Creators (9 page)

All this is said with love. Hotspur plainly adores his Kate, even as he is winding her up, and she knows it. But for Owen Glendower, the Welsh windbag—the first Welsh windbag in history—he has nothing but contempt, not believing a word of Glendower’s boastful claims of his ability to summon supernatural aid:

Hotspur, Glendower having left the stage for a moment, tells his son-in-law, Mortimer, and his uncle, Worcester, that he is tired of the man’s “mincing poetry” that “sets my teeth on edge,” tired of being told of finless fish, molten ravens, clip-winged griffins, crouching lions, vamping cats, and such “skimbleskamble stuff” (a Shakespearean invention). Hotspur says that Glendower kept him up, the previous night, “at the least nine hours,” by telling him the different names of the devils “who were his lackeys.” Then comes a wonderful metaphor:

What Shakespeare discovers, in writing this play, is the value of persiflage or colorful abuse for livening up a theater, a device rediscovered again and again by playwrights, notably John Osborne in his revolutionary work
Look Back in Anger
(1956).

This brings us to Falstaff, both the dispenser of persiflage and, still more, its object, as we learn immediately when he appears and asks Prince Hal for the time:

Thus succinctly and eloquently is Falstaff presented to us, full-grown in sin and ridicule, and thereafter he is truly launched to
fend for himself. He is progressively revealed as a soldier and a swordsman—he always carries a sword or has one handy, talks sword drill (“Thou knowest my old ward: here I lay and thus I bore my point”), and even has some military pride, saying he is ashamed of his feeble drafted men (“I’ll not march them through Coventry, and that’s flat”). He is a gross, obvious, and implausible liar, nevertheless declaring his passion for truth (“Lord, lord, how this world is given to lying!…Lord, lord, how subject we old men are to this vice of lying!”), and an arrant coward posing as a man (“Instinct is a great matter, I was a coward by instinct”). He is a thief and a parasite (“Hook on! Hook on!”), who not only borrows money he has no intention of repaying, from his rich old fellow student (“We have heard the chimes at midnight”), but sponges on the tavern keeper Mistress Quickly to the point where she is almost bankrupt. He is, by any normal standards, a thoroughly bad and worthless man. Yet he appeals to us because he does not mind abuse, is without malice, and remains good-humored almost to his deathbed, when “a babbled o green fields.”

More importantly, Falstaff is a philosopher, albeit a comic one, who soliloquizes in prose on many of the chief topics of life. The plays hinge on honor and what it means, its worth, and how to win it. Hotspur searches for honor seriously but has no illusions:

To this, in a splendid piece of counterpoint, Falstaff has a riposte in Act V, when Prince Harry, goading him into battle, says, “Thou owest God a death.” Falstaff, left alone and afraid, admits “Honour pricks me on” but adds, “How if honour pricks me off when I come on? How then? Can honour 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. What is known? A word. What is 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 have none of it.”

This piece of cold realism is the rational hinge on which the plays turn. Perhaps it ought to be read out at every presentation of medals at Buckingham Palace or the White House.

Although Falstaff’s counterpoint with Hotspur is the highlight of the play, it is merely one of Falstaff’s soliloquies, which are, as it were, a comic adumbration of the long poetic philosophizings of Hamlet, which Shakespeare was to write a year or two later. Falstaff’s thoughts, spread over the two plays, cover a huge range of subjects; they give his character depth and width, subtlety and sinewy cogitation; they make him, in their own way, a formidable commentator on life. Here are the chief subjects he covers: the need for a horse; cowardice and roguery; compulsion and its evils; instinct; the trials of being old and fat; the fear of getting thin, and of death; being robbed; his dreadful recruits; a dead hero; himself rising from the dead; lying; having a boy page; security; his own eternal youth; the dreadful “consumption” of his purse; smoothie-chops; the weaknesses of old men; his personal valor; the disadvantages of drinking and the corresponding value of sherry and sack; and, finally, the need for foolish fellows to provide a subject for jokes. Falstaff argues that life is hard and laughing essential to endure it. Hence he presents himself as a valuable creature, not only witty in himself but “the cause of wit in others”—and we agree.

In the second part of
Henry IV
we see little of Prince Hal with Falstaff. That joke is over, and indeed ended when the prince, as soon as he became king, rejected his old drinking companion so brutally that Falstaff was too shocked to soliloquize. Falstaff reels off to darkness and death, recorded early in
Henry V
when his deathbed is harrowingly and touchingly described by Mistress Quickly. Instead, in
Henry IV, Part 2
we see Falstaff twice—on his way to battle and on his return, with his old student friend Shallow in his Gloucestershire country fastnesses. Shakespeare rarely deals with the countryside proper, preferring—perhaps with his London audience in mind—arcadian fantasias such as the Forest of Arden in
As You Like It
to rural realities. But in Act
III, scene ii, we meet the heart of rustic England as Shakespeare himself knew it in his native Warwickshire. Falstaff comes to raise troops by “pricking” them for the draft, under Shallow’s supervision as a justice of the peace, and he and his contemporary reminisce about their supposed wild doings as students at the Inns of Court—doings which Falstaff tells us are largely imaginary—and the episode ends with one of his soliloquies on the tendency of elderly gentlemen to invent stories about their youth. The scene is very well done—Shakespeare at his adroit best—and it serves to indicate that Falstaff, despite his country origins, is no longer at home there: he has become a metropolitan denizen, seeing country folk as fit only to be exploited.
²⁰

