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Falstaff as Parodist and Perhaps Holy Fool

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 December 2020

Roy Battenhouse
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Abstract

Starting with Raglan's suggestion that Falstaff may be a “holy fool” and with Auden's belief that he is a comic symbol of charity, this essay explores the medieval tradition of wise fool, and especially Falstaff's always canny use of biblical allusion. His various jests, if read in relation to the political action of the main plot, reveal him as characterizing England's time of day and parodying the unchristian behavior of Hotspur, Henry, and Hal. By the time he dies mumbling Psalm xxiii to an uncomprehending Nell Quickly, there have accumulated many hints that he is, in fact, a candle to his age, a professional Fool with the heart of a faithful Lazarus, and destined to join Mowbray in Abraham's bosom. The merriment for which readers have found him lovable amid his masquerades of vice has its mysterious basis in his covertly Christian understanding of England's neo-Roman Caesars.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 90 , Issue 1 , January 1975 , pp. 32 - 52
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1975

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References

1 The Hero: A Stuck in Tradition, Mvth, and Drama (1936; rpt. New York : Random, 1956), p. 111.

2 The Dyer's Hand (New York: Random, 1962), p. 198. Falstaff radiates happiness without apparent cause, Auden says, and “this untiring devotion to making others laugh becomes a comic image for a love which is absolutely selfgiving” (p. 206).

3 As They Liked It (New York: Macmillan, 1947), pp. 75–76.

4 “Falstaff, ? Fool and Jester,'” Modern Language Quarterly, 7 (1946), 435–62; my quotation is from p. 461.

5 See, e.g., Mark Van Doren, Shakespeare (New York: Holt, 1939), p. 107, and Willard Farnham. “Mediaeval Comic Spirit in the English Renaissance,” in Joseph Quincy Adams Memorial Studies, ed. James McManaway et al. (Washington, D. C. : Folger Shakespeare Library, 1948), p. 436. Farnham, p. 430, notes that Erasmus in Praise of Folly says fools are “vastly pleasing to God.”

6 Understanding Drama (New York: Holt, 1948), rpt. in the revised Norton Critical Ed. of Henry IV, Part h ed. James L. Sanderson (New York: Norton, 1969), pp. 21529, esp. 218–19.

7 “Henry iv. Part r. History and the Artist's Vision,” a revised version of his Scrutiny essay of 1947, rpt. in Sanderson's Norton Ed. of the play, pp. 327–31. Unfortunately, Traversi's illustrations are limited to those few ? cite.

8 See Willard Farnham, The Shakespearean Grotesque (Oxford: Clarendon, 1971), pp. 32–46. I have reviewed Farnham's and other very recent views of Falstaff, in Studies in English Literature 1500–1900, 12 (1972), 411–15.

9 The Feast of Fools (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1969), pp. 23, 139–45.

10 See Howard Harper, Days and Customs of All Faiths (New York: Fleet, 1957), pp. 218–19; or John Doran, The History of Court Fools (London: R. Bentley, 1858), p. 104, which reports that this Jester, Rahere, still played the fool when a monk. ?. K. Chambers (The Medieval Stage, Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1903, H, 381) speaks of plays by parish clerks of a Guild of St. Nicholas which “may have had some connection with Bartholomew Fair”; and (i, 268) he mentions St. Martin's Day miming, in which someone dressed in a bishop's robes went about distributing nuts and apples.

11 The Medieval Stage, i, 325. The festivity depends, as Chambers notes, on the Deposuit theme in the Magnificat, at which point in the office the haculum, or pastoral staff, was taken by a lowly subdeacon. See also Barbara Swain, Fools and Folly during the Middle Ages and Renaissance (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1932). esp. pp. 54–63, where the fool's role as satirist is emphasized.

12 The Prayer-Book of Queen Elizabeth, 1559, rpt. with a historical introd. (London: Griffith: Ancient and Modern Library of Theological Lit., 1890), p. 61.

13 This allusion is overlooked by Richmond Noble in his Shakespeare's Biblical Knowledge (London: S.P.C.K., 1935), although Noble catalogs more than 50 allusions to Ecclesiasticus in the whole of Shakespeare and concludes that it was one of Shakespeare's favorite books. Murray Abend supports Noble on this point by adding 20 more instances of allusion to Ecclesiasticus in “Some Biblical Influences on Shakespeare's Plays,” Notes and Queries, 195 (1950), 554–58; but Abend, too. misses the one I have cited. Ecclesiasticus (written by Ben Sira) means “church book,” because it was used as a manual in teaching morals to the early church; it was very popular in the teaching of the Fathers. That may be the reason for Shakespeare's interest in the book. There is ironic needling, however, in Falstaff's ascribing to King Henry an interest in someone of “cheerful look”; for this is what Henry has neglected, and his own dubious prosperity has deprived him of any genuine cheerfulness. Falstaff manages to suggest that while cheerfulness may be what Henry subconsciously longs for his present fate is to have instead the tricky hangdog look which his son carries as a family heritage.

