Age in Love

by Jacqueline Vanhoutte

  As might be expected, given my claim, Falstaff’s self-consciousness about his own state of publicity is nearly unparalleled in the canon (only Cleopatra has a more developed sense of herself as a subject of public representation). The target of incessant rumors, Falstaff also threatens to resort to publicity to blacken Hal’s reputation through “filthy tunes” (1 Henry IV, 2.2.45–46). Hal claims that Falstaff is “known as well as Paul’s” (1 Henry IV, 2.4.526); Falstaff, meanwhile, wishes he knew where to find “a commodity of good names” (1 Henry IV, 1.2.82–83). Moments like these identify Falstaff’s perpetual infamy as a commodity, like Jonson’s “popular pants” or the books dedicated to Leicester sold at Paul’s. Falstaff himself represents his relation to the prince as a matter of public speculation: “here I stand,” he announces winningly, “Judge, my masters” (1 Henry IV, 2.4.439). That Shakespeare stages the loaded question of Falstaff’s rejection metatheatrically, as a matter enacted before a critical audience, speaks volumes about the role that he envisages for his theater, a role which aligns it with the new pleasures associated with the printing press, the device for continual reproduction that was changing the conditions of publicity in England. The analogy that Shakespeare posits between the treatment of Falstaff and the baiting of bears indicates that the playwright considered the sport of taking potshots at a public figure a lucrative form of entertainment.

  As the long history of commentary on Hal’s rejection of Falstaff demonstrates, Shakespeare’s comparatives do not always lead to easy judgments, however. Rowe notes that Shakespeare gives Falstaff “so much Wit as to make him almost too agreeable; and I don’t know whether some People have not, in remembrance of the Diversion he had formerly afforded ‘em, been sorry to see his Friend Hal use him so scurvily.”163 Like the bears to which he is compared, Falstaff has always conjured empathy from the burgeoning publics come to see him baited.164 What attracted Shakespeare to the figure of “age in love,” perhaps, is not just the way that this figure incited particular judgments, but also the ways in which it could be made to invite multiple judgments, and thereby defy or defer final judgment, generating instead a desire for more: one more insult, one more punishment, one more book, one play more, more debate, more analysis, more interpretation.165 Part Leicester, part Kempe, part Tophas, part Corsites, part Bottom, part Actaeon, part bear, and part woman, Falstaff is also uniquely himself, just like the “old, cozening” queen who allegedly wanted to see him, and all the old men around her, in love. That Falstaff has transcended the circumstances of his invention should not blind us to the topical overtones that align him with that other paradigmatic figure of “grey Iniquity” (1 Henry IV, 2.4.453–54), the Earl of Leicester. For one thing, these can illuminate old critical problems, including the question of why Falstaff is fat. Tending to these “pastimes” also allows us a glimpse into how that acquisitive, competitive, and synthesizing intelligence we know by the name of Shakespeare transformed the raw materials of an age into artistic products that have endured for a very, very long time.

  3

  Remembering Old Boys in Twelfth Night

  At the end of 2 Henry IV, Shakespeare makes a promise he does not keep—“to continue the story, with Sir John in it, and make you merry with fair Katherine of France” (epilogue, 28–29). The absence of reference to Henry V hints at an alternate version of history, a comic fairy tale in which Falstaff, and not the king, makes us merry by ending up with the princess of France. In actuality Shakespeare dispatches Hal’s favorite much less glamorously, with what amounts to an accidental hand job from a “quean” (2 Henry IV, 2.1.47). Mistress Quickly reports that she felt the ailing Falstaff’s feet, and then his knees, and then “up’ard and up’ard” but could not raise him, for “all was as cold as any stone” (Henry V, 2.3.23–26). Evidently, she lacks the powers of Lyly’s Cynthia to rejuvenate her favorite. The ending that Shakespeare devises for his lecherous old knight revises the ending of Endymion (1591) to conform to the most satiric strain of anticourt polemics. The status of Falstaff’s death as reported news, the quips about his lubricity, the jokes about his failing phallus, the debate about whether he is “in heaven or in hell” (2.3.8): all rehearse familiar material. Most damningly perhaps, like the “report” on the dead Earl of Leicester proffered by News from Heaven and Hell, Mistress Quickly’s description of Falstaff’s death reduces an old man fond of “handl[ing] women” to an inanimate object handled by women (2.3.36). George Bernard Shaw approved heartily, since in his view such is the fate of all old “soldiers broken down by debauchery.”1

