From its opening conversation about upstarts and coats of arms, laced with sexual and bestial innuendoes, to its allusions to the Actaeon myth and the Order of the Garter, to its final restaging of the paradigmatic bearbaiting scene, Merry Wives tightens the connections between its antihero and Elizabeth’s amorous minions. Falstaff no longer operates at the safe remove of history: worried about appearing ridiculous to the “fine wits” and “the ear of the court” (4.5.100, 95), he blurs the distinction between the action on- and offstage, encouraging the audience to indulge in “pastimes.” The setting and the language of the play abet this process by situating the characters in comparative relation to offstage courtly figures, including Leicester, who had been “constable” (4.5.119) of Windsor from 1562 until his death, and the “radiant Queen” (5.5.46) who often resided in its castle, the seat of the Knights of the Garter. When he imagines one female target as “a region in Guiana, all gold and bounty” (1.3.69), Falstaff likens his amorous ambitions to those of Ralegh and Leicester, who had parlayed their status as royal minions into profitable new world ventures.143 The fat knight also imagines playing the “cheaters,” or escheater, to the wives’ “exchequers” (1.3.70–71), framing his sexual opportunism as a lucrative form of royal service. Elsewhere, Mistress Quickly asks us to judge Falstaff’s preposterous courting style against that of “the best courtier of them all (when the court lay at Windsor) who could never have brought her to such a canary; yet there has been knights, and lords, and gentlemen, with their coaches . . . they could never get her so much as sip on a cup with the proudest of them all, and yet there has been earls, nay (which is more) pensioners” (2.2.61–77). Even her malapropism—“canary” for “quandary”—recalls the specific earls and pensioners, who for all their “alligant terms” and “wine and sugar” (2.2.68), failed to secure the lady’s agreement: Leicester and Essex, who translated their courtship of the queen into the right to farm customs on the Mediterranean wines of which Falstaff is so fond.144 Merry Wives imagines Falstaff as one in a long line of such amorous and ambitious “knights, and lords, and gentlemen” who court in vain, arguably the most memorable, and certainly the largest, Elizabethan embodiment of “age in love.”
As Shakespeare’s promiscuous layering of allusions and references indicates, his repurposing of the age-in-love trope in Merry Wives does not weigh in on particular conflicts among courtiers. Rather, the play’s handling of this trope, and of the bearbaiting motif associated with it, clarifies that it became bound up for Shakespeare with broader issues of memory, judgment, empowerment, and recreation. While all the Falstaff plays imagine the transgressive old man as a baited animal, in Merry Wives this baiting structures the plot.145 Falstaff’s first appearance follows an extended reference to bearbaiting, a “sport” Slender loves well (1.1.290), which sets the scene for the “public sport” of punishing the “old fat fellow” (4.4.13–14) in the final act. Slender prides himself on having “taken” an actual bear “by the chain” (1.1.295–96) but the play awards the honor to its middle-class wives, who are immune to Falstaff’s courtship, discerning in their judgment of him, and resourceful in administering punishment.
Like News, Merry Wives baits the courtly old bear loosed on Windsor not just for his “lust and luxury” but also for aspiring “higher and higher” (5.5.94–98)—for seeking, that is, to translate his sexual services into material advantage. For this violation of norms, Falstaff is both effeminized and dehumanized. The public nature of Falstaff’s punishment—other characters enact a play, in which he is dressed up, chained, beaten, pinched, and burned with fiery tapers—is important, and not just because it comically and hyperbolically combines the punishments meted out in Lyly’s Endymion and in the anti-Leicestrian tradition. Ever the cause of wit in others, Falstaff encourages the play’s characters to develop their powers of discernment. The tonic effect he has on the critical skills of these characters may be observed in their incessant attempts to categorize him and to devise appropriate infernal torments for him; like the members of Pluto’s assembly in News, Mistress Ford wishes that the “wicked fire of lust” would melt “him in his own grease” (2.1.67–68).146 Falstaff’s love of “gallimaufry”—his failure to distinguish between “young and old,” “high and low,” and male and female (2.1.113–15)—generates in others a corresponding need to make and enforce distinctions. In their unanimous condemnation of the amorous old courtier in their midst, the middle-class citizens of Windsor discover themselves, with a little help from the theater, as an adjudicating public.
