Great. So the final lecture in this series from autumn 2011 is on the first part of Henry the Fourth. So this is a play written in about 15 ninety six to seven. And therefore, although it's obviously got historical sequential links with Richard the second the previous play in the historical sequence and with Henry the fourth Part two and Henry the fifth, which are coming after it in historical chronology.
It's actually I think got more in common in certain ways with the comedies of that period than with the histories. So, Richard, the second is a play, as I talked about earlier, in the term, all inversed very formal verse play. Henry, the fourth but one has a lot of prose in it. Proportions quite similar to Merchant of Venice say Merry Wives of Windsor plays about the same fifteen ninety six to seven period.
It's not always clear, I think that Henry the fourth was intended as the first part of a pair of plays that I think that was always clear. And I'm going to try and talk a bit more about that during the lecture. It's first printed in fifteen ninety eight. And it's one of the most popular plays. In fact, it's the most popular Shakespeare play in print in the immediate 15 nineties into the 17th century.
And I think that's largely because of the dramatic attractiveness of its fat anti-hero, Falstaff. And so the question I wanted to ask about this play is why is Falstaff fat? OK, so let's recap the plot of the play. Henry, the fourth, who has in the previous play, Richard, the second taken the throne from Richard. His cousin is beset from the outside of Henry, the fourth one by conspiracy, civil war and insubordination.
And it's useful in a way, perhaps, to think about that, taking two forms, two substantive forms in the play. So it's over overburdened with civil war and insubordination because it comes in two quite distinct forms. The first we might describe as political. It's a rebellion led by the charismatic and chivalric Hotspur, supported by his father, Northumberland, his brother in law, Mortimer, who had to claim to be the rightful heir to the throne.
The Welshman Glendower and Douglas Scott. Together, this is a coalition of noblemen who don't accept Henry the fourth's claim to the throne. That's the political threat that's more pressingly, though, we get the rebellion of Henry's son, Prince. How how ignores the court and his royal obligations, preferring instead the company of Falstaff in the taverns of East Cheap.
The play tells the story of the gradual reconciliation of father and son, culminating in the Battle of Shrewsbury, where how killed Hotspur and protects his father from being attacked. Now, as I've already said, Henry, the fourth was a hugely popular play. It's hard for us to reconstruct the popularity of plays in performance just because the evidence is very hard to find. But we can do something about the popularity of plays in print.
So I'm just gonna talk a little bit about print play statistics. We can see that the most popular play of the Elizabethan and Jacobean period in print is an anonymous play called Musa Doris Musa. Doris, Mr. Dawes is a strange kind of Winter's Tale light. Well worth looking at. If you're looking at that play, for some reason, this is a hugely popular best kind of a Best-Selling play. It has nine editions in 25 years. So nine editions.
I mean, Sideris, this is an attempt to try and place Henry the fourth popularity in some kind of context. The next most popular plays by reprints are Dr. Fasters and the Spanish tragedy. They have eight and seven editions, respectively, in 25 years. So there's no Shakespeare play in the top three. We might think most, most most popular place, Shakespeare is a much more successful writer of narrative poems in this period than he is of plays in terms of print.
So the most Best-Selling work by Shakespeare entirely through his lifetime is not a play at all. But is Venus and Adonis narrative a villian poem? And most references to Shakespeare during his lifetime are as a poet. The poet of Venus and AdOne is not as a playwright. So top of the list, though, of Shakespeare's plays is Henry, the fourth part, one with seven editions in just over 25 years. You can look at this kind of bibliographic information.
So searching for the number of times a work is reprinted in a searchable resource listing all the publications of this period. That's called the English Shorter Title Catalogue. The English Shorter Title Catalogue. The E STC, which is online now. The extended title of the first edition from 15 NINETY-EIGHT covers some of the appeal of Henry the Fourth.
This is its long title, The History of Henry the Fourth with the battle at Shrewsbury between the King and Lord Henry Percy, Sir named Henry Hotspur of the North with the humorous conceits of Sir John Falstaff. So if you're interested in sort of humour, play is like Johnson's everyman, every man and every man out of his humour. From about this same period, a humorous conceit is obviously linking the play with that with that form of comedy.
So we can see from the layout of the title page that the humorous conceits of Sir John Falstaff are set aside visually sight typographically from the material, the historical material that precedes them. Sir John Falstaff is a challenge to the historical account that we get higher up the title page just as he is within the play itself. You can also see if you look at that title page. Lots of interesting things about Shakespeare in print at this point.
