Of the two persons principally concerned in the rejection of Falstaff,
Henry, both as Prince and as King, has received, on the whole, full
justice from readers and critics. Falstaff, on the other hand, has been
in one respect the most unfortunate of Shakespeare's famous characters.
All of them, in passing from the mind of their creator into other minds,
suffer change; they tend to lose their harmony through the
disproportionate attention bestowed on some one feature, or to lose
their uniqueness by being conventionalised into types already familiar.
But Falstaff was degraded by Shakespeare himself. The original character
is to be found alive in the two parts of _Henry IV._, dead in _Henry
V._, and nowhere else. But not very long after these plays were
composed, Shakespeare wrote, and he afterwards revised, the very
entertaining piece called _The Merry Wives of Windsor_. Perhaps his
company wanted a new play on a sudden; or perhaps, as one would rather
believe, the tradition may be true that Queen Elizabeth, delighted with
the Falstaff scenes of _Henry IV._, expressed a wish to see the hero of
them again, and to see him in love. Now it was no more possible for
Shakespeare to show his own Falstaff in love than to turn twice two
into five. But he could write in haste--the tradition says, in a
fortnight--a comedy or farce differing from all his other plays in this,
that its scene is laid in English middle-class life, and that it is
prosaic almost to the end. And among the characters he could introduce a
disreputable fat old knight with attendants, and could call them
Falstaff, Bardolph, Pistol, and Nym. And he could represent this knight
assailing, for financial purposes, the virtue of two matrons, and in the
event baffled, duped, treated like dirty linen, beaten, burnt, pricked,
mocked, insulted, and, worst of all, repentant and didactic. It is
horrible. It is almost enough to convince one that Shakespeare himself
could sanction the parody of Ophelia in the _Two Noble Kinsmen_. But it
no more touches the real Falstaff than Ophelia is degraded by that
parody. To picture the real Falstaff befooled like the Falstaff of the
_Merry Wives_ is like imagining Iago the gull of Roderigo, or Becky
Sharp the dupe of Amelia Osborne. Before he had been served the least of
these tricks he would have had his brains taken out and buttered, and
have given them to a dog for a New Year's gift. I quote the words of the
impostor, for after all Shakespeare made him and gave to him a few
sentences worthy of Falstaff himself. But they are only a few--one side
of a sheet of notepaper would contain them. And yet critics have
solemnly debated at what period in his life Sir John endured the gibes
of Master Ford, and whether we should put this comedy between the two
parts of _Henry IV._, or between the second of them and _Henry V._ And
the Falstaff of the general reader, it is to be feared, is an impossible
conglomerate of two distinct characters, while the Falstaff of the mere
play-goer is certainly much more like the impostor than the true man.
The separation of these two has long ago been effected by criticism, and
is insisted on in almost all competent estimates of the character of
Falstaff. I do not propose to attempt a full account either of this
character or of that of Prince Henry, but shall connect the remarks I
have to make on them with a question which does not appear to have been
satisfactorily discussed--the question of the rejection of Falstaff by
the Prince on his accession to the throne. What do we feel, and what are
we meant to feel, as we witness this rejection? And what does our
feeling imply as to the characters of Falstaff and the new King?
1.
Sir John, you remember, is in Gloucestershire, engaged in borrowing a
thousand pounds from Justice Shallow; and here Pistol, riding
helter-skelter from London, brings him the great news that the old King
is as dead as nail in door, and that Harry the Fifth is the man. Sir
John, in wild excitement, taking any man's horses, rushes to London; and
he carries Shallow with him, for he longs to reward all his friends. We
find him standing with his companions just outside Westminster Abbey, in
the crowd that is waiting for the King to come out after his coronation.
He himself is stained with travel, and has had no time to spend any of
the thousand pounds in buying new liveries for his men. But what of
that? This poor show only proves his earnestness of affection, his
devotion, how he could not deliberate or remember or have patience to
shift himself, but rode day and night, thought of nothing else but to
see Henry, and put all affairs else in oblivion, as if there were
nothing else to be done but to see him. And now he stands sweating with
desire to see him, and repeating and repeating this one desire of his
heart--'to see him.' The moment comes. There is a shout within the Abbey
like the roaring of the sea, and a clangour of trumpets, and the doors
open and the procession streams out.
FAL. God save thy grace, King Hal! my royal Hal!
PIST. The heavens thee guard and keep, most royal imp of fame!
FAL. God save thee, my sweet boy!
KING. My Lord Chief Justice, speak to that vain man.
CH. JUST. Have you your wits? Know you what 'tis you speak?
FAL. My King! my Jove! I speak to thee, my heart!
KING. I know thee not, old man: fall to thy prayers.
How ill white hairs become a fool and jester!
I have long dream'd of such a kind of man,
So surfeit-swell'd, so old and so profane;
But being awaked 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.
For competence of life I will allow you,
That lack of means enforce you not to evil:
And, as we hear you do reform yourselves,
We will, according to your strengths and qualities,
Give you advancement. Be it your charge, my lord,
To see perform'd the tenour of our word.
Set on.
The procession passes out of sight, but Falstaff and his friends remain.