For some members of the original audience, the pleasures of watching Falstaff play “the lecher” (3.5.144) must also have resided in the clever overhauling of motifs by now as worn as the old knight himself. As Falstaff himself observes, the materials out of which he is constituted test people’s ability to “invent anything that intends to laughter more” (2 Henry IV, 1.2.8). In Merry Wives, Shakespeare consciously challenges the virtuosity of his predecessors, inviting audiences to judge his inventiveness even as they judge his character. Like Sir Tophas and “Munsur Fatpanche,” Shakespeare’s fat man retains a page but the tiny foil is a “little gallant” (3.2.1) named Robin: an early modern Mini-Me. In Merry Wives’s rich trove of fat jokes and fantasized final judgments, the “gross wat’ry pumpion” (3.3.41), the sweating “Dutch dish,” “half stew’d in grease” (3.5.119), finds himself “damn’d in hell” (2.2.10) in ever more ways and for ever more reasons. “Old, cold, wither’d” (5.5.153) Falstaff rivals Sir Tophas in his taste for old women and Ovidian hyperbole (“O powerful love that in some respects makes a beast a man; in some other, a man a beast” [5.5.4–6]). Where Lyly’s miles gloriosus pursues two matrons seriatim, the polyamorous Falstaff thinks nothing of trying for two at once. Their husbands fail to register as obstacles; recalling the allegedly homicidal impulses of the “best courtier of them all,” Falstaff wishes that Mrs. Ford’s “husband were dead” (3.3.50). In another knowing wink at Leicester’s black legend, the transformation of Falstaff into a lover goes so against the grain of nature that he requires chemical assistance in the form of “kissing-comfits, and snow eringoes” (5.5.20). Eager to suit himself up as a lover, Falstaff ends up cross-dressed as both a woman and a beast—the wives of Windsor disguise him first as “a witch, a quean, an old cozening quean” (4.2.172) and then as a “male deer” complete with horns (5.5.17). When the assignation with his paramours ends with the arrival of some faux fairies and their “radiant Queen” (5.5.46), Falstaff is beaten as Corsites was in Endymion. Falstaff then lies down on stage with eyes tightly shut, a parody of Sir Tophas’s parody of Endymion. Thus is Falstaff, like his precursors on stage, and like the queen’s amorous “bere whelp,” “made an ass” in front of his women (5.5.119).
The concluding images of Falstaff as a baited animal or “brib’d-buck” (5.5.24) chained by an oak showcase Shakespeare’s synthetic, accretive, and relentlessly analogical mode of characterization. As an emasculated man dismembered by dogs, Actaeon is an analogue of the baited bear that the audience has been lead to expect ever since the barking dogs prompted Slender to wonder whether “there [be] bears i’ th’ town” (1.1.287). The allusions to Ovid trigger comparative readings of this scene, since the Actaeon myth was associated with courtiers given to “foule excesse of chamberworcke, or too much meate and drink,” to quote from Golding’s letter to his patron, that “Knyght of the most noble Order of the Garter.”147 Leicester’s taste for the Noble Arte of Venerie and ignoble acts of venery made Ovid’s “unluckie knight” (3.225) a natural point of comparison, moreover. The parallels became if anything more pronounced after Leicester died, since the death of Golding’s Actaeon inspires “much muttering” among survivors: “some thought there was extended / A great deale more extremitie than neded” while others “commended Dianas doing.” As was the case with Leicester, these incompatible judgments, which lead “eche partie” to “applie / Good reasons to defende their case” (3.308–9), result in a communal compulsi
on to revisit Actaeon’s story, who is thereby immortalized.
