Falstaff, page 12
The beadle, thus challenged, meets the occasion by the witty quibble in which Doll is a night-errant, one who sins at night. Quickly, ever the malaprop, says the opposite of what she means and then—“of sufferance comes ease”—utters a proverb hopelessly ambiguous.
The two defiant charmers are carried off to what is called justice, chanting delicious insults geared to the walking skeleton who will punish them. We never will see Doll Tearsheet again, which is a pity. Would you rather watch and listen to her or Prince John of Lancaster? Mistress Quickly will return in King Henry V, where we will hear her elegizing Falstaff.
The Hal who held together the disparate worlds of warrior-politicians and of Falstaff’s Eastcheap no longer exists. We barely recognize him in King Henry V. Doubtless there is gain as well as evident loss. But where is Shakespeare himself in this diminishing into a king?
Since Shakespeare so contains us, so does Falstaff. Sir John will not fit any categories assigned to him. His mystery is akin to what all of us confront in our daily lives. Are we characters, thinkers, or personalities? At eighty-six I have in common with Falstaff the will to live, which sustains me at a dreary time. When Falstaff and his group are carried off to the Fleet for momentary incarceration, how are we to imagine he felt as he lay there in durance? Shakespeare wisely chose not to represent that sadness. I have never been in jail but time in the hospital is notoriously slowed down to stasis. The word “patient” is apt for those who must wait and endure.
CHAPTER 20
The Rejection of Falstaff
Though act 5, scene 5 of Henry IV, Part 2 is the actual depiction of the new King casting off Falstaff, the entire mingled Henriad and Falstaffiad is nothing but that rejection. This scene is one of Shakespeare’s most remarkable achievements. It begins with three grooms who are strewing rushes on the streets to prepare for the arrival of King Henry V and his train. To the sound of trumpets, the King and entourage pass over the stage. Only after them do we see the entrance of Falstaff, attended by Shallow, Pistol, Bardolph, and the Page. Each time I reread or teach the scene I suffer the anticipation of what Falstaff secretly not only expects but courts:
Falstaff: Stand here by me, Master Robert Shallow, I will make the king do you grace. I will leer upon him as a’ comes by, and do but mark the countenance that he will give me.
Pistol: God bless thy lungs, good knight!
Falstaff: Come here, Pistol, stand behind me. [To Shallow] O, if I had had time to have made new liveries, I would have bestowed the thousand pound I borrowed of you. But ’tis no matter, this poor show doth better, this doth infer the zeal I had to see him.
Shallow: It doth so.
Falstaff: It shows my earnestness of affection,—
Shallow: It doth so.
Falstaff: My devotion,—
Shallow: It doth, it doth, it doth.
Falstaff: As it were, to ride day and night, and not to deliberate, not to remember, not to have patience to shift me,—
Shallow: It is best, certain.
Falstaff: But to stand stained with travel, and sweating with desire to see him, thinking of nothing else, putting all affairs else in oblivion, as if there were nothing else to be done but to see him.
Pistol: ’Tis semper idem, for obsque hoc nihil est: ’tis all in every part.
Shallow: ’Tis so, indeed.
Pistol: My knight, I will inflame thy noble liver,
And make thee rage.
Thy Doll, and Helen of thy noble thoughts,
Is in base durance and contagious prison,
Hal’d thither
By most mechanical and dirty hand.
Rouse up Revenge from ebon den with fell Alecto’s snake,
For Doll is in. Pistol speaks nought but truth.
Falstaff: I will deliver her. [Shouts within.]
[The trumpets sound.]
Pistol: There roar’d the sea, and trumpet-clangor sounds.
act 5, scene 5, lines 5–40
The spirit has already abandoned Falstaff. His living and laughing mode of speech is absent. We could be listening to any down-at-heels, would-be courtier who desperately knows he has no chance of preferment. Our modern sense of “leer” as naughty or sly is not valid here. Poor Falstaff intends to look yearningly upon his former companion in play. The thousand pounds he has extorted from Shallow may have some reference to the sum granted Shakespeare by the Earl of Southampton. Until 1603 Shakespeare’s company were the Lord Chamberlain’s Men. Under James I they became the King’s Men. Southampton’s gift evidently enabled Shakespeare to purchase a full share in the company, upon which his subsequent fortune was to be founded.
