SIR JOHN FALSTAFF

JEANNE ADDISON ROBERTS

Shakespeare’s great comic creation acts as mirror and lamp

Falstaff, one of William Shakespeare’s most engaging creations, raises some basic questions about the functions and fascinations of drama, one of the most pervasive and persistent inventions of human culture. On an individual level, we constantly act out scenes, conflicts, soliloquies, and conclusions. On a social level, theater offers unique opportunities for widely disparate groups to share a space and think and feel about a world shared by all, at least for the moment.

Theater tends to flourish in times of change, like the 5th century BC in Greece, Renaissance England, or the present- day United States. It presents an opportunity to think about problems, old or new, without fear of immediate consequences; to mourn failures which do not immediately impinge on our lives; to laugh at things which might not seem funny in real life; and to examine our own values and, possibly, to entertain new ones. The best plays do not try to tell us directly what to think or feel, but even those which do frequently evoke resistance and reappraisal. In the terms popularized by M. H. Abrams in his 1958 book on dramatic theory, a play may act as a mirror and a lamp. We see ourselves reflected in the mirror, but we also find that the play acts as a lamp, lighting up dark corners and sometimes rearranging a familiar landscape. The effect may vary depending on the location of one’s seat.

William Shakespeare, with his amazingly varied reflections of life in motion, provides audiences with endless opportunities for an infinite variety of thoughts and feelings. Falstaff, a Shakespearean character so complex he seems like a real person, evokes strong and conflicting responses from audiences both in the study and in the theater.

Falstaff is a major player in three of Shakespeare’s plays—two histories and a comedy—Henry IV, Parts One and Two, and The Merry Wives of Windsor. Falstaff has been quoted or mentioned more times than any other Shakespearean character, except Hamlet. And in the first Henry IV play, he has more lines than either of the major characters, Prince Hal, the heir apparent, or his heroic opponent, Hotspur, who dies in battle. Reactions to Falstaff range from rejection to mild amusement, to passionate affection, to almost fanatical defense. These reactions may tell us as much about the responders and their world views as about the play.

Almost everyone agrees that in the history plays Falstaff is a quintessential Old Boy. He is old and prodigiously fat.He drinks, eats, and apparently whores around with Doll Tearsheet (although some have noted that his name—Fall-staff—may suggest a certain failure of capacity). Falstaff lies, cheats, steals, sits out a battle, and then stabs the corpse of the dead Hotspur and claims credit for killing him.He degrades the quality of the army by selling relief from conscriptions; he cheats the hostess of the Boar’s Head tavern; and he leads Prince Hal away from the paths of righteousness. He is never repentant, but he is quick, smart, and funny.

In 1775, one of his early critics, Mrs. Elizabeth Griffith, commented tellingly on his distinctive quality of speech, noting that he is quick, sharp, and unpredictable. She concludes:

In fine, the portrait of this extraordinary personage is delineated by so masterly a hand, that we may venture to pronounce it to be the only one that ever afforded so high a degree of pleasure without the least pretence to merit or virtue to support it.

Dr. Samuel Johnson concluded, in his judgment of Falstaff ’s role in the plays, that the moral is that “no man is more dangerous than he that with a will to corrupt, hath the power to please....”

The image of Falstaff as Old Boy develops almost entirely in the two Henry plays.He is a buddy, perhaps a surrogate father, of Prince Hal, who is estranged from his father Henry IV. The father’s crown lies uneasy because he has succeeded a murdered legitimate king, whom he has defeated in battle, and he finds himself surrounded by rebellion and discontent. The Prince is enjoying his wild oats, and Falstaff is a perfect companion. In Part One, he eggs on the Prince with a vision of a riotous future:

Marry, then, sweet wag, when thou art king, let not us that are squires of the night’s body be called thieves of the day’s beauty. Let us be Diana’s foresters, gentlemen of the shade, minions of the moon; and let men say we be men of good government, being governed as the sea is, by our noble and chaste mistress the moon, under whose countenance we steal.

But the relationship is uneasy. The Prince tells the audience that he means to shape up when he is king.He plays a clever trick on Falstaff, which ought to disgrace his companion, but Falstaff ’s quick recovery saves his face.

Falstaff continues to proffer the outsider view.When he goes to war, he actually manages to sit out the battle with the help of his famous argument for the uselessness of honor, the prospect of which might have moved him to fight:

...honor pricks me on. Yea, but how if honor prick me off when I come on? How then? Can honor set to a leg? No. Or an arm? No. Or take away the grief of a wound? No. Honor hath no skill in surgery then? No. What is honor? A word. What is that word honor? Air—a trim reckoning! Who hath it? He that died a Wednesday. Doth he feel it? No. Doth he hear it? No. ‘Tis insensible then? Yea, to the dead. But will it not live with the living? No.Why? Detraction will not suffer it. Therefore I’ll none of it. Honor is a mere scutcheon— and so ends my catechism.