No authorship on the title page, for instance. We don't get that for another two or three years. So all of all, the plays of Shakespeare published before fifty ninety nine are effectively anonymous. And more importantly, perhaps for what I want to argue about Henry the Fourth. There's no mention that this is part one. This is just called the history of Henry the fourth Henry. The fourth only becomes part one when it's reprinted in the Folio in 16 23.
We've already talked about in relation to Richard the second, the what? That one of the organisational innovations of the Folio concerns, the history plays in particular. It's put the history plays into a chronological order of historical monarch and reordered their titles in order to make that progression clear. So in sixteen hundred, a play called The Second Part and the fourth was printed henceforth. Part two. But the two plays are never printed together, apart from in the Folio.
And even after the second part of Henry the Fourth is being printed, there are publications of what we now know as the first part of Henry the Fourth, but which are just called Henry the Fourth. Does that make sense? Henry the fourth never really becomes part one, even though it has a part to play for audiences and readers. The point of that is it was experienced as a standalone play.
And maybe Shakespeare wrote it as a standalone play, the sequel to Like The Merry Wives of Windsor, in which Falstaff also appears might be seen more as an opportunistic afterthought, cashing in on a highly successful, dramatic formula. And the popularity of Henry the fourth. The thing that makes it become part one that spawns merry wives.
And part two is, I think, Falstaff. Crucial to false starts, characterisation is his fatness house first words to him when we first meet both Howe and Falstaff in the play's second scene. Call him Fat Whitted. And there is constant banter about his appetite for food and drink names for Falstaff. Reiterate his size. Fat Guts, Horse Hawson Round Man, Fat robe. A gross fat man as fat as butter. So just that word fat comes a score. A score or more of times in the play. How long is it a go, Jack?
Since now I know NI asks how Falstaff blames size and Greeves for blowing him up like a bladder. How advises him to lie to hide on the ground during a trick. And Falstaff asks, have you any levers to lift me up again? Later he described himself as fat and old in a climactic sequence in the play An Active Scene five where Falstaff and and how act out in the Tavern an interview between Howe and his father, the King Falstaff fatness is one of the things they discuss ventriloquism.
His father's disapproval. How addresses Falstaff, who is pretending to be how there is a devil haunts the in the likeness of an old fat man. A ton of man is thy companion. And then he extemporise is an ex of a very extravagant sequence of similes piled up for false. Sighs An example of the rhetorical figure of Copiah. Copious notes which we might think Falstaff actually physically represents.
Falstaff sticks up for himself. If to be fact is to be hated, then Faro's lean kind are to be loved, referring to the biblical symbols of famine in Joseph's dream in the Old Testament. So images of Bulc, particularly his size and fatness, the word fat and its cognates pepper the play. It's really impossible to get away from the fact that Falstaff is fat. So before we ask why he might be fired, let's just step back for a minute to see how very unusual this is.
In Shakespeare's writing, very few characters in Shakespeare are given specific physical characteristics. We hear that Cassius in Julius Caesar has a lean and hungry, hungry look, just as the apothecary in Romeo and Juliet has been worn to the bones by misery. We know how old Juliet is. And strangely, we know we know how old Jago is, too. But for most other characters, we've got very little sense of their of their age, either A Midsummer Night's Dream.
We know that one of Heleno and Hermia is fair and the other dark and one is tall and the other short. But it's intrinsic to Midsummer Night's Dream that nobody can remember which is which. Beyond this handful of immediate examples, most of which have thematic rather than specifically personal resonances. There isn't much more in the way of physical description in Shakespeare's plays.
There are a few very rare occasions where a physical description of a character is so at odds with what we think the character ought to look like. Which is got not idea in itself. How would we know what the character looks like except through physical descriptions? So these occasions when a physical description is so at odds with the image we have of a character that editors have tried to manipulate the reference away.
Examples of that might be Gertrude's description of Hamlet in the final fencing match with Laertes as fact and scant of breath. Nobody really wants a fact. Hamlet has been all kinds of editorial work to say how she doesn't really mean that he's fat. Or maybe the idea that Taliban's witch, like a mother, sick secour acts, has blue eyes, all kinds of work to try and show how blue eyes were really negative thing, when clearly the burden of evidence is that blue eyes were actually quite positive.
Not particularly as it is, which is at all. So for the most part, though, Shakespeare does not give his characters extensive physical descriptions and nor is their appearance of particular dramatic interest. While we know that Shakespeare writes with a definite group of actors in mind, that's to say that's one of the most crucial differences between Shakespeare and other dramatists of this period.
