’ will be all the more attractive. Like a holiday, or other rare occurrence, new Hal will be the more desirable because unusual. The language is part religious: ‘reformation’, ‘redeeming’, ‘fault’, offence’ – Hal is thinking about the prodigal son narrative. It is also part mercantile: ‘debt’, ‘promised’, ‘foil’, ‘attract’; Hal thinks of himself as a commodity needing its value inflating. It’s a masterclass in manipulation. He is stage-managing his reformation for maximum effect, a self-conscious prodigal who knows that the worse his behaviour is now, the greater the sense of welcome when he turns over that new leaf. And this speech echoes the blank verse world of the court – established in the previous scene and in the scene immediately following this soliloquy – to align Hal with his royal birthright. I’m only slumming it in the tavern. I know my rightful place. In time I will emerge to claim it. We could read this as successional reassurance: no need to worry about the apparently unregal behaviour of the Prince of Wales; it’s all under control; order will be restored. But it also has a chilly quality. The forgivably human element of the biblical prodigal son that’s missing here is its authenticity. The original prodigal did both parts – the spendthrift years and the humiliating return – sincerely and wholeheartedly. Hal has it all planned out in advance.

  In moral and structural
terms the play probably needs to end with Hal’s repentance and reconciliation with his father. And to some extent it does. Hal assumes the proper role of the Prince of Wales in the climactic battle at Shrewsbury against the rebel forces. He fights alongside his father and, in a Shakespearean invention not found in the historical sources, protects him against attack by Douglas. The terms of King Henry’s gratitude are striking: ‘Thou hast redeemed thy lost opinion’ (5.4.47), a phrase that echoes ‘redeeming’ in Hal’s earlier speech and suggests that the anticipated time of the Prince’s reformation has now come to pass. In fact, the father and son Henrys have already showed themselves to be more similar than different (which, as in many families, is of course the root of their disagreements): King Henry berates his son for being too ‘stale and cheap to vulgar company’ (3.2.41), for being too visible and therefore not sufficiently respected. The language of strategic self-concealment as an attribute of effective authority is common to both men’s understandings of their power. But in its final scenes, the play makes good on the promise of reformation and steps back from it. In King Henry and Falstaff, the play has established that there are two incompatible father-figures with whom Hal needs to reconcile.

  1 Henry IV is deeply concerned with real and imagined relationships between fathers and sons. There’s Northumberland and his son Hotspur as well as King Henry and his son Hal. But when King Henry wishes, at the outset of the play, that the brave Hotspur were really his son, and ‘that it could be proved / That some night-tripping fairy had exchanged / In cradle clothes our children where they lay’ (1.1.85–7), his wish for an alternative son legitimates Hal’s own wish for an alternative father. Falstaff’s court of misrule in Eastcheap is full of the warmth, wit and, yes, sack (a kind of sherry) that is singularly absent from the war-wearied king’s council. When Douglas fights first Henry IV and then Falstaff at Shrewsbury, we can see that the two figures are being brought together towards resolution (although they never appear on stage at the same time). What is striking is that while Hal does align himself with his royal father, he does not quite manage the related step of distancing himself entirely from Falstaff. He has the opportunity to reveal Falstaff as a shameless and dishonourable coward, who has claimed Hotspur as his own kill by stabbing his corpse callously and dragging it off to claim the reward. But Hal does not take this decisive chance. At the end of the play he is still caught between his two alternate fathers.

  That Hal’s own reformation is compromised by this ambivalence is made clear by the existence of the sequel: in Part 2, Hal reunites, temporarily, with Falstaff, and his behaviour continues to disappoint his royal father. And perhaps Falstaff’s physical size and the difficulty of denying him come together here: Falstaff’s bulk makes it more difficult for Hal to turn away from him. The moral thrust of the play and its dramatic energies are in conflict. A morally conclusive ending requires the rejection or defeat of Falstaff, whereas a dramatically satisfying one does not want to see him go. It may be that Shakespeare has been too successful: he has allowed the play’s antagonist, Falstaff, to claim centre stage. Versions of the Henry IV plays that put him at their heart take their cue, perhaps, from Orson Welles’ brilliant tragi-comic biopic Chimes at Midnight (1965), a combined adaptation of the plays organized around Falstaff, played by Welles himself. Such a focus on Falstaff substitutes for Shakespeare’s conflicted moral telos of the prodigal, a crowd-pleasing focus on the anti-hero.

  The end of 1 Henry IV is no ending at all. Hal and his father have been reconciled, and, at least for now, Hal has behaved in a princely manner. He has dispatched his rival, the rebel Hotspur. One Henry down, one to go. But just as this battle is not the whole war, and just as the last lines of the play see the king reorganizing his forces to continue the fight against the rebels, so too Falstaff is an unresolved and perhaps unresolvable figure. To adapt a phrase from a different context, perhaps he is simply too big to fail. In the Shrewsbury encounter with Douglas, Falstaff falls down as if he were dead, and he lies among the battle casualties for some moments. Hal delivers a eulogy on the dead Hotspur and then on Falstaff himself, with a last nod to his size: ‘Could not all this flesh / Keep in a little life?’ (5.4.101–2). The prince leaves the stage, apparently believing his old acquaintance to be dead, at which point the stage direction reads, Falstaff ‘riseth up’. The word ‘riseth’ is wonderfully descriptive – Falstaff takes on a kind of unkillable or immortal quality – here he is the spirit of life itself, as Bloom would have it. Striding away from the dead of the battle, he resists the historical process that would kill him too. Hal’s opening remarks to Falstaff – ‘What a devil hast thou to do with the time of the day?’ (1.2.6) – have here their serious echo: Falstaff is not subject to time, or to history. Adapted beyond recognition from the Lollard knight Oldcastle, he is not really a historical figure. It is almost as if he operates in a different world from the other characters. Falstaff’s fatness is, then, finally a challenge to historical pragmatism, the leanness of cause and effect. He is an anti-historical excess intruding on a history play, just as the character of Falstaff impedes the patterns of succession that structure historical progress. His bulk blocks historical progress, so we are not quite yet ready for the glorious redemptive reign of Hal as Henry V. The result? Even more Falstaff, in 2 Henry IV.