After the battle, he steps forward to claim the “honor” of killing the enemy, and the Prince, knowingly or not, tolerates the claim.

David Sabin as Falstaff and Derek Smith as Prince Hal in The Shakespeare Theater's 1994 production of Henry IV, adapted and directed by Michael Kahn. Photo by Carol Pratt.

Although the Prince begins to distance himself from Falstaff in Part Two, Falstaff continues to voice the views of a rebel on the fringes of society. His pastoral scenes with Justice Shallow switch from humor to nostalgic reminiscences of the past and rueful acknowledgment of age (it is these scenes which inspired Orson Welles’ film Chimes at Midnight). Falstaff actually says to Doll Tearsheet when she kisses him, “I am old.”

The appeal of the irreverent continues to be irresistible to the Old Boys. The importance, perhaps even necessity, of the Old Boy network has been explained and defended as a stage of male development—the exploration of rebellion from rational social strictures— a celebration of freedom and human bonding which might be seductive and educational for women as well as men, although we see little evidence of this in the plays.

The pleasures of the Old Boy network may even have a class component. Falstaff is a knight and therefore above the common rank. British critic William Empson argues that this is a necessary part of his appeal:

Falstaff is the first major joke by the English against their class system; [Falstaff] is a picture of how badly you can behave, and still get away with it if you are a gentleman—a mere common rogue would not have been nearly so funny.

In any case, the underworld of the Henry IV plays must at last be abandoned by a man who wants to be crowned King Henry V. In the course of Part Two, the Prince is reconciled with his father, the King dies, and Hal is crowned Henry V. Falstaff goes to the coronation expecting to be part of the new order and is brutally rejected by the new King:

I know thee not, old man. Fall to thy prayers. How ill white hairs become a fool and jester! I have long dreamed of such a kind of man, So surfeit-swelled, 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 wider than for other men. Reply not to me with a fool-born jest.

Although it might have been less abrupt and more compassionate, this rejection and its public dimension are clearly necessary to the new King’s determination to be successful, and even critics who are shocked and saddened by the sudden loss of their hero accept its inevitability.We never see Falstaff alive again in the histories after the end of Part Two.

Perhaps significantly, men tend to be more passionate admirers of the Falstaff of the histories than women. Frederick Boas accounts for this enduring appeal, noting that “There is in every man, however strenuous and serious, a touch of Falstaff, a germ of rebellious temper against the stern immutability of moral law, and a longing for a world with a less remorseless logic of facts than our own.”

The reactions of women have been much less examined, and their voices are not necessarily unanimous. As early as 1664, Margaret Cavendish penned the first known prose assessment of Shakespeare as dramatist in a letter to a friend, praising the astonishing range of his characters. She singles out both Falstaff and the new King as magnets for identification:

so well he hath Express’d in his plays all Sorts of Persons, as one would think he had been Transformed into every One of those Persons he hath Described...who would not think he had been such a man as his Sir John Falstaff? And who would not think he had been Harry the Fifth?

But by 1808, Elizabeth Inchbald, in an introduction to Henry IV, Part One, shows a different view, noting that this is a play

..most women dislike.Many revolting expressions in the comic parts, much boisterous courage in some of the graver scenes, together with Falstaff ’s unwieldy person, offend every female auditor.

Like Dr. Johnson, the 18th century British actor Henry Hackett looks for the moral. He does not single out a gender, but his advice sounds intended for males. He contends that:

Shakespeare did indeed have a moral—to show the danger to youth of becoming corrupted by intimacy with old and vicious company, who may have a high order of intellect, yet pervert it to base uses.

In any case, it is clear early on that Falstaff and Prince Hal have taken on lives of their own. However the audience, collective or individual, may feel about the end of Henry IV, Parts One and Two, the progression of plot is clear. But what are we to make of the third Falstaff play, The Merry Wives ofWindsor, a comedy written probably between the two history plays? In it, an impoverished Falstaff wanders off to Windsor and decides to make love simultaneously to two well-off local wives, Mistress Page and Mistress Ford. He is tricked by the wives, thrown into the Thames, dressed in a woman’s clothes, enticed into an assignation wearing deer horns on his head, and pinched by local citizens in disguise as fairies. Although he never actually expresses repentance, he does admit that he’s “dejected” and remarks that his treatment by the citizens is “enough to be the decay of lust and late-walking through the realm.”He concludes, “I begin to perceive that I am made an ass.”

Why did Shakespeare choose to so change the view of the character he had established in Henry IV, Part One? Critic John Dennis explained that Queen Elizabeth had asked for a play showing Falstaff in love, but the play apparently was written around 1598, and this story first appears in print in 1702, so its authenticity, though widely accepted, is suspect. It is tempting to believe that Shakespeare might have wanted to please the Queen, and therefore showed the wives defeating Falstaff, and Shakespeare probably was at work on other comedies in 1597-98. In any case, the author himself must have agreed to explore Falstaff in a new light, and the new dimension didn’t seem disturbing to early critics.

