Classic Poem

Of the two persons principally concerned in the rejection of Falstaff,
Henry, both as Prince and as King, has received, on the whole, full
justice from readers and critics. Falstaff, on the other hand, has been
in one respect the most unfortunate of Shakespeare's famous characters.
All of them, in passing from the mind of their creator into other minds,
suffer change; they tend to lose their harmony through the
disproportionate attention bestowed on some one feature, or to lose
their uniqueness by being conventionalised into types already familiar.
But Falstaff was degraded by Shakespeare himself. The original character
is to be found alive in the two parts of Henry IV., dead in Henry
V., and nowhere else. But not very long after these plays were
composed, Shakespeare wrote, and he afterwards revised, the very
entertaining piece called The Merry Wives of Windsor. Perhaps his
company wanted a new play on a sudden; or perhaps, as one would rather
believe, the tradition may be true that Queen Elizabeth, delighted with
the Falstaff scenes of Henry IV., expressed a wish to see the hero of
them again, and to see him in love. Now it was no more possible for
Shakespeare to show his own Falstaff in love than to turn twice two
into five. But he could write in haste--the tradition says, in a
fortnight--a comedy or farce differing from all his other plays in this,
that its scene is laid in English middle-class life, and that it is
prosaic almost to the end. And among the characters he could introduce a
disreputable fat old knight with attendants, and could call them
Falstaff, Bardolph, Pistol, and Nym. And he could represent this knight
assailing, for financial purposes, the virtue of two matrons, and in the
event baffled, duped, treated like dirty linen, beaten, burnt, pricked,
mocked, insulted, and, worst of all, repentant and didactic. It is
horrible. It is almost enough to convince one that Shakespeare himself
could sanction the parody of Ophelia in the Two Noble Kinsmen. But it
no more touches the real Falstaff than Ophelia is degraded by that
parody. To picture the real Falstaff befooled like the Falstaff of the
Merry Wives is like imagining Iago the gull of Roderigo, or Becky
Sharp the dupe of Amelia Osborne. Before he had been served the least of
these tricks he would have had his brains taken out and buttered, and
have given them to a dog for a New Year's gift. I quote the words of the
impostor, for after all Shakespeare made him and gave to him a few
sentences worthy of Falstaff himself. But they are only a few--one side
of a sheet of notepaper would contain them. And yet critics have
solemnly debated at what period in his life Sir John endured the gibes
of Master Ford, and whether we should put this comedy between the two
parts of Henry IV., or between the second of them and Henry V. And
the Falstaff of the general reader, it is to be feared, is an impossible
conglomerate of two distinct characters, while the Falstaff of the mere
play-goer is certainly much more like the impostor than the true man.

The separation of these two has long ago been effected by criticism, and
is insisted on in almost all competent estimates of the character of
Falstaff. I do not propose to attempt a full account either of this
character or of that of Prince Henry, but shall connect the remarks I
have to make on them with a question which does not appear to have been
satisfactorily discussed--the question of the rejection of Falstaff by
the Prince on his accession to the throne. What do we feel, and what are
we meant to feel, as we witness this rejection? And what does our
feeling imply as to the characters of Falstaff and the new King?


1.

Sir John, you remember, is in Gloucestershire, engaged in borrowing a
thousand pounds from Justice Shallow; and here Pistol, riding
helter-skelter from London, brings him the great news that the old King
is as dead as nail in door, and that Harry the Fifth is the man. Sir
John, in wild excitement, taking any man's horses, rushes to London; and
he carries Shallow with him, for he longs to reward all his friends. We
find him standing with his companions just outside Westminster Abbey, in
the crowd that is waiting for the King to come out after his coronation.
He himself is stained with travel, and has had no time to spend any of
the thousand pounds in buying new liveries for his men. But what of
that? This poor show only proves his earnestness of affection, his
devotion, how he could not deliberate or remember or have patience to
shift himself, but rode day and night, thought of nothing else but to
see Henry, and put all affairs else in oblivion, as if there were
nothing else to be done but to see him. And now he stands sweating with
desire to see him, and repeating and repeating this one desire of his
heart--'to see him.' The moment comes. There is a shout within the Abbey
like the roaring of the sea, and a clangour of trumpets, and the doors
open and the procession streams out.

FAL. God save thy grace, King Hal! my royal Hal!

PIST. The heavens thee guard and keep, most royal imp of fame!

FAL. God save thee, my sweet boy!

KING. My Lord Chief Justice, speak to that vain man.

CH. JUST. Have you your wits? Know you what 'tis you speak?

