Age in Love

by Jacqueline Vanhoutte

  At the theater, such verbal resonances were substantiated, quite literally, by the actor who likely personated Falstaff: the clown Will Kempe, who had been a member of Leicester’s troupe, and whom Sir Philip Sidney referred to familiarly as “my Lord of Lester jesting plaier.”113 Kempe’s Bottom must have shaped the reception of Kempe’s Falstaff, prompting returning spectators to compare Falstaff’s relationship with Hal (or with the merry wives) to Bottom’s relationship with Titania.114 Shakespeare exploits Kempe’s past in other ways, too. Hal draws attention to the clown’s former employment when he notes “how ill white hairs becomes a fool and jester” (2 Henry IV, 5.5.48). Kempe had been with Leicester at his court in the Netherlands (according to News and other sources, a carnivalesque place of “quaffing” [148], more like a tavern than a place of business), where the earl used the clown to entertain local magnates fond of drinking, gaming, and rioting.115 Spoken by this former servant, the remark about knowing an old host (or an old ghost, in the alternate reading of this line) damned for being merry thus takes on a topical cast. References of this sort served as “the animating spark” of early modern clowning, and, according to Robert Hornback, Kempe had developed a special knack for satirizing the puritans associated with his former employer.116

  Even the garments Kempe wore may have evoked his deceased patron for members of the original audience. A conversation between Falstaff and Pistol in the crucial moments before Hal’s rejection calls repeated attention to what Falstaff’s clothing “doth infer” or “show” (1 Henry IV, 5.5.13–14). As Jonson’s “popular breeches” show, old clothing repurposed as theatrical costume carried its history on to the stage, where it could materialize relations with court figures, thus exposing these to the audience’s collective judgment. Such old clothes inferred a “world of social relations,” carrying with them memories which had the power to “mold and shape” the wearers “both physically and socially.”117 Actors were alert to these powers and used them to produce certain effects. Henry Wotton felt that Globe actors who showed like “Knights of the Order with their Georges and garters,” for example, made “greatness very familiar, if not ridiculous.”118 When Falstaff dreams about having “new liveries” made (5.5.11) as he stands “stained with travel, and sweating with desire to see [Hal], thinking of nothing else, putting all affairs else in oblivion, as if there were nothing else to be done but to see him” (5.5.24–27), we are made to take special note of his costume.119 Alluding to Elizabeth’s motto—“’Tis ‘semper idem’” (5.5.28)—Pistol frames the tableau of the devoted old knight in his sweaty shirt as a reenactment of previous events, a staged memory. Did Kempe don his old livery garments, adorned with the Dudley bear and ragged staff, to play Shakespeare’s fat favorite?120 And did the clown in staging the dream “of such a kind of man, / So surfeit-swell’d, so old, and so profane” (2 Henry IV, 5.5.49–50) put on the manners of his ex-patron, a man infamous for embodying these traits, notorious for his breach of generational decorum, known to have been killed, as Falstaff fears that he will be, both with “hard opinions” and “a sweat” (2 Henry IV, epilogue 30–31)? Whatever the answer to these questions, we might see in Leicester’s jester playing Falstaff the embodiment of the theater’s commodification of court materials.

  Leicester was a natural candidate for such treatment, not only because of his notoriety, but also because of his deep associations with the theater in general and fools in particular. According to his critics, the earl was a man “full of colors, juglinges, and dissimulations” who had earned the queen’s favor through his talent for “shewes” (News, 156, 144), and who therefore had an affinity for “harlotry players” (1 Henry IV, 2.4.395–96).121 These constructions of the earl as a man of the theater had, as we have seen, a basis in fact. Leicester had presided over key events in the development of the theater as an institution, including the grant of the first royal license in 1574. In this document, the queen awarded special privileges to Leicester’s troupe in exchange for “the recreation of oure loving subiectes [and] for our solace and pleasure.”122 The man accused of elevating himself by serving the queen’s “filthy lust” thus procured the social elevation of actors, so that they could serve the queen’s “pleasure.”123 Leicester also furnished Elizabeth with her official fool, Richard Tarleton, who served the queen’s pleasure so efficiently that he became Groom of the Chamber and Master of the Fence.124 The licensed fool and the licentious favorite occupied similar positions in relation to the queen: both agreed to humiliate themselves to elevate themselves. The homology between earl and actor, favorite and fool, struck observers, like the author of News, who makes “Tarlton his ruffin” a member of the earl’s seedy entourage in hell (155). Critics have long linked elements of Falstaff’s characterization to the foolery of Tarleton and Kempe.125 Falstaff’s taste for histrionics and his talent for self-promotion—he hopes to translate his talent for counterfeiting into an earldom or a dukedom and to immortalize himself in printed ballads with his “own picture on the top” (2 Henry IV, 4.3.48–49)—reflect their enterprising former patron as well. Collapsing the distinction between fool and favorite, Shakespeare gives us in Falstaff a “ruffin” (2 Henry IV, 4.5.124) who is both Leicester and jester, a royal minion confident of his ability to please “the gentlewomen” but understandably more anxious about his reception with men (2 Henry IV, epilogue, 23–24).126