It is painful to hear Falstaff stammer his hopeless desire to be accepted by Henry V. When Pistol rants that Doll is in Bridewell, poor Falstaff declares: “I will deliver her.” The trumpets sound, the new King enters with the Lord Chief Justice and the rest of his court, and Falstaff plunges into the pit:
Falstaff: God save thy grace, King Hal, my royal Hal!
Pistol: The heavens thee guard and keep, most royal imp of fame!
Falstaff: God save thee, my sweet boy!
King Henry V: My Lord Chief Justice, speak to that vain man.
Lord Chief Justice: Have you your wits? Know you what ’tis you speak?
Falstaff: My King! my Jove! I speak to thee, my heart!
act 5, scene 5, lines 41–46
The fatal word “vain” sounds again to knell the doom of Falstaff. I always startle when Falstaff cries out “My King! my Jove! I speak to thee, my heart!” Sir John is Old Father Time or Cronos, who castrated and usurped his father Uranus. Jove, the son of Cronos, displaced him a touch less violently. Saturn, the Roman name for Cronos, presided over a golden age. Falstaff, superbly intelligent even in his desperation, is highly aware of what he is saying.
Henry V is never more brilliant or cruel than in his powerfully phrased rejection:
I know thee not, old man. Fall to thy prayers;
How ill white hairs become a fool and jester!
I have long dreamt of such a kind of man,
So surfeit-swell’d, so old and so profane;
But, being awak’d 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 evils;
And, as we hear you do reform yourselves,
We will, according to your strengths and qualities,
Give you advancement.
[To the Lord Chief Justice] Be it your charge, my lord,
To see perform’d the tenor of my word.
Set on.
act 5, scene 5, lines 47–72
“I know thee not, old man.” In one sense, the King means he no longer knows Falstaff; in another, that he never knew him. The pious monarch urges Sir John to kneel down and pray. A former companion is now only a fool and jester, a figure of dream. The awakened Henry V loathes that dream, as we do not. For a single moment we hear Hal, in the playful jest that the grave beckons Falstaff thrice wider as Sir John is three times normal weight. Hastily the King stops Falstaff from joking in return, with the odious line “Presume not that I am the thing I was.”
Shakespeare was well aware of the sanctimonious pomposity of Henry V saying that God knows and the world will soon perceive that the Prodigal Son has reformed. But Falstaff is banished at least ten miles away, which may indicate an uneasiness. Rather grudgingly, Sir John will be allowed a stipend lest he turn to highway robbery again. There is a sinister clash between the absurd promise that an improved Falstaff will receive advancement, and the grim charge to the Lord Chief Justice to see the royal word performed.
There is a personal Shakespearean overtone in: “Master Shallow, I owe you a thousand pound.” Poor Shallow beseeches repayment to no avail and achieves some wit in response:
Shallow: I cannot well perceive how, unless you should give me your doublet and stuff me out with straw. I beseech you, good Sir John, let me have five hundred of my thousand.
Falstaff: Sir, I will be as good as my word: this that you heard was but a colour.
Shallow: A colour that I fear you will die in, Sir John.
Falstaff: Fear no colours: go with me to dinner: come, Lieutenant Pistol; come, Bardolph: I shall be sent for soon at night.
act 5, scene 5, lines 81–90
By “colour” Falstaff means a pretense, to which Shallow rejoins with a double pun “colour” and “collar” or the noose, and “dye” or “die.” A final pathos is heard in “I shall be sent for soon at night,” which Sir John does not believe. Instead, the Lord Chief Justice and Prince John of Lancaster, both fixed enemies of Falstaff, enter with officers and command Sir John and everyone with him to be carried to the Fleet prison. The last words we will ever hear from Falstaff are his desperate “My lord, my lord,—.” It is a sorry departure for the world’s most substantial wit.