  If Shakespeare was hoping thereby to contain his uncontainable creation, to “move on” as we say nowadays, the hope in which he dressed himself was drunk. No sooner does Mistress Quickly conclude but a spirited discussion breaks out among the characters concerning Falstaff’s habits and vices. Their need to “remember” Falstaff (2.3.40) is taken up by the play itself, which seems loath to give up altogether on his “jests, and gipes, and knaveries, and mocks.” Fluellen may have forgotten the name of the “fat knight” but Gower recalls it: “Sir John Falstaff” (4.7.48–51). While the memory of a great man may not outlive him by half a year, the memory of a funny one fares better in Shakespeare’s plays (even Hamlet has more to say about Yorick than about his father). The flurry of remembrances that attends Falstaff’s demise heralds his achievement of a peculiar immortality, of which Shakespeare must already have been aware.2

  In the wake of the Falstaff plays, other playwrights capitalized on Shakespeare’s success, creating derivative characters like the elderly braggart-soldier-turned-whoremonger Captain Shift, also known as “Master Apple-John,” in Ben Jonson’s Every Man Out of His Humour (1599).3 The original ending of that controversial play, likely censored by court authorities, mocks a scenario familiar from Endymion, The Merry Wives of Windsor (1597), and The Henriad (1596–99). Macilente encounters “a player impersonating Queen Elizabeth” and falls down onstage, “dumb and astonished.” The “lean Macilente” then imagines himself basking in the audience’s approval, becoming “as fat as Sir John Falstaff” (Every Man Out, SD 5.6, 5.6.134.)4 Every Man Out was performed at the Globe by the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, on the same stage and by the same actors as the Falstaff plays. According to Marvin Carlson, dramatists draw on audience’s memories of previous performances in this manner “to measure themselves against work of the past or to establish their position within a tradition.”5 Macilente’s “ghosting” of Falstaff is consistent with Jonson’s other attempts at antiquating his older rival, like his turn to Aristophanic “Vetus Comoedia” (Every Man Out, induction, 226). In what sounds like an outright challenge to Shakespeare, Jonson rejects old-style new comedies whose “argument . . . . might have been of some other nature, as of a Duke to be in love with a Countess, and that Countess to be in love with the Duke’s son” in favor of new-style old comedy “near and familiarly allied to the time” (Every Man Out, 3.1.406–11).6 Only “autumn-judgments” (3.1.411), Jonson contends, would prefer the former to the latter. Jonson’s generational jockeying for position was successful, in that critics still praise the innovativeness of his comical satires and minimize the continuities between these and Shakespeare’s plays.7 Far from being “completely new,” however, Jonson’s timely satires develop strains of comedy pioneered by Lyly and perfected by Shakespeare.8

  Not to be outdone, and certainly not by Jonson, Shakespeare reincarnates his old knight, in a retrospective comic fairy tale about a competition among several men for the “favor” of a “fair princess” (Twelfth Night, 2.3.122, 3.1.97). Phebe Jensen argues that “Falstaff haunts Twelfth Night,” finding in the “play’s consideration of Puritan satire, Catholic satire, the history of festivity and revelry . . . a return to the not-quite-dead Oldcastle controversy.”9 Shakespeare does indeed remember Falstaff by dismembering him, scattering fragments of the fat knight throughout his courtly comedy. The “not-quite-dead” controversy to which Twelfth Night returns, however, is the one first staged by Lyly�
�s play about love among old men. As allusions to Endymion, to his own Falstaff plays, to Jonson’s Every Man Out of His Humour and Cynthia’s Revels (1600), and to Sir John Harington’s A New Discourse on a Stale Subject, or the Metamorphosis of Ajax (1596) show, in Twelfth Night Shakespeare considers once again the fact that “what great ones do the less will prattle of” (1.2.33).10 Notably, the baiting metaphors that structure this witty comedy about the dogging of a matrimonially-minded upstart also shaped the “snarling” contests of wit that characterized turn-of-the-century theatrical culture.11 While recent critics have viewed Twelfth Night’s allusions to bearbaiting from the perspective afforded by the “nearly identical cultural situations” of the theatre and the blood sport, I argue that these reflect a concern with the effect that the ad hominem attacks of satiric “substractors” (1.3.34–35) have on public life and collective memory.12