You remember, Shakespeare is an in-house dramatist, writing for a group of a group of actors he already knows as opposed to the freelance work. But just about everybody else does. During this period. So he does capitalise on that fixed group of actors and their particular talents. But he doesn't particularly capitalise on what they look like physically. So what's the upshot of all that? Falstaff, Fatna says, I think the most thoroughgoing physical designation we ever get in Shakespeare.
So that whereas, for example, it's quite possible, I think, to read Othello. I think it would be different to see Othello, but it's quite easy to read Othello and to forget that Othello is black. So references to Othello is blackness are very prominent at the beginning of the play, but they tend to fade away. Alas, of a few zijlaard of racially and sort of grammatically inflected imagery right at the end of that play.
But we could read Othello and lots of people do, I think, read Othello and forget that the main character is black. I think it's almost impossible to imagine reading Henry the Fourth without remembering that Falstaff is fat. So the density of these signifiers of fatness is also significant when compared to Shakespeare's sources.
Although Falstaff, as he appears in the play, seems to be an a historical character who is enjoyably adrift from the serious political and military business we associate with history plays. He does have a real and rather controversial historical source. The source for Falstaff is the long, loud night, Sir John. Old Castle Old Castle was martyred in the early 15th century and included in John Fox's extensive prehistory of English Protestantism.
The Book of Martyrs. So as you know, Foxes Foxes is using history to suggest that Protestantism was sort of always existed. And all the good people in the past were really Protestants and the bad people were really Catholics, all Catholics. One of the good people in this story and his martyrdom is is pictured and discussed by Fox in that really, really important Bible off of prescient, as in the Book of Martyrs.
So he was understood by Elizabethan England to be a heroic religious man who anticipated precedented and who lived before Protestantism. But he anticipated it and died for his beliefs. There is pretty firm evidence that in its first incarnation, and very possibly in its first performances, Falstaff name was Old Castle Howl's phrase, My old Lord of the Castle doesn't make much sense if it wasn't the epilogue to part two of Henry.
The fourth teases the audience with the sense. The Falstaff both is and is not Old Castle. I mean, that's not quite explicitly. The complete Oxford Shakespeare, the collected edition edited by Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor, reinstates the name Old Castle for Falstaff, suggesting that because this was the way the play was originally written, the job of the editor is to get back to that. And so, too, to delete Falstaff and to put Old Castle instead.
So if you're reading the play in that edition, you may so far be wondering who is this person who doesn't appear at all in your play? Now, the historical old castle then was a devout and principled man and not a man noticeably fat. He certainly isn't very fat as he's being grilled in one of foxes images of martyrdom. It's clear that the that old castles, Elizabethan successors who were powerful men in the Elizabethan caught and powerful in particular in relation to the theatre.
It's clear that they took exception to seeing their noble ancestor pilloried by Shakespeare and forced the change of name. It's not clear that that was done in a in a kind of formal way or, you know. This is not a don't think this is the action of government censorship. I think this is pressure, informal pressure from powerful people forcing a change on the on the play.
The Chamberlains men's great rivals, the admirals men capitalised on this, upset by producing a more acceptable version of the old Cassells story in the play. Sir John. Old Castle in this companion play. Old Castles. Religious opposition to the Catholic Church represented in the place of John Castle by the villainous Bishop of Rochester allies. It with the popular anti Catholicism of the early modern stage. Is it really, really worth looking at alongside Henry?
The fourth part one to show how just to get a clearer sense of how Shakespeare has satirised this much more Orthodox presentation of the Protestant martyr. Ironically, this play, the play, this John Castle is reprinted in 16 nineteen, not six sorry, 16 19 claiming to be by Shakespeare. And it's also one of a package of plays, apocryphal plays largely added to the Third Folio of Shakespeare's work in sixteen sixty three.
So it's never quite fully separate from Shakespeare, but that's what I'm trying to say there. Even though it's the kind of propagandist flipside of what Shakespeare does to our castle in the character of Falstaff. So Falstaff was fact, then what? Why? I'm not particularly interested here in obvious statements like Falstaff is fat because he is lazy or Falstaff is fat because he drinks too much. He clearly does, but that's because he's fat rather than the other way around.
This is a literary, I think, not a medical question, although if you Google the question of Falstaff Fatma's, there is a striking literature on the medical symptoms of Shakespeare characters. This is an essay in the medical journal. Whoever knew there was such a journal sounds like something from Have I Got News for you? Called Obesity Surgery. This is about Falstaff and morbid obesity diagnosis, false golf symptoms.