FAL. My King! my Jove! I speak to thee, my heart!

KING. I know thee not, old man: fall to thy prayers.
How ill white hairs become a fool and jester!
I have long dream'd of such a kind of man,
So surfeit-swell'd, 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 thrice wider than for other men.
Reply not to me with a fool-born jest:
Presume not that I am the thing I was;
For God doth know, so shall the world perceive,
That I have turn'd away my former self;
So will I those that kept me company.
When thou dost hear I am as I have been,
Approach me, and thou shalt be as thou wast,
The tutor and the feeder of my riots:
Till then, I banish thee, on pain of death,
As I have done the rest of my misleaders,
Not to come near our person by ten mile.
For competence of life I will allow you,
That lack of means enforce you not to evil:
And, as we hear you do reform yourselves,
We will, according to your strengths and qualities,
Give you advancement. Be it your charge, my lord,
To see perform'd the tenour of our word.
Set on.

The procession passes out of sight, but Falstaff and his friends remain.
He shows no resentment. He comforts himself, or tries to comfort
himself--first, with the thought that he has Shallow's thousand pounds,
and then, more seriously, I believe, with another thought. The King, he
sees, must look thus to the world; but he will be sent for in private
when night comes, and will yet make the fortunes of his friends. But
even as he speaks, the Chief Justice, accompanied by Prince John,
returns, and gives the order to his officers:

Go, carry Sir John Falstaff to the Fleet;
Take all his company along with him.

Falstaff breaks out, 'My lord, my lord,' but he is cut short and hurried
away; and after a few words between the Prince and the Chief Justice the
scene closes, and with it the drama.

What are our feelings during this scene? They will depend on our
feelings about Falstaff. If we have not keenly enjoyed the Falstaff
scenes of the two plays, if we regard Sir John chiefly as an old
reprobate, not only a sensualist, a liar, and a coward, but a cruel and
dangerous ruffian, I suppose we enjoy his discomfiture and consider that
the King has behaved magnificently. But if we have keenly enjoyed the
Falstaff scenes, if we have enjoyed them as Shakespeare surely meant
them to be enjoyed, and if, accordingly, Falstaff is not to us solely or
even chiefly a reprobate and ruffian, we feel, I think, during the
King's speech, a good deal of pain and some resentment; and when,
without any further offence on Sir John's part, the Chief Justice
returns and sends him to prison, we stare in astonishment. These, I
believe, are, in greater or less degree, the feelings of most of those
who really enjoy the Falstaff scenes (as many readers do not). Nor are
these feelings diminished when we remember the end of the whole story,
as we find it in Henry V., where we learn that Falstaff quickly died,
and, according to the testimony of persons not very sentimental, died of
a broken heart. Suppose this merely to mean that he sank under the
shame of his public disgrace, and it is pitiful enough: but the words of
Mrs. Quickly, 'The king has killed his heart'; of Nym, 'The king hath
run bad humours on the knight; that's the even of it'; of Pistol,

Nym, thou hast spoke the right,
His heart is fracted and corroborate,

assuredly point to something more than wounded pride; they point to
wounded affection, and remind us of Falstaff's own answer to Prince
Hal's question, 'Sirrah, do I owe you a thousand pound?' 'A thousand
pound, Hal? a million: thy love is worth a million: thou owest me thy
love.'

Now why did Shakespeare end his drama with a scene which, though
undoubtedly striking, leaves an impression so unpleasant? I will venture
to put aside without discussion the idea that he meant us throughout the
two plays to regard Falstaff with disgust or indignation, so that we
naturally feel nothing but pleasure at his fall; for this idea implies
that kind of inability to understand Shakespeare with which it is idle
to argue. And there is another and a much more ingenious suggestion
which must equally be rejected as impossible. According to it, Falstaff,
having listened to the King's speech, did not seriously hope to be sent
for by him in private; he fully realised the situation at once, and was
only making game of Shallow; and in his immediate turn upon Shallow when
the King goes out, 'Master Shallow, I owe you a thousand pound,' we are
meant to see his humorous superiority to any rebuff, so that we end the
play with the delightful feeling that, while Henry has done the right
thing, Falstaff, in his outward overthrow, has still proved himself
inwardly invincible. This suggestion comes from a critic who understands
Falstaff, and in the suggestion itself shows that he understands him.
But it provides no solution, because it wholly ignores, and could not
account for, that which follows the short conversation with Shallow.
Falstaff's dismissal to the Fleet, and his subsequent death, prove
beyond doubt that his rejection was meant by Shakespeare to be taken as
a catastrophe which not even his humour could enable him to surmount.