He shows no resentment. He comforts himself, or tries to comfort
himself--first, with the thought that he has Shallow's thousand pounds,
and then, more seriously, I believe, with another thought. The King, he
sees, must look thus to the world; but he will be sent for in private
when night comes, and will yet make the fortunes of his friends. But
even as he speaks, the Chief Justice, accompanied by Prince John,
returns, and gives the order to his officers:
Go, carry Sir John Falstaff to the Fleet;
Take all his company along with him.
Falstaff breaks out, 'My lord, my lord,' but he is cut short and hurried
away; and after a few words between the Prince and the Chief Justice the
scene closes, and with it the drama.
What are our feelings during this scene? They will depend on our
feelings about Falstaff. If we have not keenly enjoyed the Falstaff
scenes of the two plays, if we regard Sir John chiefly as an old
reprobate, not only a sensualist, a liar, and a coward, but a cruel and
dangerous ruffian, I suppose we enjoy his discomfiture and consider that
the King has behaved magnificently. But if we _have_ keenly enjoyed the
Falstaff scenes, if we have enjoyed them as Shakespeare surely meant
them to be enjoyed, and if, accordingly, Falstaff is not to us solely or
even chiefly a reprobate and ruffian, we feel, I think, during the
King's speech, a good deal of pain and some resentment; and when,
without any further offence on Sir John's part, the Chief Justice
returns and sends him to prison, we stare in astonishment. These, I
believe, are, in greater or less degree, the feelings of most of those
who really enjoy the Falstaff scenes (as many readers do not). Nor are
these feelings diminished when we remember the end of the whole story,
as we find it in _Henry V._, where we learn that Falstaff quickly died,
and, according to the testimony of persons not very sentimental, died of
a broken heart.[2] Suppose this merely to mean that he sank under the
shame of his public disgrace, and it is pitiful enough: but the words of
Mrs. Quickly, 'The king has killed his heart'; of Nym, 'The king hath
run bad humours on the knight; that's the even of it'; of Pistol,
Nym, thou hast spoke the right,
His heart is fracted and corroborate,
assuredly point to something more than wounded pride; they point to
wounded affection, and remind us of Falstaff's own answer to Prince
Hal's question, 'Sirrah, do I owe you a thousand pound?' 'A thousand
pound, Hal? a million: thy love is worth a million: thou owest me thy
love.'
Now why did Shakespeare end his drama with a scene which, though
undoubtedly striking, leaves an impression so unpleasant? I will venture
to put aside without discussion the idea that he meant us throughout the
two plays to regard Falstaff with disgust or indignation, so that we
naturally feel nothing but pleasure at his fall; for this idea implies
that kind of inability to understand Shakespeare with which it is idle
to argue. And there is another and a much more ingenious suggestion
which must equally be rejected as impossible. According to it, Falstaff,
having listened to the King's speech, did not seriously hope to be sent
for by him in private; he fully realised the situation at once, and was
only making game of Shallow; and in his immediate turn upon Shallow when
the King goes out, 'Master Shallow, I owe you a thousand pound,' we are
meant to see his humorous superiority to any rebuff, so that we end the
play with the delightful feeling that, while Henry has done the right
thing, Falstaff, in his outward overthrow, has still proved himself
inwardly invincible. This suggestion comes from a critic who understands
Falstaff, and in the suggestion itself shows that he understands him.[3]
But it provides no solution, because it wholly ignores, and could not
account for, that which follows the short conversation with Shallow.
Falstaff's dismissal to the Fleet, and his subsequent death, prove
beyond doubt that his rejection was meant by Shakespeare to be taken as
a catastrophe which not even his humour could enable him to surmount.
Moreover, these interpretations, even if otherwise admissible, would
still leave our problem only partly solved. For what troubles us is not
only the disappointment of Falstaff, it is the conduct of Henry. It was
inevitable that on his accession he should separate himself from Sir
John, and we wish nothing else. It is satisfactory that Sir John should
have a competence, with the hope of promotion in the highly improbable
case of his reforming himself. And if Henry could not trust himself
within ten miles of so fascinating a companion, by all means let him be
banished that distance: we do not complain. These arrangements would not
have prevented a satisfactory ending: the King could have communicated
his decision, and Falstaff could have accepted it, in a private
interview rich in humour and merely touched with pathos. But Shakespeare
has so contrived matters that Henry could not send a private warning to
Falstaff even if he wished to, and in their public meeting Falstaff is
made to behave in so infatuated and outrageous a manner that great
sternness on the King's part was unavoidable. And the curious thing is
that Shakespeare did not stop here. If this had been all we should have
felt pain for Falstaff, but not, perhaps, resentment against Henry. But
two things we do resent. Why, when this painful incident seems to be
over, should the Chief Justice return and send Falstaff to prison? Can
this possibly be meant for an act of private vengeance on the part of
the Chief Justice, unknown to the King? No; for in that case Shakespeare
would have shown at once that the King disapproved and cancelled it. It
must have been the King's own act. This is one thing we resent; the
other is the King's sermon. He had a right to turn away his former
self, and his old companions with it, but he had no right to talk all of
a sudden like a clergyman; and surely it was both ungenerous and
insincere to speak of them as his 'misleaders,' as though in the days of
Eastcheap and Gadshill he had been a weak and silly lad. We have seen
his former self, and we know that it was nothing of the kind. He had
shown himself, for all his follies, a very strong and independent young
man, deliberately amusing himself among men over whom he had just as
much ascendency as he chose to exert. Nay, he amused himself not only
among them, but at their expense. In his first soliloquy--and first
soliloquies are usually significant--he declares that he associates with
them in order that, when at some future time he shows his true
character, he may be the more wondered at for his previous aberrations.