But it ends quite interestingly, it uses Falstaff as a sort of ideal patient for all the symptoms of morbid obesity. Physicians and surgeons must work to maintain the health of the world's Falstaff. It's a great idea, isn't it? Physicians and surgeons must work to maintain the health of the world's Falstaff and possibly by curing their morbid obesity. Allow them to be judged on their real merits and vices rather than on their bulk Falstaff.
Though would not be Falstaff. I want to argue if you were not fat, this is not a symptom which could be taken away from him. This is him. We've discussed earlier in this lecture series the difference between readings of Shakespeare, which plays characters as primary, that is, they see the plays as fiction, which managed to convince us that the characters pre-date what's happening to them in the play. And characters are secondary, produced by and for the needs of a particular and dominant plot.
I think I want to suggest that we might think of Falstaff fatness less as an individualising characteristic of his personality and more as part of a role, a structural role. Shakespeare wants this personage to play in Henry the Fourth, but this immediate idea that Falstaff is a role rather than a character or a function rather than a person. This is not uncontroversial. Indeed, we could say that the whole critical methodology of Shakespearean character study is built on the study of Falstaff.
So he's not just a character. He's in some sense the character Morris Morgan's 1777 publication, an essay on the dramatic character of John Falstaff. It's both the first full length account of the Shakespearean character, but also the first book length study of Shakespeare at all, the first work of literary criticism on Shakespeare in book form. Falstaff is therefore foundational to the discipline we're all involved in. Morgan attempts to defend Falstaff against charges of cowardice.
Here he he's engaging with moralist criticism of the 18th century like that of Dr. Johnson, which took a very dim view of Falstaff behaviour. Morgan's attempt, though, to defend Falstaff surely misses the point. False that Falstaff is a coward, which is the thing Morgan is trying to disprove, is actually vital to the play. But Morgan does represent the beginning of a tradition which has perhaps Harold Bloom as its most recent or prominent exemplar.
In his book, Shakespeare The Invention of the Human Bloom develops his thesis that Shakespeare has invented modern ideas of the human through his gifts of characterisation via two specific examples. The first is predictable enough Hamlet. But the second is Falstaff. So Falstaff becomes for Bloom one pillar, one of the twin pillars that on which his whole theory that Shakespeare invents cannot draw, invents the human.
Bloom credits his own youthful encounter with Sir Ralph Richardson, performing the role of Falstaff with his own lifelong fascination with Shakespeare's characterisation. So he says, when he took when Bloom talks in interviews about his interest in Shakespeare, he talked about Falstaff as kicking it all off. So he's reprising in his own life the kind of Morgane beginnings of Shakespeare criticism.
In an interview about his work with Vanity Fair, Blum describes Falstaff as the most intelligent person in all of literature. Just a curious thing to say, really. But so says the most intelligent person in all of literature literature. But he also suggests that there is something about Falstaff, which is less personal and more general. This is in a phrase where he he says that Hamlet is a kind of harbinger of death. It's a nice idea about Hamlet. This is his he isn't just talking to that skull.
He somehow is the skull. He is the gateway to death. At where? And on the other hand, he says Falstaff is life. Falstaff is the blessing. Falstaff is life. Falstaff is the blessing. That's Bloom being interviewed by Vanity Fair. Like blooms, many of these accounts are Falstaff. Tip over from the specifically personal to the more general and metaphorical, as if Falstaff is very fatness, makes him exceed individual humanness and take on instead a kind of symbolic function.
That Falstaff has a symbolic function in the play, represents more than a single person, is something Falstaff himself aspires to. In Henry the Fourth in that scene I've already mentioned in which he and how rehearse the prince's interview with his disapproving father, Falstaff, as Howe defends Falstaff against the charges, rather, as Morgan and numerous led to critics go on to do. This is his this is his defence. Sweet Jack Falstaff. Kind.
Jack Falstaff. True. Jack Falstaff. Valiant. Jack Falstaff. Banish not him by Harry's company. Panish not him by Harry's company. Banish plump jack and banish all the world. Banished plump jack and banish all the world with something quite interesting to do semantically. And the difference between fat and plump there I think. I mean just note is that Howells claim sorry Falstaff claim to haoles affections. Here is the claim that he represents more than himself.
He is in some sense all the world. No wonder then he's fat. The suggestion here is that Falstaff represents a vision of life, a physical, self-centred enjoyment of existence, and we can see this quite easily, identifying him with popular cultural archetypes such as the Lord of Misrule, the person who presides over merriment and festivity. For example, look at the kind of ideas which are developed and codified in black teens.