Moreover, these interpretations, even if otherwise admissible, would
still leave our problem only partly solved. For what troubles us is not
only the disappointment of Falstaff, it is the conduct of Henry. It was
inevitable that on his accession he should separate himself from Sir
John, and we wish nothing else. It is satisfactory that Sir John should
have a competence, with the hope of promotion in the highly improbable
case of his reforming himself. And if Henry could not trust himself
within ten miles of so fascinating a companion, by all means let him be
banished that distance: we do not complain. These arrangements would not
have prevented a satisfactory ending: the King could have communicated
his decision, and Falstaff could have accepted it, in a private
interview rich in humour and merely touched with pathos. But Shakespeare
has so contrived matters that Henry could not send a private warning to
Falstaff even if he wished to, and in their public meeting Falstaff is
made to behave in so infatuated and outrageous a manner that great
sternness on the King's part was unavoidable. And the curious thing is
that Shakespeare did not stop here. If this had been all we should have
felt pain for Falstaff, but not, perhaps, resentment against Henry. But
two things we do resent. Why, when this painful incident seems to be
over, should the Chief Justice return and send Falstaff to prison? Can
this possibly be meant for an act of private vengeance on the part of
the Chief Justice, unknown to the King? No; for in that case Shakespeare
would have shown at once that the King disapproved and cancelled it. It
must have been the King's own act. This is one thing we resent; the
other is the King's sermon. He had a right to turn away his former
self, and his old companions with it, but he had no right to talk all of
a sudden like a clergyman; and surely it was both ungenerous and
insincere to speak of them as his 'misleaders,' as though in the days of
Eastcheap and Gadshill he had been a weak and silly lad. We have seen
his former self, and we know that it was nothing of the kind. He had
shown himself, for all his follies, a very strong and independent young
man, deliberately amusing himself among men over whom he had just as
much ascendency as he chose to exert. Nay, he amused himself not only
among them, but at their expense. In his first soliloquy--and first
soliloquies are usually significant--he declares that he associates with
them in order that, when at some future time he shows his true
character, he may be the more wondered at for his previous aberrations.
You may think he deceives himself here; you may believe that he
frequented Sir John's company out of delight in it and not merely with
this cold-blooded design; but at any rate he thought the design was
his one motive. And, that being so, two results follow. He ought in
honour long ago to have given Sir John clearly to understand that they
must say good-bye on the day of his accession. And, having neglected to
do this, he ought not to have lectured him as his misleader. It was not
only ungenerous, it was dishonest. It looks disagreeably like an attempt
to buy the praise of the respectable at the cost of honour and truth.
And it succeeded. Henry always succeeded.

You will see what I am suggesting, for the moment, as a solution of our
problem. I am suggesting that our fault lies not in our resentment at
Henry's conduct, but in our surprise at it; that if we had read his
character truly in the light that Shakespeare gave us, we should have
been prepared for a display both of hardness and of policy at this point
in his career, And although this suggestion does not suffice to solve
the problem before us, I am convinced that in itself it is true. Nor is
it rendered at all improbable by the fact that Shakespeare has made
Henry, on the whole, a fine and very attractive character, and that here
he makes no one express any disapprobation of the treatment of Falstaff.
For in similar cases Shakespeare is constantly misunderstood. His
readers expect him to mark in some distinct way his approval or
disapproval of that which he represents; and hence where they
disapprove and he says nothing, they fancy that he does not
disapprove, and they blame his indifference, like Dr. Johnson, or at the
least are puzzled. But the truth is that he shows the fact and leaves
the judgment to them. And again, when he makes us like a character we
expect the character to have no faults that are not expressly pointed
out, and when other faults appear we either ignore them or try to
explain them away. This is one of our methods of conventionalising
Shakespeare. We want the world's population to be neatly divided into
sheep and goats, and we want an angel by us to say, 'Look, that is a
goat and this is a sheep,' and we try to turn Shakespeare into this
angel. His impartiality makes us uncomfortable: we cannot bear to see
him, like the sun, lighting up everything and judging nothing. And this
is perhaps especially the case in his historical plays, where we are
always trying to turn him into a partisan. He shows us that Richard II.
was unworthy to be king, and we at once conclude that he thought
Bolingbroke's usurpation justified; whereas he shows merely, what under
the conditions was bound to exist, an inextricable tangle of right and
unright. Or, Bolingbroke being evidently wronged, we suppose
Bolingbroke's statements to be true, and are qui