You may think he deceives himself here; you may believe that he
frequented Sir John's company out of delight in it and not merely with
this cold-blooded design; but at any rate he _thought_ the design was
his one motive. And, that being so, two results follow. He ought in
honour long ago to have given Sir John clearly to understand that they
must say good-bye on the day of his accession. And, having neglected to
do this, he ought not to have lectured him as his misleader. It was not
only ungenerous, it was dishonest. It looks disagreeably like an attempt
to buy the praise of the respectable at the cost of honour and truth.
And it succeeded. Henry _always_ succeeded.
You will see what I am suggesting, for the moment, as a solution of our
problem. I am suggesting that our fault lies not in our resentment at
Henry's conduct, but in our surprise at it; that if we had read his
character truly in the light that Shakespeare gave us, we should have
been prepared for a display both of hardness and of policy at this point
in his career, And although this suggestion does not suffice to solve
the problem before us, I am convinced that in itself it is true. Nor is
it rendered at all improbable by the fact that Shakespeare has made
Henry, on the whole, a fine and very attractive character, and that here
he makes no one express any disapprobation of the treatment of Falstaff.
For in similar cases Shakespeare is constantly misunderstood. His
readers expect him to mark in some distinct way his approval or
disapproval of that which he represents; and hence where _they_
disapprove and _he_ says nothing, they fancy that he does _not_
disapprove, and they blame his indifference, like Dr. Johnson, or at the
least are puzzled. But the truth is that he shows the fact and leaves
the judgment to them. And again, when he makes us like a character we
expect the character to have no faults that are not expressly pointed
out, and when other faults appear we either ignore them or try to
explain them away. This is one of our methods of conventionalising
Shakespeare. We want the world's population to be neatly divided into
sheep and goats, and we want an angel by us to say, 'Look, that is a
goat and this is a sheep,' and we try to turn Shakespeare into this
angel. His impartiality makes us uncomfortable: we cannot bear to see
him, like the sun, lighting up everything and judging nothing. And this
is perhaps especially the case in his historical plays, where we are
always trying to turn him into a partisan. He shows us that Richard II.
was unworthy to be king, and we at once conclude that he thought
Bolingbroke's usurpation justified; whereas he shows merely, what under
the conditions was bound to exist, an inextricable tangle of right and
unright. Or, Bolingbroke being evidently wronged, we suppose
Bolingbroke's statements to be true, and are quite surprised when, after
attaining his end through them, he mentions casually on his death-bed
that they were lies. Shakespeare makes us admire Hotspur heartily; and
accordingly, when we see Hotspur discussing with others how large his
particular slice of his mother-country is to be, we either fail to
recognise the monstrosity of the proceeding, or, recognising it, we
complain that Shakespeare is inconsistent. Prince John breaks a
tottering rebellion by practising a detestable fraud on the rebels. We
are against the rebels, and have heard high praise of Prince John, but
we cannot help seeing that his fraud is detestable; so we say
indignantly to Shakespeare, 'Why, you told us he was a sheep'; whereas,
in fact, if we had used our eyes we should have known beforehand that he
was the brave, determined, loyal, cold-blooded, pitiless, unscrupulous
son of a usurper whose throne was in danger.
To come, then, to Henry. Both as prince and as king he is deservedly a
favourite, and particularly so with English readers, being, as he is,
perhaps the most distinctively English of all Shakespeare's men. In
_Henry V._ he is treated as a national hero. In this play he has lost
much of the wit which in him seems to have depended on contact with
Falstaff, but he has also laid aside the most serious faults of his
youth. He inspires in a high degree fear, enthusiasm, and affection;
thanks to his beautiful modesty he has the charm which is lacking to
another mighty warrior, Coriolanus; his youthful escapades have given
him an understanding of simple folk, and sympathy with them; he is the
author of the saying, 'There is some soul of goodness in things evil';
and he is much more obviously religious than most of Shakespeare's
heroes. Having these and other fine qualities, and being without certain
dangerous tendencies which mark the tragic heroes, he is, perhaps, the
most _efficient_ character drawn by Shakespeare, unless Ulysses, in
_Troilus and Cressida_, is his equal. And so he has been described as
Shakespeare's ideal man of action; nay, it has even been declared that
here for once Shakespeare plainly disclosed his own ethical creed, and
showed us his ideal, not simply of a man of action, but of a man.
But Henry is neither of these. The poet who drew Hamlet and Othello can
never have thought that even the ideal man of action would lack that
light upon the brow which at once transfigures them and marks their
doom. It is as easy to believe that, because the lunatic, the lover, and
the poet are not far apart, Shakespeare would have chosen never to have
loved and sung. Even poor Timon, the most inefficient of the tragic
heroes, has something in him that Henry never shows. Nor is it merely
that his nature is limited: if we follow Shakespeare and look closely at
Henry, we shall discover with the many fine traits a few less pleasing.