Famous Theory of Carnival. In his highly influential book, Rabelais and His World, Mikhail Bakhtin argues for a socially subversive, carnivalesque culture of festivals and holidays in premodern culture. And these are the times in the year. These are the sort of festive moments where a carnivalesque energy, a suppressed energy, which is physically located somehow let rip.
So the carnival gives expression to the kind of physical energies of the body, the things that are suppressed all the rest of the year. For Bakhtin, the carnivalesque finds its visual expression in a trope he called the grotesque body, the grotesque body, a leaky, porous physicality preoccupied with scatological and sexual fulfilment. A body which challenges notions of decorum and pre-eminently the notion that the mind controls the body or that the mind is a higher order than the body.
It's quite easy, I think, to see how Falstaff bulky, sweaty, snoring, farting presence could be related to this bacteria and idea of the grotesque body and perhaps by extension to the challenging carnivalesque underworld, which threatens to undermine official authority. That's what by Bakhtin says is it is life affirming and and energetic about Carnival. It's a challenge to official orthodoxy fatness. Then here becomes joyful, exuberant, provocative, anti-establishment.
The epitome of carnival. Perhaps, as Bardot puts it. You are so fat, Sir John, that you must needs be out of all compass sense that Falstaff cannot be confined. And his fatness is one evident symbol of that. So we can see perhaps that Falstaff has moved in this argument from being Shakespeare's invention of the human to being Shakespeare's symbolic understanding of a carnivalesque social world. Let's try and see if we can move on with an analogy.
The nearest analogy in contemporary culture that I can imagine for Falstaff is the cartoon father, Homer Simpson. We all know that Homer Simpson is a loser, wastrel, inadequate father, positively dangerous worker at the Springfield nuclear power plant. Here are a few choice Homer isms, Lisa. If you don't like your job. I'm sorry. I wish I could do the accent, but I can't. Lisa, if you don't like your job, you don't strike.
You just go in everyday and do it really half arsed. That's the American way. Some when you participate in sporting events, it's not whether you win or lose. It's how drunk you get. If something's hard to do, then it's not worth doing. Now, these are funny because they are countercultural. They set up that. They rhetorically set up to establish a statement which seems to demand a pious answer if something's hard to do. Try harder. It's not whether you win or lose. It's the taking part.
We all know how the sentences are supposed to supposed to finish. But Homer's rhetoric is funny because it is anticlimactic. He mimics a kind of bumper sticker or Hallmark card cliche morality, but completes it with his own realist or pathetic conclusion. And that makes Homer attractive precisely because he is not up to the ideals that our culture bombards as with. And maybe therefore he allows us similarly to fail to reach those ideals.
Now let's listen to one of Falstaff musings at the end of Act five, scene one amid the chaos of the Battle of Shrewsbury. The battle between the forces of the King and the rebellion of Hotspur and his associates, Falstaff is suddenly alone onstage for a brief soliloquy. I think it's his first and only soliloquy in the play. I think we're prepared, we're prepared, and we think we know what's going to happen here.
This is a point heavily cued by the structure of repentance, which in some way governs the whole play, and then to come back to that idea of repentance in a minute. But I think it's a point where we expect that the no mark selfish drunk is going to come good. It's a cliche we're all familiar with, I'm afraid. An example I could think of is that drunk ex pilot Pams into the Independence Day and blows up the spaceship. Remember? Anyway, that's that's actually a really, really good example of that.
But I can see it's not it's not quite done. But you know either the trope I'm talking about someone who is a loser all the way through and is going to do something heroic and self sacrificial probably at the end, which is going to make everything okay. I think that's what we're being cute to think Falstaff is going to do. So what does Falstaff say when he's on stage alone? What his honour. But then he goes on what? His honour, a word. What is that honour.
Air can on a set to a leg. No. Or an arm? No. Or take away the grief of a wound. No. Honour hath no skill in surgery then. No. Falstaff ends by describing this as his catechism. And nicely ironic and subversive use of a statement of belief. The catechism is the questions and answers by which somebody affirms their faith.
To puncture pious and cliched definitions of honour. And to replace them instead with the pragmatic and selfish concerns of the vulnerable body, which will not be protected from injury by these lofty ideals like Homer. That's to say Falstaff sets up a rhetoric of piety, draws on our familiarity with the way we know we ought to behave. And like Homer deflates that expectation. Telling the self-interested or taboo truth.
It's easy, isn't it, to see how the old Kastle family took exception to this, since the doctrine of pragmatism is so entirely opposite to Sir John O. Castle's fate. For unflinching adherence to his own deeply held beliefs. Feldstein's popularity then, I think, must be related to the fact that he is unapologetic and unrepentant. And I think this does tell us something important about the anti moralistic energies of the stage in this period.
