Leon Garfield's Shakespeare Stories

by Leon Garfield

  “Whither I go, thither shall you go too; today will I set forth, tomorrow you.”

  In the Boar’s Head Tavern—a frowsy hostelry with as many nooks and cubbyholes as a nibbled cheese—the Harry of the south thought briefly of his glorious counterpart, that world’s idol and pattern of honour. He shrugged his shoulders ruefully.

  “I am not yet of Percy’s mind,” he confided to Poins, as the pair of them awaited the return of Falstaff from Gad’s Hill, “the Hotspur of the north, he that kills me some six or seven dozen of Scots at a breakfast, washes his hands and says to his wife, ‘Fie upon this quiet life, I want work . . .’ ”

  Poins laughed; and so did Prince Hal, but with a touch of bitterness, as if he partly envied what he mocked. Then all thoughts of honour and glory were blown to the winds as, with a clatter of boots and a commotion of oaths, Falstaff and his men arrived. Torn, muddy and sweating from their adventure, they collapsed upon benches and chairs. Falstaff looked hard at Poins and the Prince.

  “A plague of all cowards, I say,” he remarked sombrely. “Give me a cup of sack, boy.” A cup was fetched. He drank and made a sour face. He glared at the potboy. “You rogue, here’s lime in this sack . . . yet a coward is worse than a cup of sack with lime in it.”

  To prove it, he turned his fat back on Poins and the Prince and drank again. Addressing his companions, and studiously ignoring the Prince, he continued to abuse cowards; until the Prince ventured to inquire the cause of his displeasure. Falstaff turned.

  “Are you not a coward?” he demanded. “Answer me to that—and Poins there?”

  “Zounds, ye fat paunch,” cried Poins angrily, “and ye call me a coward, by the Lord, I’ll stab thee!”

  “I call thee coward?” wondered Falstaff, putting a table between himself and the indignant Poins. “I’ll see thee damned ’ere I call thee coward, but I would give a thousand pound I could run as fast as thou canst.”

  At last the reason for the knight’s black mood came out. The adventure upon Gad’s Hill. In spite of monumental heroism, the like of which the world had never seen, it had been a defeat. He and his three fearless companions (who dimly nodded their battered heads) had boldly robbed some sixteen ferocious merchants; and then had had the cruel misfortune to be set upon and robbed themselves. (Again the companions nodded.) By how many? the Prince inquired, with a sly glance at Poins. By a hundred, at least, said Falstaff unblushingly; and even his companions gaped at the enormity of the lie.

  “What, a hundred, man?” cried the Prince.

  “I am a rogue if I were not at half-sword with a dozen of them two hours together,” said Falstaff modestly, and went on to describe so desperate a battle that even a Hotspur would have paled at. Enemies, which seemed to multiply, as if they’d been put out at compound interest, came at him from every corner of the night; but still he duelled and still he fought, holding them all at bay—until, most treacherously, he was overcome.

  “Three misbegotten knaves in Kendal green came at my back,” he said bitterly, “and let drive at me, for it was so dark, Hal, that thou couldst not see thy hand.”

  The Prince nodded. Falstaff sighed and drank again, to drown the memory of that frightful time. Then the Prince called him a fat liar. Falstaff, much offended, demanded to know why. The Prince told him. How could he have known that the misbegotten knaves were in Kendal green when it was so dark he could not see his hand? Loftily, Falstaff declined to answer; so the Prince, with grim pleasure, went on to demolish the fat old man by telling him that the hundred he’d fought against had been no more than two; himself and Poins.

  “What trick, what device, what starting-hole canst thou now find out,” demanded the Prince, “to hide thee from this open and apparent shame?”

  Falstaff was silent. His little eyes, like mice in a mansion, peeped from side to side. He frowned. He gnawed his lip. Then he beamed.

  “By the Lord,” he exclaimed, slapping his mighty knee with his plump hand, “I knew thee as well as he that made thee! Why, hear you, my masters,” he asked of the company, “was it for me to kill the heir-apparent? Could I turn upon the true Prince?”

  With huge innocence he turned from face to face, and outfaced them all. There was no demolishing Falstaff. The truth rebounded from his fat person as harmlessly as a spent arrow, and to accuse him of lying was like blaming the ocean for being wet. There was nothing for it but to laugh . . . at truth and lies and life itself.