I have already commented on Sonnet 89, “Say that thou didst forsake me for some fault.” The two flanking Sonnets, 88 and 90, also may be relevant to the rejection of Falstaff:
When thou shalt be disposed to set me light
And place my merit in the eye of scorn,
Upon thy side against myself I’ll fight,
And prove thee virtuous, though thou art forsworn.
With mine own weakness being best acquainted,
Upon thy part I can set down a story
Of faults concealed, wherein I am attainted,
That thou in losing me shalt win much glory.
And I by this will be a gainer too,
For bending all my loving thoughts on thee,
The injuries that to myself I do,
Doing thee vantage, double vantage me.
Such is my love, to thee I so belong,
That for thy right myself will bear all wrong.
Sonnet 88
Then hate me when thou wilt; if ever, now;
Now, while the world is bent my deeds to cross,
Join with the spite of fortune, make me bow,
And do not drop in for an after-loss.
Ah, do not, when my heart hath ’scaped this sorrow,
Come in the rearward of a conquer’d woe;
Give not a windy night a rainy morrow,
To linger out a purposed overthrow.
If thou wilt leave me, do not leave me last,
When other petty griefs have done their spite;
But in the onset come; so shall I taste
At first the very worst of fortune’s might;
And other strains of woe, which now seem woe,
Compared with loss of thee will not seem so.
Sonnet 90
Shakespeare’s rejection by William Herbert, Earl of Pembroke, has a sexual element absent from the Hal-Falstaff relationship. What matters is rejection. It is a common sorrow for all of us whether it costs us a lover or a friend. Shakespeare abounds in rejections. Hamlet viciously casts off Ophelia and thus provokes her suicide. Othello rejects Iago as his second-in-command, a devastation that strikes at Iago’s fundamental being. The Tragedy of King Lear turns on the King’s casting-off of his beloved daughter Cordelia and on the Earl of Gloucester’s repudiation of his true son Edgar.
I would not venture that what may have been Shakespeare’s own sorrow of rejection influenced Hamlet, Lear, Othello. Yet we know the full depths of our own rejections by apprehending Shakespeare’s insights. Falstaff, haunted by the parable of Dives and Lazarus, may reflect Shakespeare’s own meditation upon that harshest of all the pronouncements of Jesus. We cannot know.
The rejection of Falstaff, whether or not Shakespeare shared in it, is a rejection of our own will to live. For me and for many others, Falstaff bears the Blessing. Henry V had not the power to withdraw that Blessing.
CHAPTER 21
The Death of Sir John Falstaff
All of King Henry V, from my perspective, could be called The Death of Sir John Falstaff. Yet, as I have said, Shakespeare will not let us see him die.
One might call Falstaff’s relation to King Henry V the Real Absence. His aura hovers throughout.
The doomed survivors of Sir John’s band of irregular humorists gather together in the street near the Boar’s Head Tavern to engage in their mimic quarrels. The widowed Nell Quickly surprisingly has married the egregious Pistol, thus jilting Nym, a scalawag whose name means “thief.”
Nym: Will you shog off? I would have you solus.
Pistol: Solus, egregious dog? O viper vile!
The solus in thy most mervailous face,
The solus in thy teeth, and in thy throat,
And in thy hateful lungs, yea, in thy maw, perdy,
And, which is worse, within thy nasty mouth!
I do retort the solus in thy bowels,
For I can take, and Pistol’s cock is up,
And flashing fire will follow. . . .
Nym: I will cut thy throat one time or other, in fair terms, that is the humour of it.
Pistol: ‘Couple a gorge!’
That is the word. I thee defy again.
O hound of Crete, think’st thou my spouse to get?
No, to the spital go,
And from the powdering-tub of infamy
Fetch forth the lazar kite of Cressid’s kind,
Doll Tearsheet she by name, and her espouse.
