(1 Henry IV, 2.5.223–29)
This is precisely the trading of comic insults, the public flyting, the madcap linguistic excess for which Greene and Nashe in particular were famous. Perhaps Shakespeare had participated in the games; in any case, he had absorbed the lesson and could outdo their best efforts.
Above all, the prince and his grotesque friend—“that trunk of humours, that bolting-hutch of beastliness, that swollen parcel of dropsies, that huge bombard of sack, that stuffed cloak-bag of guts, that roasted Manningtree ox with the pudding in his belly” (2.5.409–13)—spend their time inventing and playing theatrical games, acting out scenes, and parodying styles of playwriting that had gone out of fashion. The theatrical games make visible other dark thoughts as well: kingship is a theatrical performance by a gifted scoundrel; Hal’s father, King Henry IV, has no more legitimacy than Falstaff; Falstaff has taken the place of Hal’s father, but the position is precarious; Falstaff, fearing that he will be turned away by Hal, is willing to betray his friends; Hal is planning to throw them all off. “No, my good lord,” pleads Falstaff, ostensibly in the role of the prince speaking to his father,
banish Peto, banish Bardolph, banish Poins, but for sweet Jack Falstaff, kind Jack Falstaff, true Jack Falstaff, valiant Jack Falstaff, and therefore more valiant being, as he is, old Jack Falstaff,
Banish not him thy Harry’s company,
Banish not him thy Harry’s company.
Banish plump Jack, and banish all the world.
(2.5.431–38)
To which Hal, ostensibly in the role of his father, quietly, chillingly replies, “I do; I will.”
While probing the relationships at the center of the plays, the brilliant scenes of improvisatory playacting also probe deeply Shakespeare’s relationship with Greene and company. Or rather, they provide a glimpse of how Shakespeare looked back upon that relationship years later, when most of the doomed lot were dead and his own position as England’s reigning playwright was secure. “I know you all,” Shakespeare has Hal say early in 1 Henry IV, after a scene of jesting and genial wit,
and will a while uphold
The unyoked humour of your idleness.
Yet herein will I imitate the sun,
Who doth permit the base contagious clouds
To smother up his beauty from the world,
That when he please again to be himself,
Being wanted he may be more wondered at
By breaking through the foul and ugly mists
Of vapours that did seem to strangle him.
(1.2.173–81)
To recognize this proximity between Greene and Falstaff is not only to see how “foul and ugly” were the origins of Shakespeare’s golden, capacious, and endlessly fascinating character. To be sure, Greene was tawdry enough—a drunk, a cheat, and a liar whose actual horizons were pathetically narrow compared to his grandiose projections. That tawdriness is precisely one of Falstaff’s characteristics, quite literally itemized in the “tavern reckonings, memorandums of bawdy-houses, and one poor pennyworth of sugar-candy to make thee long-winded” that Hal finds when he searches his pockets (3.3.146–48). It takes no great detective work on Hal’s part to discover how empty Falstaff’s claims are—only a fool would take him at his word, and clear-eyed Hal is anything but a fool. It also takes no special gift to see how nasty and common were the actual circumstances of Robert Greene’s life. The more demanding and interesting task is to savor the power of the illusions without simply submitting to the cheating and the lies. What Falstaff helps to reveal is that for Shakespeare, Greene was a sleazy parasite, but he was also a grotesque titan, a real-life version of the drunken Silenus in Greek mythology or of Rabelais’ irrepressible trickster, Panurge.
Shakespeare seized upon the central paradox of Greene’s life—that this graduate of Oxford and Cambridge hung out in low taverns in the company of ruffians—and turned it into Falstaff’s supremely ambiguous social position, the knight who is intimate with both the Prince of Wales and a pack of thieves. Falstaff captured Greene’s bingeing and whoring, his “dropsical” belly, his prodigal wasting of his impressive talents, his cynical exploitation of friends, his brazenness, his seedy charm. He captured too the noisy, short-lived fits of repentance for which Greene was famous, along with the solemn moralizing that swerved effortlessly into irreverent laughter. “Before I knew thee, Hal, I knew nothing,” Falstaff says, adopting the role of the corrupted innocent: “and now am I, if a man should speak truly, little better than one of the wicked. I must give over this life, and I will give it over. By the Lord, an I do not, I am a villain. I’ll be damned for never a king’s son in Christendom.” To which Hal—like the friends who mocked Greene out of his pious resolutions—replies with a simple question: “Where shall we take a purse tomorrow, Jack?” “Zounds, where thou wilt, lad! I’ll make one; an I do not, call me villain” (1.2.82–89). So much for moral reform.
