FALSTAFF AND THE SONNETS

By K. Visvanatham, M.A.

O, I should have a heavy miss of thee

If I were much in love with vanity.

THE myth of Shakespeare’s impersonality is vanishing like a ghost at cock’s crow in the light of researches of scholars like G. B. Harrison. The objectivity of Shakespeare has been monstrously over-philosophised. Poets, as Bagehot remarks, do not keep tame engines to write their poems. Even poems which are cast in the mould of a convention indicate the hobnobbing of the power of the moment and the power of the man. Interior impulse and external fashion kiss each other into the red blossom of art. It is not enough to remark that Shakespeare could dramatize his experiences more effectively than others. When we speak of the experience of poets we commit the mistake of drawing a circumference of experience beyond the reach of the ordinary man. An unkind word by a neighbour may make a sensitive man cynical and a wife’s taunt may dynamite the peace of a man’s life and rouse all the sexual disgust there is in Hamlet. To draw Macbeth it is not necessary to invent for the poet some macabre experience. We are all murderers: easy victims of temptation. In so far as life is climbing, one treads on the corns or on the head of somebody else. Round the nucleus of ordinary experience gathers a vast life of passions and prejudices which rocks and heaves at the impact of an appropriate stimulus. Without this no poem is written and even if written, it is a case of verbal agility.

For a proper appreciation of the Falstaff plays we have to go to the experience in the Sonnets. The Sonnets reveal the poet’s deep attachment to the Fair Youth of a higher status. The friendship is the target of unsavoury comments. There is the rift aggravated by the Dark Mistress and an uneasy reconcilement takes place because of the initiative of the poet. This essay attempts to prove that this experience has gone into the Falstaff plays. Falstaff is the older man misguiding the Prince as the world believed. The king sees riot and dishonour atain the brow of his son. The Prince only relaxes himself in the company of sweet Jack Falstaff and, as easily as he would shed soiled garments assumed for a purpose, drops his boozing companion. The young man and the poet of the Sonnets are the Prince and Falstaff of the plays. It is the friendship between a man of high status and one who wishes to make his fortune in London under the patronage of his friend. The poet has no claim over the young man as Falstaff has no claims over the Prince. The rejection of Falstaff pains us precisely because Falstaff makes the reader believe that he has claims on the friendship of the Prince. It is entirely out of his grace or breeziness that the Prince hovers round Falstaff. He is ‘in it but not of it.’ Hence the poet in Sonnet, 58:

That god forbid that made me first your slave,

I should in thought control your times of pleasure, etc.

From the start we find in the plays tremors in the thick rotundity of Falstaff. He requests the Prince that when he became king, the ‘gang’ of Falstaff should be ‘gentlemen of the shade’. That the company of the poet has goaded the blatant beast against himself and the young man is evident from the Sonnets. So the poet bitterly or resignedly asks the young man not to mourn for him lest his friends taunt him for his irrational love towards the poet:

Lest the world should look into your moan

And mock you with me after I am gone (Sonnet, 71)

What the poet with a mournful awareness of the future says in Sonnet, 49:

Against that time, if ever that time come,

When I shall see thee frown on my defects, etc.,

explains the anxiety of Falstaff: “Do not thou, when thou art king, hand a thief.” The apparently curt and wounding reproof of Henry V: “I know thee not, old man” will not rouse our hostility to the king if the ‘death wish’ (to term it so) in Sonnet, 36 is understood.

Nor thou with public kindness honour me,

Unless thou take that honour from thy name.

If this personal experience is properly juxtaposed, the rejection of Falstaff does not leave a bad taste and a right understanding of the Prince’s character is possible. This emotional context is finely described by J. A. Fort. (A Time Scheme for Shakespeare’s Sonnets, p. 51): “It is only the story of an older man of inferior rank, who already foresaw (No. xlix) that his influence over a younger man of higher rank must some day cease, trying to retain his influence as long as possible, and to do so Shakespeare had always to send letters of compliment or affection immediately after his letters of reproof, but the poet handled his difficult pupil with exquisite skill and this old story of a very strange friendship is, I think, a fascinating one apart from the lovely poetry in which it is told.” Shakespeare is irritated by the Rival Poet and the infection and impiety that surround his friend (Sonnet, 67). This jealousy is easily paralleled in Falstaff’s letter: “Be not too familiar with Poins; for he misuses thy favours so much that he swears thou art to marry his sister Nell.” The mistress of the Sonnets is perhaps, Doll Tearsheet of Falstaff. One might go to the extent of positing that every scene of Falstaff and the Prince can be fitted into the Sonnets decorously even to the way of address like ‘my sweet boy’.

Before we brand the Prince a prig, let us understand him. Whenever we judge a character we take into consideration what he says about himself and what others say about him. The Prince refuses to be a satellite of Falstaff because Falstaff is a ‘rogue’, a globe of sinful continents, and villainous company. The story of Willobie His Avisa is a description of this experience. Like the Prince the young man of the Sonnets refuses to be tied to the apron-strings of Shakespeare: Like the poet of the sonnets Falstaff pleads every time he meets the prince that he should not reject him. When he plays the kin & he says, “There is virtue in that Falstaff: him keep with, the rest banish.” (And from his description of the Prince having a foolish hanging of the nether lip it is possible perhaps to identify the Fair Youth of the Sonnets). Falstaff blames the Prince in his absence but glozes over it in his presence. “I dispraised him before the wicked, that the wicked might not fall in love with him,” says Falstaff when he was surprised by the Prince.