  The network of connections tying Leicester to the theater must have registered differently with Shakespeare and his colleagues than with the authors of opposition tracts, a factor that helps account for the ambivalence and ambiguity in the character of Falstaff. When polemical writers made a taste for histrionics a component of the earl’s notorious identity, they meant no praise to the earl or to the theater: in their hands, “age in love” is an antitheatrical trope, which conflates dramatic performance with categorical transgression, attributing both to the queen’s Circean powers. If the incident with William Storage offers any indication, in 1588 members of the earl’s troupe viewed attacks on his “raggyd staffe” as attacks on themselves: they identified their professional fortunes with his reputation, which they defended.127 Nearly a decade later, with Leicester dead and that reputation destroyed, and with the theater staking out a new and more independent position for itself, matters had gotten more complicated. Whatever Shakespeare and Kempe were up to with their “Sir John Paunch” (1 Henry IV, 2.2.66), they were not in the business of defending or attacking the historical Earl of Leicester. Like Joseph Roach’s Betterton, the multiply-ghosted figure of Leicester’s jester playing Falstaff may have functioned instead as a kind of “effigy” to “gather in the memory of audiences.”128 Leicester’s notoriety showed “perpetual infamy” to be a hot commodity; “loud Rumor,” a “pipe / Blown by surmises, jealousies, conjectures” upon whose “tongues continual slanders ride” (2 Henry IV, prologue, 2–16), seems always to leave people wanting more. Strikingly, Shakespeare’s unholy goddess figures slander as a kind of political “news,” brought by “the wind, [her] post-horse,” to an eager public which spreads “from the orient to the drooping west” (2 Henry IV, prologue, 38, 3–4). The metaphor of the wind, which, as we saw in the last chapter, was used by Lyly and Sidney to describe verbal assaults on Leicester, conveys the boundlessness associated with the circulation of slanderous materials among potentially infinite strangers. Thanks to the invocation of Rumor, for the duration of 2 Henry IV, the audience in Shakespeare’s theater is made coterminous with this virtual public of “open . . . ears,” eager to be stuffed with “false reports” (prologue, 1, 8). All become avid consumers of Rumor’s news, who taste of the “contempt” that she inspires and assume the feelings of “moral superiority” that she retails.129

  Although the queen’s councillors worried about notoriety and wise individuals tried to avoid it, Shakespeare harvested its perpetuating and leveling energies to theatrical ends.130 He is predictably self-conscious about this development. When Poins and Hal secretly observe, laugh at, and pass
judgment on the “strange” disjunction between Falstaff’s age and his sexual desires, the metatheatrical device highlights a shared, voyeuristic fascination with the clownish spectacle of senescent male sexuality. This self-reflective moment illustrates the process by which a violation of sexual and generational norms transforms individual spectators into a critical public, defined and elevated by its collective adherence to rules of social and moral decorum. According to Hobbes, laughter on such occasions results from “the sudden glory arising from some sudden conception of some eminency in ourselves, by comparison with the infirmity of others.” Earlier thinkers, too, had commented on the emancipatory force of communal laughter; in a passage decrying the tendency of plays to extend “judgement” to “the worste sorte,” Stephen Gosson rebukes defamatory depictions of real people that provoke the “wonderfull laughter” of the “commen people.”131 Even Falstaff comments on the socially productive force of laughter, which he relies on to secure his position with Hal: “I will devise matter enough of this Shallow to keep Prince Harry in continual laughter” (2 Henry IV, 5.1.78–80). 2 Henry IV dramatizes the power of the theater to unite and elevate its audience through “continual laughter.” Made privy to the conversation between Hal and Poins, the audience is invited to pass judgment by laughing with the prince. The common work of enforcing social norms through laughter suspends class divisions, so that Shakespeare’s audience momentarily participates by means of theatrical proxy in the “being of the sovereign.”132