Henry IV. describes him as the noble image of his own youth; and, for
all his superiority to his father, he is still his father's son, the son
of the man whom Hotspur called a 'vile politician.' Henry's religion,
for example, is genuine, it is rooted in his modesty; but it is also
superstitious--an attempt to buy off supernatural vengeance for
Richard's blood; and it is also in part political, like his father's
projected crusade. Just as he went to war chiefly because, as his father
told him, it was the way to keep factious nobles quiet and unite the
nation, so when he adjures the Archbishop to satisfy him as to his right
to the French throne, he knows very well that the Archbishop _wants_ the
war, because it will defer and perhaps prevent what he considers the
spoliation of the Church. This same strain of policy is what Shakespeare
marks in the first soliloquy in _Henry IV._, where the prince describes
his riotous life as a mere scheme to win him glory later. It implies
that readiness to use other people as means to his own ends which is a
conspicuous feature in his father; and it reminds us of his father's
plan of keeping himself out of the people's sight while Richard was
making himself cheap by his incessant public appearances. And if I am
not mistaken there is a further likeness. Henry is kindly and pleasant
to every one as Prince, to every one deserving as King; and he is so not
merely out of policy: but there is no sign in him of a strong affection
for any one, such an affection as we recognise at a glance in Hamlet and
Horatio, Brutus and Cassius, and many more. We do not find this in
_Henry V._, not even in the noble address to Lord Scroop, and in _Henry
IV._ we find, I think, a liking for Falstaff and Poins, but no more:
there is no more than a liking, for instance, in his soliloquy over the
supposed corpse of his fat friend, and he never speaks of Falstaff to
Poins with any affection. The truth is, that the members of the family
of Henry IV. have love for one another, but they cannot spare love for
any one outside their family, which stands firmly united, defending its
royal position against attack and instinctively isolating itself from
outside influence.
Thus I would suggest that Henry's conduct in his rejection of Falstaff
is in perfect keeping with his character on its unpleasant side as well
as on its finer; and that, so far as Henry is concerned, we ought not to
feel surprise at it. And on this view we may even explain the strange
incident of the Chief Justice being sent back to order Falstaff to
prison (for there is no sign of any such uncertainty in the text as
might suggest an interpolation by the players). Remembering his father's
words about Henry, 'Being incensed, he's flint,' and remembering in
_Henry V._ his ruthlessness about killing the prisoners when he is
incensed, we may imagine that, after he had left Falstaff and was no
longer influenced by the face of his old companion, he gave way to anger
at the indecent familiarity which had provoked a compromising scene on
the most ceremonial of occasions and in the presence alike of court and
crowd, and that he sent the Chief Justice back to take vengeance. And
this is consistent with the fact that in the next play we find Falstaff
shortly afterwards not only freed from prison, but unmolested in his old
haunt in Eastcheap, well within ten miles of Henry's person. His anger
had soon passed, and he knew that the requisite effect had been produced
both on Falstaff and on the world.
But all this, however true, will not solve our problem. It seems, on the
contrary, to increase its difficulty. For the natural conclusion is that
Shakespeare _intended_ us to feel resentment against Henry. And yet that
cannot be, for it implies that he meant the play to end disagreeably;
and no one who understands Shakespeare at all will consider that
supposition for a moment credible. No; he must have meant the play to
end pleasantly, although he made Henry's action consistent. And hence it
follows that he must have intended our sympathy with Falstaff to be so
far weakened when the rejection-scene arrives that his discomfiture
should be satisfactory to us; that we should enjoy this sudden reverse
of enormous hopes (a thing always ludicrous if sympathy is absent); that
we should approve the moral judgment that falls on him; and so should
pass lightly over that disclosure of unpleasant traits in the King's
character which Shakespeare was too true an artist to suppress. Thus our
pain and resentment, if we feel them, are wrong, in the sense that they
do not answer to the dramatist's intention. But it does not follow that
they are wrong in a further sense. They may be right, because the
dramatist has missed what he aimed at. And this, though the dramatist
was Shakespeare, is what I would suggest. In the Falstaff scenes he
overshot his mark. He created so extraordinary a being, and fixed him so
firmly on his intellectual throne, that when he sought to dethrone him
he could not. The moment comes when we are to look at Falstaff in a
serious light, and the comic hero is to figure as a baffled schemer; but
we cannot make the required change, either in our attitude or in our
sympathies. We wish Henry a glorious reign and much joy of his crew of
hypocritical politicians, lay and clerical; but our hearts go with
Falstaff to the Fleet, or, if necessary, to Arthur's bosom or
wheresomever he is.[4]
In the remainder of the lecture I will try to make this view clear. And
to that end we must go back to the Falstaff of the body of the two
plays, the immortal Falstaff, a character almost purely humorous, and
therefore no subject for moral judgments. I can but draw an outline, and
in describing one aspect of this character must be content to hold
another in reserve.
2.