  Bearbaitings continued to be tied to Leicester well into the 1590s, as Harington’s Ajax demonstrates. This controversial pamphlet, which retails court gossip while detailing methods for the disposal of human waste, went through four editions, spawning numerous sequels and responses (thirteen imprints altogether) in the year it appeared.13 If the reading public enjoyed learning about the court’s privy doings, court figures were less enthusiastic about the chatter that Ajax provoked. Elizabeth I was especially enraged that the author “had aimed a shafte at Leicester”; after observing her reaction, Robert Markham found he “would not be in [the author’s] beste jerkin for a thousand markes.”14 In the offending passage, the narrator touts his invention of the flush toilet, opining that he “may one day be put into the Chronicles, as good members of our countrey, more worthily then the great Beare that carried eight dogges on him when Monsieur was here.”15 Leicester’s opposition to the French match, which D. C. Peck describes as “the central political event behind Leicester’s Commonwealth,” had first caused the dogs to “bark at the Bear that is so well britched” well over a decade before Ajax was published.16 Yet Harington assumes his readers will still laugh at the allusion. Given that Harington elsewhere advocates using Holinshed’s Chronicles as toilet paper, there can be little doubt regarding what he made of the “great Beare’s” innovative attempts to go down in history as a “good member” of his country.17 No wonder Elizabeth took offense and Shakespeare took note.

  Leaving the Chronicles behind, Shakespeare began to experiment in different generic registers with the perdurable materials out of which he had fashioned his own “lugg’d bear” (1 Henry IV, 1.2.74). Leslie Fiedler notes that low comedy or satire is “the proper mode for rendering the foredoomed defeat of Old Age in love.”18 Lyly had pushed against these expectations by celebrating Endymion’s “foredoomed defeat” as a Neoplatonic success, while his portrayals of Sir Tophas and Corsites struck the more conventional satiric note. As we saw in previous chapters, Shakespeare’s initial approach to these materials was synthetic. Royal favorites who dream of becoming made men but who turn into asses instead, Bottom and Falstaff recall all three of Lyly’s aging lovers. While Shakespeare invests them with the aspiring thoughts of an Endymion, “stitched to the stars . . . much higher . . . than [they] can reach,” Bottom’s “rare vision” of the Fairy Queen (A Midsummer Night’s Dream, 4.1.205) exceeds his ability to describe or inhabit it, and Falstaff remains weighed down by the mercenary nature of his ambitions.19 Uniquely memorable, both characters are also figures of ridicule.

  Twelfth Night follows its predecessors in situating the unsettling convergence of erotic desire and social ambition in aging males, and in provoking derisive laughter at their “certain deformity,” a word identified throughout the early modern period with the targets of social ridicule.20 The treatment reserved for the amorous Malvolio reproduces key aspects of that inflicted on the lecherous Falstaff (or the Falstaffian Leicester, for that matter).21 But Twelfth Night also deploys the bearbaiting trope to new effect, privileging its empathetic potential over its evaluative one, and ultimately insisting that “none can be call’d deform’d but the unkind” (3.4.368). Like the twins, whom C. L. Barber describes as forming a “composite,” the play’s two bears function as two halves of a whole, with Orsino assuming the positive and Malvolio absorbing the negative aspects of the age-in-love figure.22 The “main difference” between these characters is thus not “one of class,” or not of class only, but of generic emphasis and orientation.23 It is as if Shakespeare decided to offer rival portraits of the great favorites: one reflecting the perceptions of others, and drawing on the materials of anticourt writers like Allen and satirists like Jonson; the other reflecting the way they might have seen themselves, and drawing on the materials of court writers like Lyly or Sir Walter Ralegh. The “lunatic” Malvolio (4.2.22) recalls the conventional butts of Elizabethan satire, channeling the anger that a false etymology associated with the genre, and triggering derisive laughter on- and offstage.24 In contrast, the elegant Orsino hearkens back to Lyly’s moon-lover, triggering responses of a different sort.