  As Poins’s offer to “beat” Falstaff “before his whore” (2 Henry IV, 2.4.257) suggests, the figure of the old man in love also instills a desire for more spectacles, of a distinctly punitive kind. There was a vogue for such spectacles at the turn of the sixteenth century: Merry Wives, Twelfth Night (1601–2), Hamlet (1600–1601), The Revenger’s Tragedy (1607), and Antony and Cleopatra (1608) are all extended exercises in beating old men before their whores. By dwelling on the sexual subjection of their elders, and reducing these bloat men to “huge hill[s] of flesh” (1 Henry IV, 2.4.243), Hal, Poins, Hamlet, Octavius, and Vindice claim the masculine authority associated with disembodiment for themselves. Barbara Freedman wonders why “Shakespeare was interested . . . in writing about clownish male sexual humiliation and punishment.”133 One answer is that this theatrical pattern appealed to disenfranchised, second-generation Elizabethan men, weary of (or eager to reflect on) their double subjection to the queen and her aging minions. Like Poins, who remembers with pleasure “how the fat rogue roar’d” when Hal describes Falstaff “sweat[ing] to death” (1 Henry IV, 2.2.108–9), or the writer of News, who fantasizes “Munsur Fatpanche” subject to eternal fiery torment, these younger men must have enjoyed watching their elders burnt in effigy.

  While Hal’s “I know thee not, old man” (2 Henry IV, 5.5.47) may mark a collective reaction to the Elizabethan regime, it had more intimate implications for Shakespeare and his colleagues. The age-in-love trope helped them not just to capitalize on but also to distance themselves from their own institutional past, tainted by the very condition that glamorized it: service to the moon’s pleasure. In this context, Falstaff’s desire for new livery signals a shift in institutional allegiance from the patronage system to the public theater. His old shirt, soon to be discarded, becomes a reminder of the duty, obedience, and service owed the infamous earl. The parricidal themes that attend Hal’s rejection of Falstaff suggest Shakespeare’s adulterating awareness of the treachery involved in this process. The Falstaff plays coincide with a period of transition in the history of the theater, which culminated with the 1598 edict “allowing” only the Lord Chamberlain and the Lord Admiral’s men, a “watershed” event that Richard Dutton argues changed the status of shareholders in these companies, lifting them from a vagabond state to a “privileged position.”134 Before they secured this position, the artisans of the newly professionalized theater had occasion to reflect on their ambiguous status in relation to the court. Although their former patron had become a target of widespread satire, he may have also functioned as an aspirational model for these theatrical artists, who, like Falstaff and Bottom, sought to translate their histrionic talents into social and material advantage. Kempe playing Falstaff is, among other things, a servant parodying his deceased master to secure the patronage of a new one, the paying audiences of the public stage: at once an image of a kind of petty treason, an eloquent and multifaceted figure of love and betrayal, and a poignant reminder of how close the “harlotry players” had once been to the celebrated queen.

  In his final moment in the histories, Falstaff conveys the ambiguity of his position by kneeling, “before you”—that is, the mixed audiences of the theater—“but indeed, to pray for the Queen” (2 Henry IV, epilogue, 16–17). In this posture Falstaff recalls iconic representations of courtly submission, like the Leicester pictured in Gascoigne’s Noble Arte, or the epilogue of Endymion, who encourages the entire audience to “not only stoop, but with all humility lay both our hands and hearts at Your Majesty’s feet” (15–16).