14 See 1H4 i.ii. Hal, recognizing the allusion, repeats it only to disregard it. Falstaff's reply, “O, thou hast damnable iteration, and art indeed able to corrupt a saint,” may mean: it is damnable to repeat Scripture without taking it to heart, not applying it to oneself, since this is how a saintly person (or a saintly author's message) is corrupted.

15 Euphuesin a letter to Philautus says (without identifying the source of his allusion): “Hee that toucheth pitch shall be defiled,” in a context that associates pitch with women (in R. Warwick Bond's The Complete Works of John Lyly, London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1902, i, 250); and in a letter to Livia (Bond, i, 320) he associates pitch with wanton women, while assuring Livia that she can “handle pitch and not be defiled.” Such moralizing is shifty, and far from Ecclesiasticus. One wonders, therefore, whether Shakespeare in making parody of euphuism may be glancing also at Lyly the author, whose intellectual shallowness Bond has commented on (i, 77, 148, 162). C. S. Lewis, in English Literature of the Sixteenth Century (Oxford : Oxford Univ. Press, 1954), p. 314, has remarked that Lyly's palinode against wit in Euphues requires no moral theology and no experience of life. And G. K. Hunter has noted, in John Lyly (London: Routledge, 1962), that Lyly's dramas pay homage to the ethos of court life, whereas for Shakespeare the world of the court is not self-sufficient but “placed” in relation to other ways of life, as evidenced by theun-Lylian palinode at the end of Love's Labor s Lost (p. 348). Since Falstaff, as I read him, is mocking a courtly king's sense of virtue, is he perhaps Shakespeare's spokesman for a medieval wit that outdoes and judges Lyly's “university” wit?

16 Pitch in the biblical sense was apparently well understood by Dante; see Inferno, Cantos xxi-xxii, where Barrators (who sell justice by trafficking in public offices) are shown quarreling with each other in their circle of fraud. Their lake of pitch signifies the pelf in which they frolic in their trickery, diving to hide or emerging to harpoon each other. Dante treats them, as Dorothy Sayers notes (Inferno, London: Penguin, 1949), with “a mixture of savage satire and tearing high spirits” (p. 205). His burlesque, a'though more grim than Falstaff's, is, I think, not dissimilar; and I suspect Shakespeare knew of Dante's placing of these civic robbers immediately next to the Hypocrites. Hotspur's imagery of diving to pluck up “honor” (i.iii) and Hal's vow to tear Hotspur to make him “render every glory up” (iii.iii) resemble Dante's imagery.

17 In Preston's play Ambidexter, when commenting to the audience on Cambises' slaying of Praxaspes' son, declares the king's virtue “fained” (1. 608) and then predicts that “ye shall see in the rest of his race ' What infamy he will work against his own grace” (11. 619–20). Falstaff merely implies a similar assessment of Henry. But does he not also intuit that in Henry's case “the rest of his race” (in the person of Henry's son) will work the infamy of striking at the heart of a latter-day good counselor's son, Falstaff himself? That analogy could have been a further reason for his choice of the Cambises story for thematic material.

18 The Player King (London: Chatto & Windus, 1968), pp. 106–07.

19 “Shakespeare in His Relation to the Visual Arts,” Research Opportunities in Renaissance Drama, 13–14 (1970–71), 8. Nearly this same meaning, I may add, can be found in Lyly's Euphues, just a few lines before the “camomile” simile. Writing of “ripest wits,” Lyly says: “one flatereth another in hys owne folly, and layeth cushions under the elbowe of his fellowe, when he seeth him take a nap with fancie” (Bond, I, 195). Samuel Chew, The Pilgrimage of Life (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1962), Fig. 70 (date 1601), shows a cushion on the head of a tempting female who represents Flesh; he infers that the cushion signifies Sloth or Lechery. More important, see also 2H4 v.iv, where a cushion is spectacularly associated with Doll's pretensions to pregnancy—i.e., to a motherhood that is as specious and absurd as is fatherhood in King Henry's ethics.