  In the midst of all the merriment, there came, like a spectre to the feast, a gentleman from the court with a message for the Prince from the King, his father. Falstaff went to inquire, and came back with uneasy news. Hotspur, Northumberland and Worcester, together with many powerful friends, were up in arms. The rebellion had begun.

  “Thy father’s beard,” said the fat man, “is turned white with the news; you may buy land now as cheap as stinking mackerel.”

  The Prince was commanded to appear before his father in the morning; for, when all was said and done, Hal was the heir-apparent, and, when all was said and done, the King had need of him. Earnestly Falstaff exhorted his young friend to prepare himself and have some ready answer to the heavy reproaches that the King would undoubtedly heap upon his son’s way of life. The Prince looked at the old man thoughtfully. Suddenly he laughed.

  “Do thou stand for my father and examine me upon the particulars of my life.”

  Falstaff blinked. A look of startled fondness flickered across his wine-red face. “Shall I?” he wondered. He beamed. “Content!” he cried; and, settling himself royally in his chair, crowned his bald pate with a dirty tasselled cushion. Then, to the huge delight of the assembled thieves, potboys, and the blotchy hostess of the tavern, who was weeping and hiccuping with laughter, he addressed the Prince with all the dignity of a sorrowing father and a troubled king.

  Meekly, and with bowed head, the Prince listened as his father, in the person of the raddled old knight, reproached him for his wild ways and low companions.

  “And yet there is a virtuous man whom I have often noted in thy company,” said Falstaff dreamily.

  “What manner of man, and it like Your Majesty?” inquired the Prince, as if he did not know.

  “A good portly man, i’faith,” said Falstaff happily, “and a corpulent, of a cheerful look, a pleasing eye, and a most noble carriage; and now I remember me, his name is Falstaff . . .” He paused for the roars of laughter to die down, and then said most sincerely: “There is virtue in that Falstaff; him keep with, the rest banish . . .”

  “Dost thou speak like a king?” interrupted the Prince, smiling, but with an edge to his voice; for Falstaff’s open mockery of his father and himself had affected him more deeply than might have been supposed. “Do thou stand for me, and I’ll play my father.”

  Cheerfully, and with a better grace than King Richard (whom Hal’s father had deposed) the fat man resigned his throne and crown. He stood, humbly, before the new king, biting his thumbnail and tracing a pattern with his toe, the very image of an awkward prince. The Prince himself, seated in the chair of state, and wearing the cushion, regarded his mockery self with elaborate severity. The company laughed, expecting more comedy; and so indeed it began, with stern questions from the son-father and meek, apologetic answers from the father-son . . . for Falstaff had years enough to be Hal’s father, and even his grandfather as well. Then the mood changed. The young man’s voice grew harder, and his very youth seemed turned to stone.

  “There is a devil haunts thee,” he said, as if looking through Falstaff to himself, “in the likeness of an old fat man, a tun of man is thy companion. Why dost thou converse with that trunk of humours, that bolting-hutch of beastliness, that swollen parcel of dropsies . . . that reverend vice, that grey iniquity, that father ruffian . . .”

  Mercilessly the Prince went on. Laughter died, smiles faded, and Falstaff himself grew uneasy, not because of the brutality of the young man’s words, but because of what he dreaded might be in the young man’s hear
t. This was the fat knight’s only weakness: his deep love for Hal. It was the only point in his armour of lying, boastfulness and dishonesty through which he could be hurt.

  “If to be old and merry,” he protested, anxiously trying to defend himself, “be a sin, then many an old host that I know is damned . . . banish Peto, banish Bardolph, banish Poins—but for sweet Jack Falstaff . . . banish not him thy Harry’s company . . . banish plump Jack, and banish all the world.”

  “I do, I will,” said the Prince coldy; and at that moment he was indeed his father, the lean stern politician, Bolingbroke.

  Urgently Falstaff attempted to plead more on his own behalf, when there came a loud knocking on the tavern door. The sheriff and the watch had come in search of the robbers from Gad’s Hill. In particular, they were looking for a gross fat man . . .

  Instantly Falstaff hid; and the Prince, forgetting everything but fondness, lied to save his friend.

  “The man I do assure you,” he promised the sheriff, “is not here.”