The Fairy Queen reinforces such analogic “pastimes” not only through her presence, which reintroduces the Circe/Diana figure to the central position she normally occupies in age-in-love tropes, but also through her long speech about the Order of the Garter. In it, she frames the tableau of the fat knight, crouching on “bending” knees, with the telltale chain around his neck, and surrounded by the fairies who beat him with fiery tapers, in heraldic terms. The fairy dance, she claims, is “like to the Garter’s compass,” containing the chained and baited Falstaff (5.5.65). Such a “ring” (5.5.66) was a familiar sight in London—knights of the Garter, including Essex, Leicester, and Hatton, adorned their arms, badges, and persons with it (in his many portraits, Leicester wears jewels emblazoned with the Garter motto). If we take the Fairy Queen’s speech as a stage direction, the fairies complete their provocative picture—the theatrical equivalent of what the Privy Council called a “slanderous device”—by writing “Honi soit qui mal y pense” using “flow’rs for their charactery” (5.5.69, 73).148 This tableau lampoons aristocratic devices generally and the infamous bear device specifically, cementing the relation elaborated in all three Falstaff plays between Shakespeare’s fat knight and Elizabeth’s favorite knights.149 Given the Order of the Garter’s legendary origins in a judgment passed on the sexual indiscretions of a monarch, Shakespeare realizes in Falstaff’s “trial” (5.5.89) a long-standing Elizabethan fantasy: to call a royal minion to public “accompt . . . to see what other men could say against him” (Leicester’s Commonwealth, 186). With characteristic dexterity, the playwright invokes the Garter motto’s retributive properties to engage the failsafe mechanism of satire, reminding those who judge that they are implicated in their judgments.150
As befits a play about wit, discrimination, and judgment, Merry Wives is written in the comparative mode: its multiple allusions and its metatheatrical moments suggest that “Fat Falstaff” has a “great scene” (4.6.16–17) because it is an incrementally better scene than previous ones. The play thus solicits aesthetic judgments as eagerly as it solicits political ones; by positioning Falstaff against a stage tradition that includes Bottom, Endymion, and Sir Tophas, Shakespeare encourages his audience to develop a discriminating appreciation for his evolving artistry. He is not just retailing courtly wares, but improving on them, turning the “public sport” of his theater into a vehicle for his empowerment as an author. When Falstaff is beaten for getting into the clothes of an old “quean”, more than one courtly old bear is baited. A master of the forms that Lyly pioneered, Shakespeare marks his superiority to the earlier playwright, whose works suffer by comparison from their exaggerated subjection to the queen’s “solace and pleasure.” Ben Jonson, who might be faulted for his lack of generosity but never for his lack of perceptiveness, saw just “how farre” Shakespeare did “our Lily out-shine.”151 Although he is a foundational figure of English drama, whose contributions Shakespeare spent years honing, Lyly is not treated with the critical respect accorded the younger generation of Elizabethan playwrights. His status as the queen’s chief theatrical panegyrist has something to do with that. We have learned to see unqualified praise of Elizabeth—of any monarch, perhaps—as unmanly and undignified, and we have been taught to want more from our plays. We want the pleasures attendant on judgment; no longer pleased to gaze on sovereignty, we expect to participate in it.