  CHAPTER 9

  Much Ado About Nothing

  Shakespeare writes some fabulous villains. Richard III, Iago in Othello and Edmund in King Lear are all energetically amoral figures whose iniquity is elevated into a compelling personal credo. They are alluring and terrifying in equal measure, drawing other characters into their nihilistic world, demonstrating the awful entranced complicity of villain and victim. They represent a horrifically plausible evil that is always one step ahead of goodness, and they are brilliant, bravura, charismatic stage presences. Well, sometimes. But not in this case. The villain of Much Ado About Nothing, Don John, seems to be phoning it in. Criticisms of Keanu Reeves’s performance of the role in Kenneth Branagh’s sunny film (1993) as ‘wooden’ really miss the point: it’s not Reeves who is wooden but Don John himself, and in capturing that peculiar stiltedness, his is actually a brilliant performance. So why is everyone in the play world of Messina taken in by this poor man’s Iago, this wannabe Edmund, this budget Richard – and how might their collective credulity help us understand the specific undercurrents of romantic comedy in Much Ado?

  Let’s start with some analysis of Don John’s role in the play. Much Ado About Nothing opens by bringing together two distinct gendered worlds, when the returning soldiers under Don Pedro’s command billet in Messina, home to old men and young women. A declarative stage direction names ‘John the bastard’ as one of the brigade (1.1.90). He is largely silent, until he is welcomed by Leonato, Governor of Messina. This silence comes straight from the Shakespearean villainy playbook: in other plays, we see Iago and Edmund as taciturn onlookers in long scenes to which they hardly contribute but from which they gather intelligence to furnish their traps. We discover that there has been bad blood between Don John and his legitimate brother, Don Pedro, but that they are now reconciled (it’s not clear whether this argument between the brothers was the substance of the wars, or a sideline, since we never hear about their cause). John’s reply professes ineloquence: ‘I thank you. I am not of many words, but I thank you’ (1.1.150–51). The play’s attention shifts to the matchmaking of Claudio and Leonato’s daughter Hero, and to some jockish bantering with Benedick, a prominent soldier in Don Pedro’s army.

  We then see Don John in full villainous mode talking to his henchman, Conrad. John defines himself here by a kind of saturnine melancholy, claiming that his ‘sadness is without limit’ (1.3.4). Disdaining the silencing ‘muzzle’ (30) of the peace terms with his brother, Don John commits himself instead to a radical policy of self-revelation. In contrast to those Shakespearean villains who admit they are not what they seem (or even, Iago-like, ‘I am not what I am’ (Othello 1.1.65)), Don John states that h
e is incapable of dissimulation: ‘I cannot hide what I am. I must be sad when I have cause, and smile at no man’s jests’ (1.3.12–14). He’s a curious kind of villain, characterized by disclosure rather than concealment: ‘I am a plain-dealing villain’ (29–30). News arrives that Claudio, described as Don Pedro’s ‘right hand’ (45), is to be married. Don John sees that ‘this may prove food to my displeasure’: ‘That young start-up hath all the glory of my overthrow. If I can cross him any way I bless myself every way’ (60–63). Because Claudio has substituted for Don John in Don Pedro’s affections, Don John will plot to undermine the wedding.

  As we’ve seen before, the boy-meets-girl structure of romantic comedy doesn’t quite capture Shakespeare’s approach. Often it’s girl-meets-boy for starters, but then there are the boy-meets-girl-and-this-really-messes-up-his-boy-pals or even boy-meets-girl-who-will-have-to-do-since-the-boy-he-really-wants-is-off-limits versions. That’s to say that romantic comedies, produced by Renaissance dramatists including Shakespeare for a largely male audience, major on male–male relationships. Much Ado About Nothing is a fine example of this Shakespearean genre of bromantic comedy, as Don John reveals. His plot is established within a network of rivalrous male bonding that structures the entire play. Don Pedro has already told Claudio that he will woo Hero on his behalf, and this courtship is a negotiation between Claudio, Don Pedro and Leonato, with Hero herself barely figuring. The couple are never seen speaking together on stage until the scene of their marriage ceremony, and Don Pedro’s triumphant declaration, ‘Here, Claudio, I have wooed in thy name, and fair Hero is won. I have broke with her father and his good will obtained. Name the day of marriage’ (2.1.279–81), seems to miss out something important, not least Hero’s unambiguous consent. In part, at least, Hero is silent because she’s irrelevant: her existence merely seals the deal between the powerful men and secures the network of male relationships at the heart of the play.