Up to a certain point Falstaff is ludicrous in the same way as many
other figures, his distinction lying, so far, chiefly in the mere
abundance of ludicrous traits. _Why_ we should laugh at a man with a
huge belly and corresponding appetites; at the inconveniences he suffers
on a hot day, or in playing the footpad, or when he falls down and there
are no levers at hand to lift him up again; at the incongruity of his
unwieldy bulk and the nimbleness of his spirit, the infirmities of his
age and his youthful lightness of heart; at the enormity of his lies and
wiles, and the suddenness of their exposure and frustration; at the
contrast between his reputation and his real character, seen most
absurdly when, at the mere mention of his name, a redoubted rebel
surrenders to him--_why_, I say, we should laugh at these and many such
things, this is no place to inquire; but unquestionably we do. Here we
have them poured out in endless profusion and with that air of careless
ease which is so fascinating in Shakespeare; and with the enjoyment of
them I believe many readers stop. But while they are quite essential to
the character, there is in it much more. For these things by themselves
do not explain why, beside laughing at Falstaff, we are made happy by
him and laugh _with_ him. He is not, like Parolles, a mere _object_ of
mirth.
The main reason why he makes us so happy and puts us so entirely at our
ease is that he himself is happy and entirely at his ease. 'Happy' is
too weak a word; he is in bliss, and we share his glory. Enjoyment--no
fitful pleasure crossing a dull life, nor any vacant convulsive
mirth--but a rich deep-toned chuckling enjoyment circulates continually
through all his being. If you ask _what_ he enjoys, no doubt the answer
is, in the first place, eating and drinking, taking his ease at his inn,
and the company of other merry souls. Compared with these things, what
we count the graver interests of life are nothing to him. But then,
while we are under his spell, it is impossible to consider these graver
interests; gravity is to us, as to him, inferior to gravy; and what he
does enjoy he enjoys with such a luscious and good-humoured zest that we
sympathise and he makes us happy. And if any one objected, we should
answer with Sir Toby Belch, 'Dost thou think, because thou art virtuous,
there shall be no more cakes and ale?'
But this, again, is far from all. Falstaff's ease and enjoyment are not
simply those of the happy man of appetite;[5] they are those of the
humorist, and the humorist of genius. Instead of being comic to you and
serious to himself, he is more ludicrous to himself than to you; and he
makes himself out more ludicrous than he is, in order that he and
others may laugh. Prince Hal never made such sport of Falstaff's person
as he himself did. It is _he_ who says that his skin hangs about him
like an old lady's loose gown, and that he walks before his page like a
sow that hath o'erwhelmed all her litter but one. And he jests at
himself when he is alone just as much as when others are by. It is the
same with his appetites. The direct enjoyment they bring him is scarcely
so great as the enjoyment of laughing at this enjoyment; and for all his
addiction to sack you never see him for an instant with a brain dulled
by it, or a temper turned solemn, silly, quarrelsome, or pious. The
virtue it instils into him, of filling his brain with nimble, fiery, and
delectable shapes--this, and his humorous attitude towards it, free him,
in a manner, from slavery to it; and it is this freedom, and no secret
longing for better things (those who attribute such a longing to him are
far astray), that makes his enjoyment contagious and prevents our
sympathy with it from being disturbed.
The bliss of freedom gained in humour is the essence of Falstaff. His
humour is not directed only or chiefly against obvious absurdities; he
is the enemy of everything that would interfere with his ease, and
therefore of anything serious, and especially of everything respectable
and moral. For these things impose limits and obligations, and make us
the subjects of old father antic the law, and the categorical
imperative, and our station and its duties, and conscience, and
reputation, and other people's opinions, and all sorts of nuisances. I
say he is therefore their enemy; but I do him wrong; to say that he is
their enemy implies that he regards them as serious and recognises their
power, when in truth he refuses to recognise them at all. They are to
him absurd; and to reduce a thing _ad absurdum_ is to reduce it to
nothing and to walk about free and rejoicing. This is what Falstaff
does with all the would-be serious things of life, sometimes only by his
words, sometimes by his actions too. He will make truth appear absurd by
solemn statements, which he utters with perfect gravity and which he
expects nobody to believe; and honour, by demonstrating that it cannot
set a leg, and that neither the living nor the dead can possess it; and
law, by evading all the attacks of its highest representative and almost
forcing him to laugh at his own defeat; and patriotism, by filling his
pockets with the bribes offered by competent soldiers who want to escape
service, while he takes in their stead the halt and maimed and the
gaol-birds; and duty, by showing how he labours in his vocation--of
thieving; and courage, alike by mocking at his own capture of Colvile
and gravely claiming to have killed Hotspur; and war, by offering the
Prince his bottle of sack when he is asked for a sword; and religion, by
amusing himself with remorse at odd times when he has nothing else to
do; and the fear of death, by maintaining perfectly untouched, in the
face of imminent peril and even while he _feels_ the fear of death, the
very same power of dissolving it in persiflage that he shows when he
sits at ease in his inn. These are the wonderful achievements which he
performs, not with the sourness of a cynic, but with the gaiety of a
boy. And, therefore, we praise him, we laud him, for he offends none but
the virtuous, and denies that life is real or life is earnest, and
delivers us from the oppression of such nightmares, and lifts us into
the atmosphere of perfect freedom.
No one in the play understands Falstaff fully, any more than Hamlet was
understood by the persons round him. They are both men of genius. Mrs.