  Submitting to the audience of the public theater instead, Falstaff highlights the ways in which Shakespeare’s customers have usurped a place of authority formerly reserved for the queen. Falstaff goes on to note that “all the gentlewomen here have forgiven me” (2 Henry IV, epilogue, 22–23), a comment that conflates the women in the audience with that queen, implicitly inviting men to reach a different conclusion.135 By emphasizing the function of gender in the exercise of good judgment—only “good wenches” would place Falstaff among the “men of merit” who “are sought after” (2 Henry IV, 2.4.375)—the history plays call the queen’s qualification for good rule into question. At the same time, however, Shakespeare shares in Elizabeth I’s fondness for self-dramatizing old men, since his Sir John Paunch is no mere “Munsur Fatpanche.” A strong toil of affect (guilt, melancholy, nostalgia, admiration) modulates what had been, until Shakespeare came to it, a straightforward satiric trope. Even the coldly rational Hal finds that “were’t not for laughing” he “should pity” Falstaff (1 Henry IV, 2.2.110). Shakespeare turned the national pastime of baiting courtly old men into a profitable theatrical venture, a process that involved a recalibration of the theater’s relation to the structures of power and to the concepts of recreation and pleasure. Falstaff is the self-identified “lugg’d bear” who facilitates this transaction, but whose fecund charm, self-conscious wit, and inexhaustible talent for “shewes” also threaten to undermine it. Since drama, unlike polemics, thrives on ambiguity and conflict, this tension made for a successful stage formula. If early responses offer an indication, Falstaff achieved instant immortality, becoming a prime mover in establishing his author’s reputation and conjuring the enduring public to which we—along with Elizabeth I—belong.136

  Fig. 5. George Gascoigne, The Noble Arte of Venerie or Hunting (1575), 133. By permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library.

  Often disregarded in analyses of Falstaff, Merry Wives best illustrates Shakespeare’s conversion of scandalous material into renewable forms of theatrical pleasure. Perhaps the Cobham controversy emboldened the playwright to develop features of his knight left latent in 1 Henry IV. Although Falstaff eats and drinks to excess in that play, the erotic aspects of his surfeit are subsumed in a series of jokes and in his Endymion-like propensity for napping on stage. The Circe/Elizabeth figure associated with the age-in-love pattern is relegated to the margins of the play, where she takes the shape of the Welsh lady, whose speech is “as sweet as ditties highly penn’d / Sung by a fair queen in a summer’s bow’r” (3.1.206–7).137 In his perceptive analysis of 1 Henry IV, Garret Sullivan argues that the Circe myth haunts Shakespeare’s representation of the relation between Hal and Falstaff. While Sullivan contends that Falstaff plays “both tavern Circe and dangerous male favorite” to Hal, Falstaff himself casts Hal as the enchantress, at least if we take his observations that he is “bewitch’d with the rogue’s company” and that “the rascal” has “given me medicines to m
ake me love him” (2.2.17–19) as referring to the young prince.138 Falstaff’s associations with bestiality, effeminacy, and idleness identify him, meanwhile, as a stereotypical victim to the classical goddess.139 Hal further emphasizes this pattern by bestowing animal monikers on his favorite and by categorizing Falstaff as a “latter spring” (1 Henry IV, 1.2.158), a preposterous old man who, having failed to observe the natural “race and course of age,” espouses lusty behavior inappropriate to “hys due tyme and season.”140

  The patterns marking Falstaff as an aging lover in 1 Henry IV are concretized in 2 Henry IV and amplified in Merry Wives. Where in 1 Henry IV identifies Falstaff as “a whoremaster” (2.4.469), who “went to a bawdy-house not above once in a quarter—of an hour” (3.3.16–17), 2 Henry IV stages the lecherous (Leicesterous?) aspect of the royal favorite, and provides him with a “quean” who loves him “better than . . . e’er a scurvy young boy of them all” (2.4.272–73). And Merry Wives gives the amorous aspect of its aging antihero free reign: a “greasy knight,” “well-nigh worn to pieces with age,” Falstaff nevertheless determines to play the “young gallant” (2.1.108, 21–22). The command to show Falstaff in love (whether or not Elizabeth issued it) is thus far more perceptive, and the characterization of Falstaff more consistent, than critics normally allow.141 The farce returns the old man in lust to the context of female domination: the “female-controlled plotting . . . parallels the Queen-dominated court politics,” while magnifying “the pattern of provocation, deferral, prohibition, and frustration found in the cult of Elizabeth.” This is the context in which Falstaff—like the queen herself “inclining to threescore” (1 Henry IV, 2.4.425), and, as W. H. Auden remarks, way too old to be Hal’s favorite—belongs.142