The stage is not moral in this period. I don't think plays are moral and it isn't as what people want to go and see. The popularity of Falstaff might give us a way into thinking about that. Of course, the fact that Falstaff neither apologises nor repents allows, perhaps makes inevitable the possibility of a sequel. But let's look a bit at how repentance and apology do work in Henry.
So, Henry, the fourth is structured like a number of dramatic and particularly a number of prose texts from the 15 nineties around the theme of the prodigal son. As Richard Helgason pointed out more than 30 years ago in a book called Elizabethan Prodigals, writing by figures like Gascoine, George Gascoine, Robert Greene, Thomas Lodge and Philip Sydney, amongst others, use the theme of the prodigal to characterise the narrative voice.
Writers think of themselves as prodigals, whose creative freedom requires them to rebel against paternal or paternalistic authority. The theme of the protocol comes, of course, from Luke's gospel. You'll remember the parable. It tells how the youngest son of a rich man decides to claim his share of inheritance before his father's death and then goes on to spend it in a profligate way in the city brought to absolute penury by his reckless spending and working as a swineherd.
The son realises that his father's servants have a better time than he and vows to return to throw himself on his father's mercy not as his son, but as his servant. But on his arrival home, the father is so overjoyed to see him that he orders a great feast. The killing of the fatted calf. Much to the chagrin of the older brother, who has had no such reward for living loyally and consistently all the time in his father's house. The theme is a prominent one in Henry the Fourth.
The prince's dedication to access and riot rather than obedience to his father makes the paradigm clear. Implicit in the theme of the prodigal son is the expectation of reformation. And in Henry the Fourth. The play makes it quite clear that how has this teleology firmly in mind? At the end of Act one, scene two, how delivers an unexpected soliloquy.
He's been on stage in a kind of prose back and forth, pleading with foul Falstaff, but with without the other tavern companions, laughing and joking, setting up a trick where they're going to rob some travellers.
That's been going on for quite some time, and it's it's a scene which is really effectively contrasted with a very sort of gloomy, serious, controlled environment of the court, which we get it act one scene, one side, once in two, seems to work to contrast with that in every way that the subject matter. The tone of prose versus verse and so on. But at the end of the scene, all the time, companions leave the stage and house stays behind to deliver a long speech about his intentions.
This is an important speech. I'm going to read the whole thing. I know you all and will a while uphold the honour, yolked, humour of your idleness. Yet here in will imitate the son who doth permit the base contagious clouds to smother up his beauty from the world. That one he plays again to be himself being wanted. He may be more wandered out by breaking through the foul and ugly mists of vapours that did seem to strangle him.
If all the year were playing, holidays to sport would be as tedious as to work. But when they seldom come, they wished for. And nothing pleases but rare accidents. So when this loose behaviour I throw off and pay the debt I never promised said. By how much better than my word I am by so much. Shall I falsify men's hopes and like bright metal on a sullen ground, my reformation glittering all my fault. She'll show more goodly and attract more eyes than that which hath no foil to set it off.
I also offend to make offence a skill redeeming time when men think least I will. Now the language of reform is interesting here, but so too is the language of manipulation. How is stage managing his reformation for maximum effect? He's a self-conscious protocol. Who knows that the worse his behaviour, the greater the sense of welcome relief at his reformation and the language of this revelation.
The end of act runs into his distinctive set aside from the short, informal prose of the foregoing scene. Whole speech immediately echoes the blank verse world of the court. That's that's been an act one, scene one, and it's going to be in the scene immediately following Act one, scene three. There's a kind of chilling reassurance in the ease with which how slips into the blank verse of political control and expediency. I'm only slumming it in the tavern. I know my place in time.
I will emerge to claim it in part, of course. This is the expected teleology of the prodigal son narrative that the prodigal son goes home and repents and in moral and structural terms. The play needs to end. The play needs to end with howls, repentance and reconciliation with his father. To some extent the play does. And in that way, how assumes the proper role of the Prince of Wales fighting alongside his father and protecting him from attack by the Scot Douglas.
His father's gratitude at being saved from Douglas. Thou hast redeemed thy lost opinion. Thou hast redeemed thy lost opinion directly linked to the language of House speech forat previously. But what also happens in this scene is that the play brings its two father figures into a kind of juxtaposition. And that's where Falstaff comes back into our story.
I've already suggested that Falstaff own repentance is cued by the play's thematic and generic structure, but that this expectation is decisively subverted by false. Confident selfishness. Unlike how that's to say, Falstaff does not bend himself to normative political, ethical or familial values. Related to this, I think, is his role as an alternative father to how? In the play, its opening scene.