Quickly and Bardolph are his slaves, but they know not why. 'Well, fare
thee well,' says the hostess whom he has pillaged and forgiven; 'I have
known thee these twenty-nine years, come peas-cod time, but an honester
and truer-hearted man--well, fare thee well.' Poins and the Prince
delight in him; they get him into corners for the pleasure of seeing him
escape in ways they cannot imagine; but they often take him much too
seriously. Poins, for instance, rarely sees, the Prince does not always
see, and moralising critics never see, that when Falstaff speaks ill of
a companion behind his back, or writes to the Prince that Poins spreads
it abroad that the Prince is to marry his sister, he knows quite well
that what he says will be repeated, or rather, perhaps, is absolutely
indifferent whether it be repeated or not, being certain that it can
only give him an opportunity for humour. It is the same with his lying,
and almost the same with his cowardice, the two main vices laid to his
charge even by sympathisers. Falstaff is neither a liar nor a coward in
the usual sense, like the typical cowardly boaster of comedy. He tells
his lies either for their own humour, or on purpose to get himself into
a difficulty. He rarely expects to be believed, perhaps never. He
abandons a statement or contradicts it the moment it is made. There is
scarcely more intent in his lying than in the humorous exaggerations
which he pours out in soliloquy just as much as when others are by.
Poins and the Prince understand this in part. You see them waiting
eagerly to convict him, not that they may really put him to shame, but
in order to enjoy the greater lie that will swallow up the less. But
their sense of humour lags behind his. Even the Prince seems to accept
as half-serious that remorse of his which passes so suddenly into glee
at the idea of taking a purse, and his request to his friend to bestride
him if he should see him down in the battle. Bestride Falstaff! 'Hence!
Wilt thou lift up Olympus?'
Again, the attack of the Prince and Poins on Falstaff and the other
thieves on Gadshill is contrived, we know, with a view to the
incomprehensible lies it will induce him to tell. But when, more than
rising to the occasion, he turns two men in buckram into four, and then
seven, and then nine, and then eleven, almost in a breath, I believe
they partly misunderstand his intention, and too many of his critics
misunderstand it altogether. Shakespeare was not writing a mere farce.
It is preposterous to suppose that a man of Falstaff's intelligence
would utter these gross, palpable, open lies with the serious intention
to deceive, or forget that, if it was too dark for him to see his own
hand, he could hardly see that the three misbegotten knaves were wearing
Kendal green. No doubt, if he _had_ been believed, he would have been
hugely tickled at it, but he no more expected to be believed than when
he claimed to have killed Hotspur. Yet he is supposed to be serious even
then. Such interpretations would destroy the poet's whole conception;
and of those who adopt them one might ask this out of some twenty
similar questions:--When Falstaff, in the men in buckram scene, begins
by calling twice at short intervals for sack, and then a little later
calls for more and says, 'I am a rogue if I drunk to-day,' and the
Prince answers, 'O villain, thy lips are scarce wiped since thou
drunk'st last,' do they think that _that_ lie was meant to deceive? And
if not, why do they take it for granted that the others were? I suppose
they consider that Falstaff was in earnest when, wanting to get
twenty-two yards of satin on trust from Master Dombledon the
silk-mercer, he offered Bardolph as security; or when he said to the
Chief Justice about Mrs. Quickly, who accused him of breaking his
promise to marry her, 'My lord, this is a poor mad soul, and she says up
and down the town that her eldest son is like you'; or when he explained
his enormous bulk by exclaiming, 'A plague of sighing and grief! It
blows a man up like a bladder'; or when he accounted for his voice
being cracked by declaring that he had 'lost it with singing of
anthems'; or even when he sold his soul on Good-Friday to the devil for
a cup of Madeira and a cold capon's leg. Falstaff's lies about Hotspur
and the men in buckram do not essentially differ from these statements.
There is nothing serious in any of them except the refusal to take
anything seriously.
This is also the explanation of Falstaff's cowardice, a subject on which
I should say nothing if Maurice Morgann's essay,[6] now more than a
century old, were better known. That Falstaff sometimes behaves in what
we should generally call a cowardly way is certain; but that does not
show that he was a coward; and if the word means a person who feels
painful fear in the presence of danger, and yields to that fear in spite
of his better feelings and convictions, then assuredly Falstaff was no
coward. The stock bully and boaster of comedy is one, but not Falstaff.
It is perfectly clear in the first place that, though he had
unfortunately a reputation for stabbing and caring not what mischief he
did if his weapon were out, he had not a reputation for cowardice.
Shallow remembered him five-and-fifty years ago breaking Scogan's head
at the court-gate when he was a crack not thus high; and Shallow knew
him later a good back-swordsman. Then we lose sight of him till about
twenty years after, when his association with Bardolph began; and that
association implies that by the time he was thirty-five or forty he had
sunk into the mode of life we witness in the plays. Yet, even as we see
him there, he remains a person of consideration in the army. Twelve
captains hurry about London searching for him. He is present at the
Council of War in the King's tent at Shrewsbury, where the only other
persons are the King, the two princes, a nobleman and Sir Walter Blunt.