  Not satisfied, but forced to take the Prince’s word, the sheriff departed. Falstaff was looked for and discovered fast asleep behind a curtain. He was quite worn out from all his labours and all his frights. Upon a sudden impulse, the Prince told Peto search the snorer’s pockets. Nothing was found but a list of debts. The Prince sighed. All Falstaff’s substance was in his flesh; he owned nothing but the listed recollections of food and drink. Hal shrugged his shoulders and departed to meet with his father, leaving behind the lying, boastful, laughing world of Falstaff for the grim world of honour, politics and war.

  Of all the discontented barons who had gathered under the banner of Hotspur and Northumberland, none was more feared than Owen Glendower. Even Falstaff had quaked at the mention of him, for he was said to have power over the spirits and demons of the air. Deep in his Welsh stronghold, he strode back and forth, a short, fierce gentleman in a robe of silver stars and moons that billowed out behind him, and with a nose like the prow of a ship and deep-set eyes that burned like hot cannons. In rolling Welsh tones, he informed his companions—Hotspur, Mortimer and Worcester—that he was so remarkable a personage that, at his birth, there had been strange portents in the sky and that the world itself had shaken.

  Hotspur yawned. He had had more than his fill of wild Welsh magic. “Why so it would have done at the same season,” he said, “if your mother’s cat had but kitten’d, though yourself had never been born.”

  “I say the earth did shake when I was born,” repeated Glendower, glaring at the impudent young man.

  Hotspur said it did not; and the others, fearing for Glendower’s rage, tried to keep Hotspur quiet. It was a hopeless task.

  “I can call spirits from the vasty deep,” said Glendower, darkly.

  “Why, so can I,” said Hotspur, not much impressed, “or so can any man, but will they come when you do call for them?”

  It was an uncomfortable beginning to the enterprise; but then Hotspur was an uncomfortable young man. He lacked an easy temper. Unlike the other Harry, he could never have lived and laughed with a Falstaff. He loved honour too much, and he suspected all the world of trying to rob him of it. Presently, however, the differences between Hotspur and Glendower were resolved and the meeting ended with the coming in of wives, and Lady Mortimer singing a sweet song in Welsh and Lady Percy making amorous fun of her husband, so that, for a little while, honour, politics and war gave way to music, smiles and love.

  Prince Hal stood before the King. He tried with all his might to look serious and contrite; but as his lean, stern father talked and frowned and sadly shook his head, and reproached him for his wild ways and low companions, the young man could not help thinking that his father was very like a thin imitation of Falstaff imitating the King. Then his father spoke, as he always did, of Hotspur, the too-glorious Hotspur. Even though Hotspur had rebelled against him, he was still admired; and, Hal knew, preferred above himself.

  “What never-dying honour he hath got,” went on the King, driving knives of envy into his son’s heart, “against renowned Douglas . . .”

  Silently the Prince stood as his father continued to heap praises upon the bright Harry of the north, at the expense of the dull Harry who stood before him. “Thou art degenerate,” accused the King.

  “Do not think so,” cried Hal, “you shall not find it so!” and he poured out his bitterness against Hotspur and swore that he would prove himself to be the better man. “For the time will come,” he promised, “that I shall make this northern youth exchange his glorious deeds for my indignities!”

  So fiercely did he speak that the King’s heart quickened and, for the first time, he saw in his son some glimmerings of the greatness he had hoped for; and when news came in that the rebels were gathering at Shrewsbury, he gladly gave the Prince command over an army to march against them.

  “Let’s away,” he urged, laying a fond arm about his son’s shoulders. “Advantage feeds him fat while men delay.”

  “Bardolph, am I not fallen away?” sighed Falstaff to his purple-nosed companion as the pair of them slopped into the Boar’s Head Tavern. “Do I not bate? Do I not dwindle?” he wondered, patting his huge belly and finding it to be some inches from where he expected it. He sat down and regarded his countenance in the diminishing bowl of a spoon. “Why, my skin hangs about me like an old lady’s loose-gown.”

  He was melancholy. It was not so much Falstaff as the world that was falling away. War was approaching, and his beloved Hal was now with his true father. The fat man felt himself neglected. He turned quarrelsome and accused the hostess of picking his pocket while he’d slept.