The king wishes that the brave Hotspur, also called Harry were revealed to be his own lost son, changed with the wastrel prince. How by fairies in the cradle. So if King Henry wishes for an alternative son, so how himself wishes for an alternative father in absenting himself from court. He establishes himself in the alternative locus of East cheap, disreputable location associated largely with prostitution in the Elizabethan period.
Hence the irony of Middletons titled A Chaste Made in Cheapside and how establishes himself in that alternative locus with an alternative monarch, Falstaff. How is choice as a protocol, then, is in fact a choice between father figures, which father does he returned to at the end? Douglas the Scot fights both Henry the fourth unfold staff in Act five, scene four, bringing them together in a way which is perhaps inevitable for the moral and ethical choices of the plots.
Final resolution two adjacent stage directions can give us a sense of the difference between these adjacent encounters. So the first is Douglas and Henry, the fourth fighting. They fight the king being in danger. Enter the Prince of Wales and then the other one. Enter Douglas. He fights with Falstaff. He falls down as if he were dead. He Falstaff the prince kill. Percy. Both Douglass's triumphs are taken from him, that's to say in the first.
How comes in to save his father? And in the second, Falstaff drops down, pretending to be dead. Fathers multiply in this sequence just as Henry the forth battle strategy involves sending numerous doppelgangers out into the field. Douglas has already lost another time by killing a fake king. So Walter Blunt dressed in the king's armour. So fathers and father figures are echoed in this scene and none of them can quite be killed. What's striking is that how aligns himself with his royal father.
But he does not quite take the corollary, the step of distancing himself entirely from Falstaff at the end of the play. He has the opportunity to reveal Falstaff as a shameless and dishonourable coward. Falstaff is claiming Hotspur as his own victim, stabbing his call his corpse callously and dragging it off to claim reward. How knows that he himself killed Falstaff and that this is untrue. But he does not take the opportunity to reveal a full staff, nor to punish him at the end of the play.
Then he is still caught between the two alternative fathers. That haoles own reformation is compromised by this ambivalence, I think is made clear by the existence of the sequel in part to how reunites with Falstaff and his behaviour continues to disappoint his royal father. So he he falls back from the decision he seems to have made at the end of this play, perhaps Falstaff physical size and the difficulty of denying him come together here.
Falstaff is fat, and that makes it more difficult for how to turn away from him, as he, as he says himself, is a kind of vise figure who represents the appeal and the allure of the way Falstaff should not behave. And the bigger he is, the more compelling and convincing that representation is. But the moral thrust of Henry the Fourth and its dramatic energies are in a conflict. And it's similar to the conflict we saw in the lecture about Antony and Cleopatra.
You remember in that play the sort of historical logic. In some ways, the rational logic is that Caesar has got to win at the end. But the dramatic logic is that we don't we're not interested in Rome. We're interested in Egypt. Something. So there's something similar here. A morally conclusive ending requires the rejection or defeat of Falstaff, but a dramatically satisfying one does not want to let him go. It may be that Shakespeare has actually been too successful in this play.
He's allowed the play's antagonist, Falstaff, to take over the world and take over Falstaff certainly did. A collection called the Shakespeare Illusion Book made in the 1930s, which is a collection of allusions to Shakespeare and to Shakespeare's works during his lifetime and in the immediate aftermath, is completely dominated by references to Falstaff. Indeed, at the top of the index to the book, this book of Allusions to Shakespeare.
It says, For the purposes of this index, Falstaff is treated as a work. So for the purposes of this index, Falstaff is treated as a work. There are more direct references to Falstaff than to all the other plays put together. Amongst the entries are comments in plays by Messenger, Middleton and Suckling. But there's also more kind of private correspondence and references, including the Countess of Southhampton gossipy postscript in a letter to her husband. This is what she says.
All I can, all the news I can send you that I think will make you marry is that Sir John Falstaff is by his Mrs. Dame Paint Pot maid, father of a goodly Miller's thumb. Does using John Falstaff begin with talk about a fat person may know who has become who has had a child or made someone pregnant. Then maybe they maybe talking about the figure who of the family, the old castle family. But it may just be talking about a sort of fat person for whom Sir John Falstaff has become a kind of nickname.
So Falstaff self-interest then and his unorthodox pragmatism made him an unlikely but an undelete deniable Elizabethan heroes. And that may suggest that those versions of these plays, Henry, the fourth part one and two, sometimes with bits of merry wives of Windsor that put him at the centre, are echoing the Elizabethan reception of these plays. OK, so so when critics like Cannon call the Henry Henry plays from Henry the fourth Henry Henry ad on the model of the Aeneid.