The messenger who brings the false report of the battle to
Northumberland mentions, as one of the important incidents, the death of
Sir John Falstaff. Colvile, expressly described as a famous rebel,
surrenders to him as soon as he hears his name. And if his own wish that
his name were not so terrible to the enemy, and his own boast of his
European reputation, are not evidence of the first rank, they must not
be entirely ignored in presence of these other facts. What do these
facts mean? Does Shakespeare put them all in with no purpose at all, or
in defiance of his own intentions? It is not credible.
And when, in the second place, we look at Falstaff's actions, what do we
find? He boldly confronted Colvile, he was quite ready to fight with
him, however pleased that Colvile, like a kind fellow, gave himself
away. When he saw Henry and Hotspur fighting, Falstaff, instead of
making off in a panic, stayed to take his chance if Hotspur should be
the victor. He _led_ his hundred and fifty ragamuffins where they were
peppered, he did not _send_ them. To draw upon Pistol and force him
downstairs and wound him in the shoulder was no great feat, perhaps, but
the stock coward would have shrunk from it. When the Sheriff came to the
inn to arrest him for an offence whose penalty was death, Falstaff, who
was hidden behind the arras, did not stand there quaking for fear, he
immediately fell asleep and snored. When he stood in the battle
reflecting on what would happen if the weight of his paunch should be
increased by that of a bullet, he cannot have been in a tremor of craven
fear. He _never_ shows such fear; and surely the man who, in danger of
his life, and with no one by to hear him, meditates thus: 'I like not
such grinning honour as Sir Walter hath. Give me life: which if I can
save, so; if not, honour comes unlooked-for, and there's an end,' is not
what we commonly call a coward.
'Well,' it will be answered, 'but he ran away on Gadshill; and when
Douglas attacked him he fell down and shammed dead.' Yes, I am thankful
to say, he did. For of course he did not want to be dead. He wanted to
live and be merry. And as he had reduced the idea of honour _ad
absurdum_, had scarcely any self-respect, and only a respect for
reputation as a means of life, naturally he avoided death when he could
do so without a ruinous loss of reputation, and (observe) with the
satisfaction of playing a colossal practical joke. For _that_ after all
was his first object. If his one thought had been to avoid death he
would not have faced Douglas at all, but would have run away as fast as
his legs could carry him; and unless Douglas had been one of those
exceptional Scotchmen who have no sense of humour, he would never have
thought of pursuing so ridiculous an object as Falstaff running. So
that, as Mr. Swinburne remarks, Poins is right when he thus
distinguishes Falstaff from his companions in robbery: 'For two of them,
I know them to be as true-bred cowards as ever turned back; and for the
third, if he fight longer than he sees reason, I'll forswear arms.' And
the event justifies this distinction. For it is exactly thus that,
according to the original stage-direction, Falstaff behaves when Henry
and Poins attack him and the others. The rest run away at once;
Falstaff, here as afterwards with Douglas, fights for a blow or two,
but, finding himself deserted and outmatched, runs away also. Of course.
He saw no reason to stay. _Any_ man who had risen superior to all
serious motives would have run away. But it does not follow that he
would run from mere fear, or be, in the ordinary sense, a coward.[7]
3.
The main source, then, of our sympathetic delight in Falstaff is his
humorous superiority to everything serious, and the freedom of soul
enjoyed in it. But, of course, this is not the whole of his character.
Shakespeare knew well enough that perfect freedom is not to be gained in
this manner; we are ourselves aware of it even while we are sympathising
with Falstaff; and as soon as we regard him seriously it becomes
obvious. His freedom is limited in two main ways. For one thing he
cannot rid himself entirely of respect for all that he professes to
ridicule. He shows a certain pride in his rank: unlike the Prince, he is
haughty to the drawers, who call him a proud Jack. He is not really
quite indifferent to reputation. When the Chief Justice bids him pay his
debt to Mrs. Quickly for his reputation's sake, I think he feels a
twinge, though to be sure he proceeds to pay her by borrowing from her.
He is also stung by any thoroughly serious imputation on his courage,
and winces at the recollection of his running away on Gadshill; he knows
that his behaviour there certainly looked cowardly, and perhaps he
remembers that he would not have behaved so once. It is, further, very
significant that, for all his dissolute talk, he has never yet allowed
the Prince and Poins to _see_ him as they saw him afterwards with Doll
Tearsheet; not, of course, that he has any moral shame in the matter,
but he knows that in such a situation he, in his old age, must appear
contemptible--not a humorist but a mere object of mirth. And, finally,
he has affection in him--affection, I think, for Poins and Bardolph, and
certainly for the Prince; and that is a thing which he cannot jest out
of existence. Hence, as the effect of his rejection shows, he is not
really invulnerable. And then, in the second place, since he is in the
flesh, his godlike freedom has consequences and conditions;
consequences, for there is something painfully wrong with his great toe;
conditions, for he cannot eat and drink for ever without money, and his
purse suffers from consumption, a disease for which he can find no
remedy.[8] As the Chief Justice tells him, his means are very slender
and his waste great; and his answer, 'I would it were otherwise; I would
my means were greater and my waist slenderer,' though worth much money,
brings none in. And so he is driven to evil deeds; not only to cheating
his tailor like a gentleman, but to fleecing Justice Shallow, and to
highway robbery, and to cruel depredations on the poor woman whose
affection he has secured. All this is perfectly consistent with the
other side of his character, but by itself it makes an ugly picture.