I have, and I will hold, the quondam Quickly
For the only she; and pauca, there’s enough.
Go to.
act 2, scene 1, lines 45–81
Nym challenges Pistol to shog off and thus march with him to a death-duel. Defiantly the ranting Pistol employs false French for throat-cutting and insults Nym as a Cretan hound akin to Actaeon’s hunting dogs that turned and destroyed him. A spital or lazar house adds to the rancorous defiance, culminating in Nym’s dispatch to the powdering-tub of infamy where you sweat away venereal disease in a cloud of mercury. Cressid who deserted Troilus for Diomede in Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde, and subsequently was punished with leprosy by the gods, is associated with poor Doll Tearsheet, the last mention we will hear of that boisterous spirit.
Pauca is the Latin for “a few,” here words, as Pistol concludes. The impending violence is held off by the Boy:
Boy: Mine host Pistol, you must come to my master, and you, hostess. He is very sick, and would to bed. Good Bardolph, put thy face between his sheets, and do the office of a warming-pan. Faith, he’s very ill.
Bardolph: Away, you rogue!
Mistress Quickly: By my troth, he’ll yield the crow a pudding one of these days. The King has killed his heart. Good husband, come home presently.
act 2, scene 1, lines 83–89
Since a pudding was meat minced and tied in a skin, Mistress Quickly primly fears that Falstaff will soon be so much carrion. Sir John is yielding either to the plague or syphilis and not to his broken heart:
Mistress Quickly: As ever you come of women, come in quickly to Sir John. Ah, poor heart, he is so shaked of a burning quotidian tertian that it is most lamentable to behold. Sweet men, come to him.
Nym: The King hath run bad humours on the knight, that’s the even of it.
Pistol: Nym, thou hast spoke the right;
His heart is fracted and corroborate.
Nym: The King is a good king, but it must be as it may. He passes some humours and careers.
act 2, scene 1, lines 117–26
Ancient Pistol resorts to Latinisms with “fracted” for “broken” and a misused “corroborate,” which means “strengthened” rather than “diminished.” The iconic Nym turns to horsemanship where passing a career is to gallop at full speed. King Henry V cannot be turned from riding the horse of his will.
Falstaff has died.
Mistress Quickly: Prithee, honey-sweet husband, let me bring thee to Staines.
Pistol: No; for my manly heart doth earn.
Bardolph, be blithe. Nym, rouse thy vaunting veins.
Boy, bristle thy courage up;
For Falstaff he is dead, and we must earn therefore.
Bardolph: Would I were with him, wheresome’er he is, either in
heaven or in hell!
Mistress Quickly: Nay, sure, he’s not in hell; he’s in Arthur’s bosom, if ever man went to Arthur’s bosom. A’ made a finer end, and went away an it had been any christom child. A’ parted even just between twelve and one, even at the turning o’th’ tide. For after I saw him fumble with the sheets and play wi’th’ flowers, and smile upon his fingers’ ends, I knew there was but one way; for his nose was as sharp as a pen, and ’a table of green fields. ‘How now, Sir John?’ quoth I, ‘what, man! be o’ good cheer.’ So a’ cried out ‘God, God, God!’ three or four times. Now I, to comfort him, bid him a’ should not think of God; I hoped there was no need to trouble himself with any such thoughts yet. So a’ bade me lay more clothes on his feet. I put my hand into the bed and felt them, and they were as cold as any stone. Then I felt to his knees, and so up’ard and up’ard, and all was as cold as any stone.
Nym: They say he cried out of sack.
Mistress Quickly: Ay, that a’ did.
Bardolph: And of women.
Mistress Quickly: Nay, that a’ did not.
Boy: Yes, that a’ did, and said they were devils incarnate.
Mistress Quickly: A’ could never abide carnation, ’twas a colour he never liked.
Boy: A’ said once the devil would have him about women.
Mistress Quickly: A’ did in some sort, indeed, handle women; but then he was rheumatic and talked of the Whore of Babylon.