They're suggesting that Henry is at the centre of that. But perhaps we need something which is more like a kind of full Staffy ad, rather like Welles's Chimes at Midnight, The Greats of lyrical tragicomic film by Orson Welles. Combining Henry the fourth Part one and two with Hal is a very marginal, boyish, puppyish kind, foolish figure and Falstaff as the central figure at the centre of our attention, played, of course, by Welles himself.
Putting Falstaff at the heart of the play substitutes Shakespeare's conflicted moral Tell US of the Prodigal with the critical reception of the play that wants more Falstaff part of the problem for part two of Henry the Fourth. Aside from the intrinsic formal problem of being a sequel that we're familiar with from Hollywood is that it has to reconcile the prodigal son narrative. How has to separate himself from Falstaff with the ongoing popularity of Falstaff himself?
So how has to separate himself from a figure that everybody loves? That's the that's the kind of conundrum of pop to the end of Henry. The fourth part one is no ending at all. How and his father have been reconciled. And contrary to the rumours that he wanted to kill his father and take away the throne,
he had saved his father from death on the battlefield at Shrewsbury. But just as this battle is not the whole war, and just as the last lines of the play see the king reorganising his forces to continue the fight against the rebels. So to Falstaff is an unresolved and perhaps an unresolvable figure in the encounter with Douglas.
We heard about before Falstaff falls down as if he were dead and he lies on the stage amongst the battle casualties for some moments, while Howe delivers his eulogy on the dead Hotspur and then on Falstaff himself. There's a last nod by How to Falstaff. Sighs Could not all this flash keep in a little life? How leaves the stage believing his old acquaintance to be dead. Which the stage direction reads Falstaff. Rise up. The word rises is just somehow much more than gets up or stands up.
There is some sort of resurrecting of energy, some vitality in the idea of rising up. Falstaff seems to be unkillable, unlike the other figures in the play. Who who lie down and I mean, they're all die down on their pretending to be dead. But Falstaff knows he's pretending Hotspur. It is. We know Hotspurs pretending, but we have to pretend. We don't think he is pretending to pretend. We think he's really dead. But Falstaff becomes in a way, as Bloom might say, the spirit of life.
It sells itself from amongst the dead of the battle. Falstaff resists the historical process that would kill him to. It kind of makes sense of of haoles opening remarks to Falstaff, Falstaff asks him what time it is. He says, Why on earth you need to know what time it is. And you never do anything. There is an idea that Falstaff is a kind of figure outside time or Amitay time at time is the is the act is the access to field in which history happens.
And Falstaff is immune to that. He's not part of that world. So Falstaff is not really a historical figure. And that may be accidental, that maybe because Old Castle had to be changed into Falstaff. But the result of that is to have the most vital figure in the play. A figure who is not part of or constrained by history. It's almost as if he operates in a different world from the other characters.
W.H. Auden argued that Falstaff could not fully inhabit the world of Chronical histories, his values, his language, and perhaps we might think, above all his fatness are all in excess of historical process. As David Kasdan puts it, Falstaff is never merely the servant of the historical plot. He is never merely the servant of the historical plot. And in that, I think, is a really interesting figure of a group of characters.
I've become more conscious of writing these lectures, characters who won't play the part that's been set for them, or who resist the tyranny or the control of the plays or playwright or or directorial figures. We talked about those in relation to The Tempest last week. Bertram, who who has a kind of romantic plot written for him by the king and all's well that ends well but doesn't want to do it.
Barney dying perhaps in measure for measure someone who is supposed to be killed in order to enable the plot to keep going and just says, no, I won't. Am I going to do so? Characters who Falstaff then becomes a character who resists the plot in which he finds himself. So false starts fatness is then a challenge to historical pragmatism, to the leanness of cause and effect, a kind of a. historical excess.
Just as he as a character impedes the patterns of succession that structure historical progress. So false starts factness, I think is at the centre of a nexus of quite paradoxical associations. They make him up once more individualistic and more communal, more literally more of a person and less symbolically of one. His size registers something of his resistance to confinement moral, ethical, historical, generic. Hence perhaps his reappearance in accommodate merry wives of Windsor.
So I've tried in this lecture, as in previous ones, to show how an apparently reductive question might take us into issues about the play structure, its sources and its analogues. And then briefly, it's reimagining on film. Next term, I'm going to lecture on comedy of errors. Richard the third. All's well that ends well. King John King Lear and parallelise.