Margaret Cavendish apparently did not object to Falstaff ’s disgrace and, in fact, she particularly admired the women of the play:

...one would think [Shakespeare] had been metamorphosed from A Man to a Woman, for who could Describe...Better than he hath done many...Females of his own creating as Nan Page,Mrs. Page,Mrs. Ford and the Doctor’s Maid....

Male critics also were favorable, though not quite so enthusiastic. John Dryden praised the play as exactly formed.William Oxberry called it a “perfect comedy.”Dr. Samuel Johnson concluded of the play that “...its general power, that power by which all works of genius shall finally be tried, is such, that perhaps it never yet had reader or spectator, who did not think it too soon at an end.”

Early women critics were similarly unconcerned about the decline of Falstaff. Mrs. Elizabeth Montagu(1769) finds Falstaff the character “...perfectly original and sustained through every play, in which it appears.” Mrs. Griffith is delighted with all three plays. She concludes of Falstaff ’s humiliations in The Merry Wives:

There is a very good reflection made here, upon the nature of fear or guilt being apt to confound our reason and senses, so as to lead us to mistake appearances for realities.

Pat Carroll as Falstaff in The Shakespeare Theatre’s 1990 production of The Merry Wives of Windsor, directed by Michael Kahn. Photo by Joan Marcus.

There have been cases of women attempting to play Falstaff, but the response has been predictably harsh. One critic in 1784 reports his outrage at the stage’s disgrace by such “vile and beastly” transformation which “indelicacy seldom parallels,” adding that Mrs. Webb exhibited herself in the dress of Falstaff, and sustained the character word for word, through the first part of Henry IV. He concludes that obesity was her sole quali- fication. The only successful female impersonator of the fat knight, as far as I know, was Pat Carroll at the Shakespeare Theatre in Washington in 1990, and, predictably, she played only the defeated Old Boy of The Merry Wives—a play that is largely absent from the current revivals of Falstaff plays. The Old Boy may be rejected by a man but not defeated by women.

By the end of the 18th century, the Romantics begin to see things differently. The glorification of the Falstaff of the histories is evident in Maurice Morgann’s long essay designed to prove that Falstaff is not a coward.And William Hazlitt in the early 19th century is the first to suggest that the Falstaff of The Merry Wives is “not the man he was in the two parts of Henry IV.” Soon the idea is taken to be literally true. Hartley Coleridge declares that this Falstaff is “...a big-bellied imposter, assuming his name and style, or at best it is a Falstaff in dotage.”

This process of Falstaff glorification and the rejection of the Falstaff of The Merry Wives reaches its acme almost exactly 300 years after the death of Queen Elizabeth in the words of A. C. Bradley, a distinguished late Victorian critic, who dismisses The Merry Wives as a “hasty farce” in which Falstaff is “baffled, duped, and treated like dirty linen, beaten, burnt, pricked, mocked, insulted, and worst of all repentant and didactic,” concluding “it is horrible.”

In our own time, the prolific critic Harold Bloom shares Bradley’s distaste for The Merry Wives. Bloom dismisses feminist critics of The Merry Wives, who, he says, regard the play as “a castration pageant, with the merry wives vastly enjoying their labors of emasculation.” He sees the Falstaff of the histories as “a miracle in the creation of personality,” whose prose gives us “a cognitive music that overwhelms us even as it expands our minds to the ends of thought.”He compares Falstaff to Socrates and Hamlet and predicts that the character, having survived four centuries,will “prevail centuries after our fashionable knowers and resenters have become alms for oblivion.” In response to this ecstatic encomium, we might hear the voice from the grave of George Bernard Shaw repeating his judgment that Falstaff is “a besotted and disgusting old wretch.” It is hard to believe that a fictional character could have aroused such an astonishing range of responses and seems to continue to do so.

Seeing Falstaff in the flesh on stage can show you not only the power of drama but also something about yourself —your values, your gender, your sense of humor, your limits, and your possibilities. It also forces you to consider your culture and your history. Good drama probably does not teach morality or values but rather, in the terms laid out by Abrams, serves as both a mirror and a lamp.We see ourselves and our world reflected, but we also experience ideas in ways that cast light on our history and our future. Perhaps that is why in 2004 one could see Henry IV, Part One and Part Two at the Washington Shakespeare Theatre, and the Salieri opera Falstaff at Wolf Trap National Park for the Performing Arts. The Shenandoah Shakespeare Festival in Staunton, Virginia, featured Henry IV, Part One, along with a play contrived of the words of Falstaff from all three plays. In New York, Kevin Kline played Falstaff at Lincoln Center.

Seeing the character on the stage provides a great opportunity for audiences to join the great assembly of audiences and critics that has preceded them, and to figure out where they stand along the broad spectrum of responses.

Jeanne Addison Roberts (CC ’04) is emerita professor of literature at The American University. She is the author of two books on Shakespeare and past president of the Shakespeare Association of America.

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