Falstaff was not a straightforward portrait of Robert Greene (who was neither a knight nor an old man), any more than the whore Doll Tearsheet was a faithful portrait of the virtuous country wife named Doll whom Greene abandoned or the tavern hostess Mistress Quickly was a portrait of the Mistress Isam from whom he borrowed money and who nursed him through his final illness. Here as elsewhere, Shakespeare’s actual world gets into his work, but most often in a distorted, inverted, disguised, or reimagined form. The point is not to strip away the reimaginings, as if the life sources were somehow more interesting than the metamorphoses, but rather to enhance a sense of the wonder of Shakespeare’s creation—the immensely bold, generous imaginative work that took elements from the wasted life of Robert Greene and used them to fashion the greatest comic character in English literature.
Greene was by no means the sole source. Like many of Shakespeare’s most memorable creations, Falstaff is made out of multiple materials, much of it not from life but from literature. Shakespeare understood his world in the ways that we understand our world—his experiences, like ours, were mediated by whatever stories and images were available to him. When he was in a tavern and encountered a loudmouthed soldier who bragged about his daring adventures, Shakespeare saw that soldier through the lens of characters he had read in fiction, and at that same time he adjusted his image of those fictional characters by means of the actual person standing before him.
In inventing Falstaff, Shakespeare started, as he so often did, from a character in a play by someone else, The Famous Victories of Henry the Fifth, which had been performed by the Queen’s Men in London and on tour. This crude anonymous play, which chronicled the near-miraculous transformation of Prince Hal from wastrel youth to heroic king, included a dissolute knight, Sir John Oldcastle, as part of the crew of thieves and ruffians in which Hal had become enmeshed. Shakespeare took over this figure (he originally used the same name, only changing it to Falstaff after the descendants of Oldcastle objected) and built upon its spare frame his vast creation. He took the stock figure of the braggart soldier, the blowhard who is always going on about his martial accomplishments but who plays dead when danger comes too close, and combined him with another venerable comic type, the parasite, always hungry and thirsty and always conniving to get his wealthy patron to pick up the tab. To these he added features of the Vice in the morality play—shameless irreverence, the exuberant pursuit of pleasures, and a seductive ability to draw naive youth away from the austere paths of virtue. And he conjoined with these some elements of a newer cultural stereotype, the hypocritical Puritan who noisily trumpets his commitment to virtue while secretly indulging his every sensual vice. But to contemplate these pieces of literary flotsam and jetsam is already to see how complete and unexpected was Shakespeare’s transformation of them.
He himself must have been surprised by what began to emerge when he sat down to write Henry IV. What would have been predictable, what he may initially have intended, was some version of the lively but largely conventional figure whom in fact he created some years later in Al
l’s Well That Ends Well. That character, Paroles, has all the appropriately obnoxious traits of the loudmouthed, bragging corrupter of the young, and the audience is invited to delight in his discomfiture. But even here, when his imagination was not operating at the very pinnacle of its power, Shakespeare did something odd, something that casts light back on the infinitely greater Falstaff. Paroles has been utterly humiliated, exposed and disgraced before his friends and fellow officers so devastatingly that the suicide proposed to him is the only honorable course of action. But he is anything but honorable, and, rejecting any thought of putting an end to himself, he takes his leave. “Captain I’ll be no more,” Paroles ruefully acknowledges, and then his mood shifts:
But I will eat and drink and sleep as soft
As captain shall. Simply the thing I am
Shall make me live.
(4.3.308–11)
This is the life force itself.
This life force is at work to an unparalleled degree in Falstaff. In him too it burns brightest when everything that goes by the word “honor”—name, reputation, dignity, vocation, trustworthiness, truthfulness—is stripped away. “Can honour set-to a leg?” Falstaff asks, at the brink of battle.