  Until Sebastian and Viola arrive, all Illyrians suffer to some extent from Endymion’s condition of having “waxed old” without “knowing it” (Endymion, 5.1.76). Orsino and Malvolio come to embody a more general condition in this play, endemic in late Elizabethan culture, of waking up from “such a dream that when the image of it leaves” all must “run mad” (2.5.193–94). This disenchantment, far from purging the “dream” in the manner of Jonsonian satires, testifies to its enduring allure by resituating it as an object of reflective nostalgia—a fantasy not about the future but about a rapidly receding past, when such dreams had more purchase on reality.25 According to Svetlana Boym, this form of nostalgia has utopian dimensions, and privileges “longing and loss, the imperfect process of remembrance,” lingering on “the patina of time and history, in the dreams of another place and another time.” When Boym defines the object of reflective nostalgia as located “somewhere in the twilight of the past or on the island of utopia where time has happily stopped, as on an antique clock,” she might as well be writing about Illyria, before the antique clock strikes in the third act.26 Shakespeare’s generic experimentation accounts for the “elegiac,” “melancholy,” or “autumnal” tone of Twelfth Night, which it shares with the sonnets.27 At the turn of the seventeenth century, just a few years before Elizabeth’s death, the playwright turned to a form of longing that mediates between individual and collective memory to counter the reductive fictions about the Elizabethan regime that he had helped disseminate in earlier plays.28

  Although no single male character carries the full burden of his legacy, Falstaff haunts Twelfth Night in a variety of shapes. Various critics note that Shakespeare pursues a strategy of twinning in this play, epitomized by the young shipwrecks who share “One face, one voice, one habit,” yet are “two persons” (5.1.216). So Cristina Malcolmson argues that “Viola and Maria are twinned” usurpers of privileged status: one performs the part of the man, the other of her mistress. Viola and Malvolio are “twinned” servants intent on marrying their superiors. And Malvolio and Orsino are “twinned” in their failure to secure Olivia’s hand in marriage.29 These shared qualities establish the inhabitants of Illyria as analogues of one another, in ways that raise concerns familiar to readers of this book. Characters are grouped together in structures of favoritism (Viola, Malvolio), in practices of theatrical usurpation (Viola, Maria), in eroticized forms of social mobility (Viola, Sebastian, Malvolio), and in bearbaiting plots (Malvolio, Orsino).30 The upstart twins who function as catalysts for the plot are meritorious candidates for election by an imperious lady. And the older male characters who surround these twins, and whose unruly energies the twins absorb and redirect, share a common ancestry in the materials that Shakespeare drew on to fashion his “whoreson round man” (1 Henry IV, 2.4.140).

  This comparative arrangement of characters is advertised through the play’s multiple signifying names, which invite audiences to collaborate in the construal of meaning. The forged document t
hat incites Malvolio to act on his sociosexual fantasies contains a notorious “fustian riddle” involving the initials “M. O. A. I.” (2.5.107–8). The steward interprets these as a reference to himself, since “every one of these letters are in [his] name” (2.5.141). As a number of readers have noticed, most of those letters are also in Viola’s and Olivia’s names. The three names are near-anagrams, implying an unequal division of material held in common.31 Given that the same “characters crush[ed] . . . a little” (2.5.140) produce different names, the most basic units of dramatic personhood, we are invited to “work . . . out” what else these scrambled “alphabetical position[s]” might “portend” (2.5.127, 119). Malcolmson finds that the missing letters in “Viola” stand for the distinctive trait that she lacks of Malvolio, the “ill will” spelled out in the steward’s name. Orsino’s servant, of gentle status like Olivia’s servant, has the ambition to make an upwardly mobile marriage but not the self-interest that satirists assumed accompanied such ambition.32 In other words, Cesario is a “servingman” worthy of Olivia’s “favors” (3.2.6), one who lacks the traits—including advancing age—that in Malvolio invite ridicule.

  As this example suggests, the characters in Twelfth Night emerge from processes of division and subtraction. “How have you made division of yourself?” a stunned Antonio asks Sebastian and Viola/Cesario; “An apple, cleft in two, is not more twin / Than these two creatures” (5.1.222–24). This metaphor borrows from a famous passage in Plato’s Symposium, in which the Greek gods, having made “primeval man . . . round, his back and sides forming a circle,” with “four hands and four feet” and “two privy members,” grow fearful of their own creatures:

  Terrible was their might and strength, and the thoughts of their hearts were great, and they made an attack upon the gods. . . . Doubt reigned in the celestial councils. Should they kill them and annihilate the race with thunderbolts . . . then there would be an end of the sacrifices and worship which men offered to them. . . . At last, after a good deal of reflection, Zeus discovered a way. He said: “Methinks I have a plan which will humble their pride and improve their manners. . . . I will cut them in two and then they will be diminished in strength and increased in numbers . . . and if they continue to be insolent and will not be quiet, I will split them again.” . . . He spoke and cut men in two, like a sorb apple which is halved for pickling, or as you might divide an egg with a hair. . . . Apollo was bidden to heal their wounds and compose their forms.33