The standards for judgment extended by Merry Wives encourage audiences to reflect on the ways in which the Elizabethan court distinguished itself from the rest of English society with regard to gender and generational norms. In the history plays, Hal’s unlikely proclivity for a licentious old man, a cowardly “fool” who pretends to be a “valiant lion” (1 Henry IV, 2.4.227, 274) and likes to play at being “a perfect king” invites similar comparisons.152 Throughout, Falstaff assumes that he will become “Fortune’s steward” (2 Henry IV, 5.3.130–31), confident of “the countenance that [Hal] will give” him (5.5.7–8). The Falstaff plays go out of their way to solicit anxieties about the “man that sits within a monarch’s heart / and ripens in the sunshine of his favor” and who abuses “the countenance of the King” (2 Henry IV, 4.2.11–13). Shakespeare takes up the Catholic opposition’s fantasy of an anarchic England rent by a predatory royal favorite, “A Bearwhelp” who “will overturn all if he be not stopped or muzzled in time,” by playing on the fears that “the fift Harry” will “from curb’d license pluck / The muzzle of restraint, and the wild dog / Shall flesh his tooth on every innocent” (2 Henry IV, 4.5.130–32).153 But Hal ultimately refuses to countenance his minion’s hopes of preferential treatment or social advancement. The decision to “muzzle” Falstaff marks the way in which Shakespeare’s ideal (young, male) prince differs from his actual (old, female) one, who had allowed her “unmoseled” bear to feast at will.154 In contrast, Hal baits his fat favorite himself; in one of his prescient moods, Falstaff complains, “The young prince hath misled me. I am the fellow with the great belly, and he my dog” (2 Henry IV, 1.2.145–46). While the Henry IV plays tell “the story of the weaning of the prince from his dangerous male favorite,” as Sullivan puts it, they also glance askew at another story, that of a female prince unable to wean herself from hers.155 Hal’s dismissive comment about the presumably dead Falstaff—“I should have a heavy miss of thee / If I were much in love with vanity”—might even comment on the queen’s long-lived grief for her “fat . . . deer” (1 Henry IV, 5.4.105–7), whose final letter she kept by her bedside until the day she died. When Hal rejects Falstaff, he seals himself “into a steely performance as a king whose private affections appear to have been extinguished completely”—the kind of masculine monarch about whom disgruntled Elizabethans dreamed.156
Insofar as audiences caught these comparative “pastimes,” they were put in the delicious position of passing judgment on the “best courtier of them all,” a position that Elizabeth had tried and failed to reserve for herself. They were also invited to pass judgment on the queen, and to fantasize about her replacement, by a young man like Hal, who demonstrates his “right wits” and “good judgments” when he “turn[s] away the fat knight with the great belly doublet” (Henry V, 4.7.47–48).157 In this way, the wish for God to “send the Prince a better companion” always already entails the wish for God to “send the companion a better Prince” (2 Henry IV, 1.2.199–201). The members of the audience share in the vicarious pleasures of de Certeau’s historiographer, becoming virtual princes in the process.158 The theater’s usurping ambitions are made explicit in the final scene of Merry Wives, when an actor dresses up as the Fairy Queen to subject Falstaff to his final baiting. While the Queen of England could not bring herself to turn her countenance from her minion, her Shakespearean substitute, like Hal, shines brightly in the exercise of newfound authority.159
Although Falstaff’s long association with Elizabeth’s pleasure suggests that some first responders were alert to these political resonances, they need not have made the specific connection to Leicester for Falstaff to have his effect, since Shakespeare recreates the conditions of the controversy within the plays. Falstaff is a paradox in this regard: a fully detachable and timeless amalgam of timely materials—one reason perhaps that he always seems “outside of time.”160 In all three plays Shakespeare represents Falstaff as an already known quantity—an effeminate courtier, a creature of luxury, a “pampered glutton,” an opportunistic upstart, the rhetorical target of prince and commoner alike.161 To show this courtly bear baited is to call attention to how the phenomenon of notoriety, by encouraging “base comparisons,” “continual slander,” and “unsavory similes” (1 Henry IV, 2.4.250; 2 Henry IV, induction, 6; 1 Henry IV, 1.2.79), inspires broad-based participation in the political nation. Judging by contemporary anecdotes, Shakespeare’s audiences were quick to avail themselves of the tools that he had provided. Several high-ranking Elizabethan courtiers, including the Earl of Essex, used Falstaff to comment mockingl
y on the behavior of their peers. The Countess of Southampton wrote to her husband (Shakespeare’s patron) with the titillating gossip that “Sir John Falstaf is by his Mrs Dame Pintpot made father of a godly milers thumb, a boye that’s a heade and very litel body,” sounding for all the world like one of Shakespeare’s judicious wives.162 Merry Wives extends powers of participation to its female characters, provided they observe the social norms that Falstaff violates. Shakespeare’s depiction of his transgressive knight is at once politically radical and socially conservative, in other words—although, in the moments that Falstaff generates sympathy, Shakespeare also flirts with being politically conservative and socially radical.
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