No. Or an arm? No. Or take away the grief of a wound? No. Honour hath not skill in surgery, then? No. What is honour? A word. What is in that word “honour”? What is that “honour”? Air. A trim reckoning! Who hath it? He that died o’Wednesday. Doth he feel it? No. Doth he hear it? No. ’Tis insensible then? Yea, to the dead. But will it not live with the living? No. Why? Detraction will not suffer it. Therefore I’ll none of it. (1 Henry IV, 5.1.130–38)
A few moments later, standing over the corpse of Sir Walter Blunt (killed fighting bravely for the king), Falstaff sharpens the stark opposition between empty words and the only thing that actually matters, at least to him: “I like not such grinning honour as Sir Walter hath. Give me life” (5.3.57–58).
To a degree unparalleled in Shakespeare’s work and perhaps in all of English literature, Falstaff seems actually to possess a mysterious inner principle of vitality, as if he could float free not only of Shakespeare’s sources in life and in art but also of the play in which he appears. If a theatrical tradition, first recorded in 1702, is correct, Queen Elizabeth herself not only admired Shakespeare’s great comic character but also sensed this inner principle: she commanded the author to write a play showing Falstaff in love. In two weeks’ time, or so it is said, The Merry Wives of Windsor was written, to be first performed on April 23, 1597, at the annual feast to commemorate the founding of the Order of the Garter. Famous already in Shakespeare’s lifetime, constantly alluded to throughout the seventeenth century, and the subject of a distinguished book-length study as early as the eighteenth century, the fat knight has for centuries provoked admirers to attempt to pluck out the heart of his mystery: great wit and the ability to provoke wit in others; spectacular resilience; fierce, subversive intelligence; carnivalesque exuberance. Each of these qualities seems true, and yet there is always something else, something elusive that remains to be accounted for, as if the scoundrel had the power in himself to resist all efforts to explain or contain him.
Shakespeare himself evidently struggled to keep his own creation within bounds. The climax of the second of the great history plays in which Falstaff appears is a scene in which Hal, newly crowned as Henry V, brutally dashes his friend’s wild expectations of plunder: “I know thee not, old man” (2 Henry IV, 5.5.45). It is the most decisive of repudiations. Falstaff is banished from the royal presence on pain of death, and the king’s coldly ironic words to the onetime “tutor and feeder of my riots” conjure up the final, literal containment of all that corpulent energy: “know the grave doth gape / For thee thrice wider than for other men” (5.5.60, 51–2). Yet a moment later Falstaff seems already to be slipping free from this noose—“Go with me to dinner. Come, Lieutenant Pistol; come, Bardolph. I shall be sent for soon at night” (5.5.83–85)—and at the play’s close Shakespeare announces that he will bring him back once again. “One word more, I beseech you,” says the actor who speaks the epilogue. “If you be not too much cloyed with fat meat, our humble author will continue the story with Sir John in it” (lines 22–24). It is as if Falstaff himself refuses to accept the symbolic structure of the play that has just ended.
Yet when he actually sat down to continue the story, by writing a play about Henry V’s great triumph over the French at Agincourt, Shakespeare had second thoughts. Falstaff’s cynical, antiheroic stance—his ruthless, comic deflation of the idealizing claims of those in power and his steadfast insistence on the primacy of the flesh—proved impossible to incorporate into a celebration of charismatic leadership and martial heroism. That celebration was not without Shakespeare’s characteristic skeptical intelligence, but for the play to succeed—for Hal to be something more than a mock king—skepticism had to stop short of the relentless mockery that in two consecutive plays Falstaff so brilliantly articulated. Hence Shakespeare decided to break his promise to the audience and to keep his comic masterpiece out of Henry V. Indeed, he decided to get rid of him permanently by providing a detailed narrative of death: “A parted ev’n just between twelve and one, ev’n at the turning o’th’ tide,” Mistress Quickly memorably recounts,
for after I saw him fumble with the sheets, and play with flowers, and smile upon his finger’s end, I knew there was but one way. For his nose was as sharp as a pen, and a babbled of green fields. “How now, Sir John?” quoth I. “What, man! Be o’ good cheer.” So a cried out, “God, God, God,” three or four times. Now I, to comfort him, bid him a should not think of God; I hoped there was no need to trouble himself with any such thoughts yet. So a bade me lay more clothes on his feet. I put my hand into the bed and felt them, and they were as cold as any stone. Then I felt to his knees, and so up’ard and up’ard, and all was as cold as any stone. (Henry V, 2.3.11–23)
The drama here is not the death scene itself, which is carefully kept off-stage; the drama, as Shakespeare and his audience understood, is the spectacle of a great playwright killing off the greatest of his comic characters. Of course, given Falstaff’s manner of life, the official cause of death must be overindulgence—the equivalent of Greene’s fatal feast of pickled herring and Rhenish wine—but the play makes clear that it has staged a symbolic murder: “The King has killed his heart” (2.1.79).