  “I have lost,” he complained bitterly, “a seal-ring of my grandfather’s worth forty mark.”

  “O Jesu,” cried the hostess indignantly, “I have heard the Prince tell him, I know not how oft, that that ring was copper!”

  “The Prince is a Jack, a sneak-up!” snarled Falstaff, venting his spleen on the absent young man, “ ’sblood, and were he here I would cudgel him like a dog.”

  Even as he uttered the threat, the Prince came marching in. He was fresh and spruce and shining from his father’s presence, and every inch the heir-apparent to the throne. At once the knight’s melancholy left him; and he glowed as if his Hal had kindled him.

  “Now, Hal, to the news at court,” he demanded eagerly. “For the robbery, lad, how is that answered?”

  All was well. The money had been paid back and Falstaff was no longer in danger from the sheriff. The Prince was good friends with his father; and, what was more, had procured Falstaff the command of a company of soldiers. The Prince was in high good spirits. The prospect of battle excited him, and the thought of meeting, at last, with his great rival, filled him with a fierce eagerness.

  “The land is burning,” he cried, “Percy stands on high, and either we or they must lower lie!”

  “Rare words!” chuckled Falstaff, when the warlike Prince had gone. “Brave world!” And he settled down to eat his breakfast with an appetite restored.

  Messengers crossed and re-crossed the land, galloping down narrow lanes and along broad highways on steaming horses, carrying rumour in their looks and news in their saddle-bags, from north to south, from south to north, to the King in London and to the rebel lords in Shrewsbury as the country plunged and staggered towards war. News came to Hotspur as he waited with Douglas and Worcester for his father and Glendower to join them, that his father was sick in bed and could not come. This was a great blow and Worcester cast doubts upon the sickness which he suspected to be caused more by caution than infection. Scarcely had this disaster been taken in than more messengers came, like doom-croaking ravens, to the rebel camp. Owen Glendower was delayed, and the King with all his people, was up in arms and marching north.

  “What may the King’s whole battle reach unto?” demanded Hotspur.

  “To thirty thousand,” answered the messenger.

  “Forty let it be!” cried Hotspur, not in the least d
ismayed; for this was the cream of honour, to battle against impossible odds.

  But the odds were not quite so great as Hotspur had been told. Already, and without a shot being fired or a sword being raised, the King’s great army had been reduced by a hundred and fifty. How so? Falstaff had sold them. By the authority entrusted to him, he had pressed into service only those who were rich enough to buy themselves out; in their place the knight was now the captain of some three hundred pounds and a band of ragged skeletons who had scarcely strength enough to march. Quilted, plumed and tasselled, like a pavilion filled with a gust of wind, the fat warrior rolled along the road to Coventry while his miserable little army picked their way painfully in his wake. Prince Hal, riding with the Lord of Westmoreland, came upon him and urged him to make haste, for the King’s forces were already at Shrewsbury. He glanced back, and saw Falstaff’s regiment.

  “Tell me, Jack,” he asked, “whose fellows are these that come after?”

  “Mine, Hal, mine,” responded Falstaff proudly.

  “I did never see such pitiful rascals!”

  “Tut, tut,” exclaimed Falstaff, loftily waving aside all criticism, “good enough to toss, food for powder, food for powder . . .” he chuckled, “they’ll fill a pit as well as better; tush, man, mortal men, mortal men.”

  The Prince frowned. Falstaff’s harsh humour was not to his present taste.

  “Sirrah, make haste!” he commanded. “Percy is already in the field!”

  It was night-time in the rebel camp, and lanterns peered among the tents like creeping glow-worms. Hotspur was impatient for the coming battle. Time and again Douglas and Worcester urged him to wait until more men came in to swell his force. But Hotspur was a hero in the old style: caution, to him, was little better than cowardice.

  A trumpet sounded, thin as a knife in the night. Voices murmured, lanterns gathered and threw up in their combined light, a herald emblazoned with the gaudy lions of the King. It was Sir Walter Blunt, a much-respected gentleman, come with an offer from the King. Swiftly he was conducted to Hotspur, who greeted him with affection and listened to him with courtesy. The message was that the King would know what were Hotspur’s grievances so that they might be remedied without loss of blood. It was, all things considered, a fair and generous offer. But not to Hotspur, who admired the messenger but not the sender of the message.