20 See Tilley, as summarized in the New Variorum Henry the Fourth: Part I, ed. Samuel B. Hemingway (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1936), p. 26. Theologians such as Reinhold Niebuhr have helped us distinguish between time as chronos and time as crisis. Crisis time is the hour of “our day” in relation to Judgment Day; i.e., it is the apocalyptic dimension of the temporal. Commentators who are unalert to this meaning have applauded Hal's retort that Falstaff's question is absurd because (as Brooks and Heilman say) “Falstaff has properly nothing to do with the world of time” (Sanderson, p. 223). Actually, however, the real absurdity is Hal's, in his not comprehending that Falstaff's question has everything to do with time.

21 Cf. James Winny's view, p. 109, that the Gad's Hill robbery “is manifestly a comically scaled-down version of Bolingbroke's original crime, followed by a matching sequel in which a group of fellow-conspirators attempt to snatch the booty from their successful partners.” But Winny, while seeing Falstaff often as a satirical parallel to Bolingbroke, concludes that Falstaff himself is “morally bankrupt” (p. 130). Thus Winny fails to integrate his own fragmentary insights.

22 According to the medieval law of arms, Hotspur had the right to retain all the prisoners except the Earl of Fife. On this point, see the New Arden / Henry IV, ed. A. R. Humphreys (London: Methuen, 1960), p. 8, or the New Variorum, ed. Hemingway, p. 21. Thus Hotspur's initial answer to the King's demand (i.i.93–94) accords with customary laws, but the King takes occasion to force his larger demand. Holinshed tells us the Percies handed over the Earl of Fife while claiming the other prisoners as properly theirs. Shakespeare shows them promising the Earl of Fife, but breaking that promise when provoked by Henry. The King is the provocateur of a confrontation.

23 The Man in the Name (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1956), pp. 12–13. To be “seldom seen” is King Henry's advice in 1H4 m.ii, and I suspect that his further advice to appear in “robe pontifical” is reflected in Falstaff's mock impersonation of “Turk Gregory.”

24 Robin acquires a name only in Merry Wives. But we see him as a witty jester in each of his earlier appearances (2H4 i.ii and n.i-ii; H5 m.ii and iv.v). Note that he regards Pistol as a roaring devil whose nails can be pared with a wooden dagger, an echo of Falstaff's “dagger of lath” in 1H4 n.iv. This suggests to me that, dramatically, this Boy is perhaps in H5 a quasi-fulfilling of Shakespeare's promise at the end of 2H4 to “continue the story, with Sir John in it.” Much of Falstaff's shrewd spirit continues in Robin. J. W. Draper, in “Falstaff's Robin and Other Pages,” Studies in Philology, 36 (1939), 476–90, ignores Robin's wit and insight, sees him rather as an instance of the pitiful lot of Elizabethan young noblemen's sons taken in “service,” and supposes (as I cannot) that he is abused by Falstaff and eventually in MW betrays him.

25 For the sake of swiftness of argument, my summary has reduced the complexity of the parody. Actually, Falstaff's “Repent . . .” can be understood simultaneously in two senses: either in the sincere sense I have mentioned, or as a continuing mock of Hal's misplaced sermonizing and thus as a forecast of what a “pious” Hal will say in the coronation scene (“as we hear you do reform . . . We will . . . Give you advancement”). Falstaff's jests are doublesided. Hence, also, Falstaff's “Thine by yea and no” is both ambiguous promise and a mock of Hal's duplicity. If read as a dig at Hal it means: “Promise and break-promise is the way you've been using me,” (This fickle yea-and-nay St. Paul rebuked in n Cor. i. 17–20, and so does King Lear when saying that “aye” and “no” are no good divinity.) Regarding the double sense of farewell, compare Portia's report to Shylock of Gobbo's message: “His words were farewell mistris, nothing else” (MKn.v.45).

26 Prince John's comment, “more his courtesy than your deserving,” is true because Coleville's surrender has been gratis, undeserved through any militant action by Falstaff, who arrived at Gaultree after all was over. But at another level (dramatic irony) the remark applies to its speaker: this Prince “took” the rebels more by their foolish courtesy in trusting him than by any deserving of his.