“An upstart Crow, beautified with our feathers”: Greene and his crowd, despite their drunken recklessness and bohemian snobbery, saw something frightening in Shakespeare, a usurper’s knack for displaying as his own what he had plucked from others, an alarming ability to plunder, appropriate, and absorb. Shakespeare, for his part, understood that he did not belong with these grasshoppers, and he may, as Greene himself seems to imply, have turned down some request for help from the indigent, desperate scoundrel.
In Prince Hal, the author of the Henry IV plays saw himself, projecting onto his character a blend of experimental participation and careful, self-protective distance; recognizing the functional utility of his tavern lessons in language games and in role-playing; and unsentimentally accepting the charge of calculated self-interest. Reflecting on the scene he entered into in the late 1580s, Shakespeare acknowledged what he had had to do in order to survive. But the coldness that he attributed to himself—or rather to Hal—was only one aspect of his relationship with Greene, and perhaps not the most important aspect. For if Shakespeare took what he could from Greene—if, as an artist, he took what he could from everyone he encountered—he also performed a miraculous act of imaginative generosity, utterly unsentimental and, if the truth be told, not entirely human. Human generosity would have involved actually giving money to the desperate Greene; it would have been foolish, quixotic, and easily abused. Shakespeare’s generosity was aesthetic, rather than pecuniary. He conferred upon Greene an incalculable gift, the gift of transforming him into Falstaff.
CHAPTER 8
Master-Mistress
THE HACK PRINTER Henry Chettle was not the only one to be squirming in the wake of the attack on Shakespeare as an “upstart Crow.” There were rumors that Thomas Nashe also had his hand in the attack, that perhaps he had even ghostwritten the farewell words of his friend Robert Greene. The rumors make perfect sense: after all, the Cambridge-educated satirist had earlier heaped comparable scorn in print on poorly educated players, whom he described as a “rabble of counterfeits” who rashly attempt to imitate their betters in the writing of blank verse. Nashe might ordinarily have been pleased thus to be the object of suspicion: in the business of giving offense, he cultivated the reputation of a reckless wit. But he too must have had an unusually alarming conversation with someone, for, though he was not given to backing away from a squabble, he rushed into print to disclaim any connection to Greene’s Groatsworth of Wit, which he called a “trivial lying pamphlet.” Nashe did everything he could to ensure that his vehement disclaimer would be taken seriously: “God never have care of my soul, but utterly renounce me, if the least word or syllable in it proceeded from my pen, or if I were any way privy to the writing or printing of it.” That seems to be the sound of abject panic.
The question is who put Nashe into such a sweat. The answer is not the upstart Shakespeare himself; it must have been someone much more powerful and intimidating. But who? The likeliest candidate by far is someone connected to Henry Wriothesley, third Earl of Southampton. The nineteen-year-old earl is highly unlikely to have gone himself on such a lowly errand, but, like Duke Orsino in Twelfth Night, he had many dependent gentlemen eager to do his bidding and serve as his go-between. (A few years later, Southampton mentioned being accompanied somewhere by “only ten or twelve” of his usual attendants.) One candidate for this particular errand would have been his French and Italian tutor, John Florio. Born in London, the son of Protestant refugees from Italy, Florio had already published several language manuals, along with a compendium of six thousand Italian proverbs; he would go on to produce an important Italian-English dictionary and a vigorous translation, much used by Shakespeare, of Montaigne’s Essays. Florio became a friend of Ben Jonson, and there is evidence that already in the early 1590s he was a man highly familiar with the theater.
Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare Page 24