Yes, it makes an ugly picture when you look at it seriously. But then,
surely, so long as the humorous atmosphere is preserved and the humorous
attitude maintained, you do not look at it so. You no more regard
Falstaff's misdeeds morally than you do the much more atrocious misdeeds
of Punch or Reynard the Fox. You do not exactly ignore them, but you
attend only to their comic aspect. This is the very spirit of comedy,
and certainly of Shakespeare's comic world, which is one of
make-believe, not merely as his tragic world is, but in a further
sense--a world in which gross improbabilities are accepted with a smile,
and many things are welcomed as merely laughable which, regarded
gravely, would excite anger and disgust. The intervention of a serious
spirit breaks up such a world, and would destroy our pleasure in
Falstaff's company. Accordingly through the greater part of these dramas
Shakespeare carefully confines this spirit to the scenes of war and
policy, and dismisses it entirely in the humorous parts. Hence, if
_Henry IV._ had been a comedy like _Twelfth Night_, I am sure that he
would no more have ended it with the painful disgrace of Falstaff than
he ended _Twelfth Night_ by disgracing Sir Toby Belch.[9]
But _Henry IV._ was to be in the main a historical play, and its chief
hero Prince Henry. In the course of it his greater and finer qualities
were to be gradually revealed, and it was to end with beautiful scenes
of reconciliation and affection between his father and him, and a final
emergence of the wild Prince as a just, wise, stern, and glorious King.
Hence, no doubt, it seemed to Shakespeare that Falstaff at last must be
disgraced, and must therefore appear no longer as the invincible
humorist, but as an object of ridicule and even of aversion. And
probably also his poet's insight showed him that Henry, as he conceived
him, _would_ behave harshly to Falstaff in order to impress the world,
especially when his mind had been wrought to a high pitch by the scene
with his dying father and the impression of his own solemn consecration
to great duties.
This conception was a natural and a fine one; and if the execution was
not an entire success, it is yet full of interest. Shakespeare's purpose
being to work a gradual change in our feelings towards Falstaff, and to
tinge the humorous atmosphere more and more deeply with seriousness, we
see him carrying out this purpose in the Second Part of _Henry IV._ Here
he separates the Prince from Falstaff as much as he can, thus
withdrawing him from Falstaff's influence, and weakening in our minds
the connection between the two. In the First Part we constantly see them
together; in the Second (it is a remarkable fact) only once before the
rejection. Further, in the scenes where Henry appears apart from
Falstaff, we watch him growing more and more grave, and awakening more
and more poetic interest; while Falstaff, though his humour scarcely
flags to the end, exhibits more and more of his seamy side. This is
nowhere turned to the full light in Part I.; but in Part II. we see him
as the heartless destroyer of Mrs. Quickly, as a ruffian seriously
defying the Chief Justice because his position as an officer on service
gives him power to do wrong, as the pike preparing to snap up the poor
old dace Shallow, and (this is the one scene where Henry and he meet) as
the worn-out lecher, not laughing at his servitude to the flesh but sunk
in it. Finally, immediately before the rejection, the world where he is
king is exposed in all its sordid criminality when we find Mrs. Quickly
and Doll arrested for being concerned in the death of one man, if not
more, beaten to death by their bullies; and the dangerousness of
Falstaff is emphasised in his last words as he hurries from Shallow's
house to London, words at first touched with humour but at bottom only
too seriously meant: 'Let us take any man's horses; the laws of England
are at my commandment. Happy are they which have been my friends, and
woe unto my Lord Chief Justice.' His dismissal to the Fleet by the Chief
Justice is the dramatic vengeance for that threat.
Yet all these excellent devices fail. They cause us momentary
embarrassment at times when repellent traits in Falstaff's character are
disclosed; but they fail to change our attitude of humour into one of
seriousness, and our sympathy into repulsion. And they were bound to
fail, because Shakespeare shrank from adding to them the one device
which would have ensured success. If, as the Second Part of _Henry IV._
advanced, he had clouded over Falstaff's humour so heavily that the man
of genius turned into the Falstaff of the _Merry Wives_, we should have
witnessed his rejection without a pang. This Shakespeare was too much
of an artist to do--though even in this way he did something--and
without this device he could not succeed. As I said, in the creation of
Falstaff he overreached himself. He was caught up on the wind of his own
genius, and carried so far that he could not descend to earth at the
selected spot. It is not a misfortune that happens to many authors, nor
is it one we can regret, for it costs us but a trifling inconvenience in
one scene, while we owe to it perhaps the greatest comic character in
literature. For it is in this character, and not in the judgment he
brings upon Falstaff's head, that Shakespeare asserts his supremacy. To
show that Falstaff's freedom of soul was in part illusory, and that the
realities of life refused to be conjured away by his humour--this was
what we might expect from Shakespeare's unfailing sanity, but it was
surely no achievement beyond the power of lesser men. The achievement
was Falstaff himself, and the conception of that freedom of soul, a
freedom illusory only in part, and attainable only by a mind which had
received from Shakespeare's own the inexplicable touch of infinity which
he bestowed on Hamlet and Macbeth and Cleopatra, but denied to Henry the
Fifth.
1902.