27 I sense a kind of equivalence between these 5 recruits and the 5 principals in the Gaultree episode. Mouldy and Bullcalf, the 2 who are allowed to buy themselves off, parallel in this respect Westmoreland and John of Lancaster, who at Gaultree use the bribery of false promises to save themselves. On the other hand, the 3 recruits who are not spared—Shadow, Feeble, and Wart—are mirror equivalents of Mowbray, the Archbishop, and Hastings, who get “pricked down” by execution at Gaultree. Surprisingly, there are features in the portraits of each of the 5 that enable the reader to guess at specific equivalences. Mouldy says he has been drafted on an earlier occasion (as Westmoreland was by Henry to meet the Hotspur rebellion) and that he is needed to do his old dame's “drudgery” (cf. Westmoreland's drudge role). Bullcalf says he is diseased with a “cold”—thus matching the coldness of John of Lancaster, stressed for instance by Falstaff when speaking of the merits of sack. Shadow is described as being of little substance compared with his father—which at Gaultree is true of young Mowbray, a poor substitute for the elder Mowbray who died fighting as a crusader for Christ. Feeble is strikingly parallel to the Archbishop, in being “as valiant as the wrathful dove and most magnanimous mouse.” And Wart, who is made to march up and down to show he can “charge you and discharge you,” duplicates in this respect the role of Hastings at Gaultree. In short, Shakespeare has integrated his low-level comedy with high-level history, by presenting us in the Gloucestershire yokels 5 parody equivalents of the 5 would-be “noblemen” at Gaultree. The implication is that in Henry's England farce is truth, while the truthfulness of politicians is a kind of farce.

28 There is a parallel to this in King Henry's acceptance of Warwick's plea on Prince Hal's behalf (2H4 iv.iv), followed by the King's admitting, a couple of speeches later, that “my brain is giddy” (1. 110). Ten occurrences of the word giddy in H4 through H6 are but one indication that Shakespeare sees giddiness as a cultural characteristic of the epoch.

29 Let me suggest that Theobald's brilliant emendation to “babbled of green fields” might have been even better had he simply interpolated the word “babbled” while retaining “a table of green fields.”

30 E.g., Hardin Craig, Shakespeare: The Complete Works (Chicago: Scott, 1951), p. 247; also William Burgess, The Bible in Shakespeare (Chicago: Winona, 1903), p. 59, and J. H. Walter, ed., New Arden Henry v (London: Methuen, 1954), p. 47. But note, further, that this psalm's image of “oil” is associated in Psalm xlv with a gift of “gladness” to the man who loves righteousness, an idea which Matt, vi.17 reinforces, and which Falstaff has exemplified.

31 D. J. Palmer, in “Casting Off the Old Man: History and St. Paul in Henry iv,” Critical Quarterly, 12 (1970), 267–83, admits that Hal's purpose is to renew his reputation rather than to be renewed “in the spirit of the mind” as stipulated by Eph. iv.33. But whereas Palmer seems to justify Hal by saying that “in a sense” Hal has cast off the “old man” when he buries his father, King Henry, I would insist that such a fulfilling is no more than a counterfeit of the Pauline phrase and would urge readers to ponder especially Eph. v.6, “Let no man deceive you with vaine words,” and (verse 14), “Awake thou that sleepest.”

32 John Dover Wilson, The Fortunes of Falstaff (Cambridge, Eng.: University Press, 1943), p. 24.

33 Peter Alexander, in Modern Language Review, 39 (1944), 409, as cited in the New Variorum Supplement to Henry IV, Part I, ed. G. B. Evans, Shakespeare Quarterly, 7 (1956), 91. And cf. Goddard, cited on p. 93.

34 This phrase is that of the entranced chorus in H5 ii; Prologue, 1. 6. But among the various possible meanings of “mirror,” this chorus probably has in mind only that of exemplar or “model,” whereas Shakespeare may have in mind two additional meanings: (1) a beguiling glass (as in Richard n's lament, “O flattering glass . . . That does beguile me”); and (2) a story offering warning, as in Mirror for Magistrates.

35 “Falstaff, Incongruity and the Comic: An Essay in Aesthetic Criticism,” The Personalis!, 49 (1968), 289–321; see esp. pp. 289–300.

36 The Janus of Poets (Cambridge, Eng. : University Press, 1935), p. 40.

37 European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, trans. Willard R. Trask (New York: Pantheon. 1953), pp. 98–101.

38 See the note by Lewis Soens, in his Regents Critics Ed. of Sir Philip Sidney's Defense of Poesy (Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1970), pp. 77–78. Sidney himself in his peroration (p. 55) exhorts: “Believe with me that there are many mysteries contained in poetry which of purpose were written darkly lest by profane wits should be abused.”

39 In Shakespeare Survey, 25 (1972), 37–44.

40 In an unpublished paper summarized by Joseph Sittler, in “The Scope of Christological Reflection,” Interpretation, 26 (1972), 335.