Apart from this personal experience there is artistic propriety behind the rejection. Falstaff pretends exra-breeziness masking his flesh-quakes to win the love of the Prince. The fears of the old man are expressed so often that the actual rejection should not be a surprise just as murder in a novel of Dostoevsky does not surprise us because it has been so frequently mentioned from the start. In his own field–the kingdom of humour–Falstaff ‘stays put’; his improvement is ‘from prayer to purse-taking’. Satire, according to Ronald Knox, is Humour capped with criticism; Humour is sheer breeziness and without Satire is a waste product. Raleigh’s definition of Humour better fits Satire; it is “thinking in fun while feeling in earnest.” Falstaff does not evolve from Humour to Satire. The artillery of Falstaff’s good humour detonates constantly–but with the purpose of ‘whitemailing’ the Prince. “A god wit,” he says, “will make use of anything. I will turn diseases into commodity.” How is it that we read the soliloquy of the Prince and condemn him as a hypocrite and do not think of censuring the fat knight when he soliloquizes, “If the young dace be a bait for the old pike, I see no reason in the law of nature, but I may snap at him?” The Chief Justice, for instance, is Falstaff-prof. “Sir John, Sir John, I am well acquainted with your manner of wrenching the true cause the false way. It is not a confident brow, nor the throng of words that come with such more than impudent sauciness from you can thrust me from level consideration.

If Falstaff is the spirit of freedom from all obligations, he would have been free from the obligation of death (if that expression is allowable). He would have slipped like an eel from the disaster of rejection. Falstaff smells of the meat and drink of jokes. But we tire of Jokes. The paradoxes of Wilde exhilarate us for some time and then leave us heart-whole. There is always the appalling risk of Shavian coruscations becoming Shavian monkeyings (an impossible adjective as Shaw himself noted). Shaw may say the real joke is I-am-in-earnest but the reader thinks earnestly that he is a joke. Shaw could not clap the lid on his irrepressible comicality even at the time of his mother’s funeral that Granville Barker remarked, “You certainly are a merry soul, Shaw.” Tolstoy could not stomach the inappropriate brilliance of Man and Superman. The severe rebuke administered by the Prince to Falstaff: “Peace, chewet, peace” or “Reply not to me with a fool-born jest”–indicates that he could not have made him his lifelong companion. The famous catechism on Honour is not so much criticism as irresponsibility that flies at everything like a haggard without jesses. There is no propriety in his jokes. “What, is it a time to jest and dally now?” The tragedy of Shaw lies, writes Ronald Knox, in the shouts of laughter that greeted his remark that a woman risks her life every time she brings a child into the world in a greater measure than a soldier on the battle-field.

Falstaff silences our criticism by his brilliant retorts. That is why Poins warns the Prince: “My Lord, he will drive you out of your revenge, and turn all to a merriment, if you take not the heat.” The fat knight flings an enormous cloak of self-pity about him. Falstaff refuses to be cornered because there are no corners about him; he not only lards the lean earth with wit but slithers down his way greased with self-pity though he mints laughter out of self-pity too. If Falstaff makes fun of his girth, his sack, his lechery, his lying, his fleecing others, it is not because of a Shakespearian hatred of pedantry and love of the unending diversity of God’s creation. It is only to amuse the Prince, to cash his cheques on the goodwill of his friend and give his lechery an unending lease. We love Falstaff because we do not love to be frowned upon by moralists. He is like the clown who shakes his ears or stands on his head, amuses the audience and gathers his pennies; his clowning now runs with the hares, now hunts with the hounds. Self-pity seems to be the characteristic of some of the tragic heroes of Shakespeare. In many of his plays there is the case of “Virtue rudely strumpeted.” That is why in fierce derision of the moral pedantry, “of the frailer spies on his sportive blood” the poet shouts at the pitch of his voice, “I am that I am” (Sonnet, 121) which is easily neighboured by Falstaff’s passion against villainous company. Uneasy is the reconcilement we find in the sonnets. The poet forgives the lapse of his friend but it is forgiveness issuing out of helplessness. One is forced to think that by way of rectifying this he drew Prospero forgiving, when he could crush, his enemies like nuts between a door and the door-post.

It is common to talk of Falstaff as not only witty in himself but the cause that wit is in others. But the statement has to be revised. Though the Prince is not a match for Falstaff, he makes possible the inimitable Falstaff just as in the Sonnets the young man is no match for the poet but he is the substance of the poet’s songs. “But thou art all my art” (Sonnet, 78). The Prince is the whetstone at least for Falstaff to hone his mind and raise sparks. Falstaff knows the Prince and fears: him: the poet admires the Fair Youth and weeps

to have that which it fears to lose.

Sonnet, 94 which speaks of those who

rightly do inherit heaven’s graces

is a character-sketch of Henry V and is a commentary on his soliloquy which is unjustly regarded as dissimulation. Every man would think me an hypocrite indeed” is his fine awareness. The moment Shakespeare loses hold of the young man he does not touch earth and grows weak like Antaeus. The moment the Prince disowns the old lecher, his heart is “fracted and corroborate.”

He cherished an illusion and when the scales drop from his eyes he collapses like a ‘burst fink’, though the Prince promises him competence for life; but competence would have satisfied a beggar, not this Leviathan that would lie floating many a rood in royal bounty.

The poet is greater, of course, than his creation. He survives these blenches and creates Lear’s Fool who is an improvement on Falstaff in that his is purposeful laughter, laughter capped by criticism and understanding, not scattered by libertinism and irresponsibility, “now a little fire in a wild field were like an old lecher’s heart” outdistances. “There’s that will sack a city” as much as knowledge outdistances ignorance. The poet creates Prospero and encourages us that “the best part of revenge is to be different from our enemy.” Even Prospero forgives perhaps because the plot got out of the magician’s wand when

At first sight

They have changed eyes.

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