Falstaff is at home in the London underworld, and Shakespeare shows it to us in Act II, scene iv, one of the finest pieces of theatrical low life ever written and a superb example of tragicomedy involving deadly persiflage leading up to a sword exchange between Falstaff and his Ancient (or under-officer) Pistol. This scene shows us two virtuoso exponents of vulgar abuse in action—the tavern whore Doll Tearsheet, and the half-educated Pistol, who has picked up a smattering of classical lore together with a muddled acquaintance with Christopher Marlowe’s play
Tamerlaine
. Doll calls him “the foul-mouthest rogue in England,” and when Pistol, drunk, makes a lascivious grab at her, she lets fly. “What you poor, base, rascally, cheating, lark-linen mate! Away, you mouldy rogue, away, I am meat for your master…. Away you cutpurse rascal, you filthy bung, away! By this wine, I’ll thrust my knife in your mouldy chaps an you play the saucy cuttle with me! Away, you bottle-ale rascal, you basket-hilt stale juggler, you!”

Pistol replies in his own brand of mangled verse. Mistress Quickly is a malapropist of quality, who tells Pistol to “aggravate your choler.” But Pistol is something more, a man who pounces on classical names and uses them without knowing what they signify. He compares the angry Doll to Irene (“Have we not Hiren here?”) and threatens to drown her “In Pluto’s vile lake” wherein are “Erebus and tortures vile!” He asks in his wrath:

Well might Mistress Quickly comment: “By my troth, captain, these are very bitter words.” They are certainly confusing ones, and they are followed by a mass of others. To get rid of him Falstaff is obliged to use a rapier, and “hurt him i’ the shoulder,” provoking Doll’s admiration. The two end the scene in a bed offstage before Falstaff goes off to the wars.

It is gritty realism and grimly comic, indicating that Shakespeare was familiar with low city taverns and their habitués, or at least knew how to conjure them up in words. But the scene has a serious point. At the close of the 1590s, thanks to the expeditions England had sent to France, Flanders, and Ireland, drunken soldiers were familiar and much detested figures in London. Particular opprobium attached to the title “captain,” once honorable, now common, and with a dreadful reputation for insolent and riotous behavior, so that Mistress Quickly uses “swaggerer” as a deadly term of abuse and horror—“I am the horse when one says ‘swagger.’ Feel, master, how I shake, look you, I warrant you.” Doll sneers at Pistol’s elevation to the rank of commissioned officer—“God’s light, with two points on your shoulder! Much!” Two points made him only a lieutenant, but Mistress Quickly addresses him as “captain” and Doll adds:

She adds: “These villains will make the word…odious” (that is, the word “captain”); “therefore captains had need look to ’t.”

Queen Elizabeth herself would have agreed heartily with Doll’s sentiment. She was incensed by the inflation of captains,
and watched with dismay when they demanded knighthoods for their services, and were even given knighthoods by Essex in Ireland, using his vice-regal privileges—the scandal of the “Essex knights” was one of the steps leading to his final downfall.
²¹
Queen Elizaebth saw
Henry IV, Parts 1 and 2
at court and thoroughly approved. In her reading of the plays, Shakespeare was protesting about the shocking behavior of overpromoted military men, be they captains or knights, and holding them up to well-deserved ridicule. Hence the old tradition that she personally asked Shakespeare to “continue the fat knight in the play more, and show him in love.” She was so eager to see it acted, runs another tradition, that she commanded it to be finished in fourteen days and was very well pleased with the representation. The result was
The Merry Wives of Windsor
, given at the castle itself on 23 April, the evening of the annual Garter ceremony. Written in a fortnight and not at the author’s own choosing as to plot or anything else—he may well have been sick of the fat knight by this point—the play is not vintage Shakespeare but a commercial farce fit for a one-night stand. It contains some memorable phrases nonetheless—“The King’s English” makes its first appearance, and “all the world’s mine oyster”—plays surprisingly well, and is often performed. It is written almost entirely in prose and is the only play of Shakespeare’s with a contemporary setting in an actual English town. The merry wives show a cunning acquaintance with topical idiom, especially lawyers’ talk and printers’ argot. But Falstaff is a mere butt. His soliloquies are strangely absent, and it was left to Verdi, 300 years later, displaying an astonishing skill in matching notes and sounds to words, to raise the fat knight into immortality again.
²²

Shakespeare, by now, had his mind on other things, above all his greatest creation, perhaps the most formidable, extensive, complex, subtle, and penetrating work of art ever carried to perfection, making the works of Leonardo and Michelangelo, Beethoven and Mozart, Dante and Goethe seem inferior by comparison—
Hamlet
. Shakespeare wrote this play at the summit of his powers, and that fact shows in almost every line. The play is long, very long. The idea came from a twelfth-century Danish folktale written in Latin by Saxo Grammaticus, and was retold by
François de Belleforest in his
Histoires Tragiques
(1570). From 1589 on there are references to an English tragedy of Hamlet, but the text has been lost irrecoverably. The play is a revenge play, and since the murder takes place before it opens, and the act of revenge cannot occur until the last scene, a huge dramatic hole has to be filled in. Shakespeare took the main plot as he found it, but he added the Ghost of Hamlet’s father; the coming of the actors; and the performance of a play within a play to test the reaction of King Claudius, the suspected murderer; the terrifying scene between Hamlet and his mother after it; Ophelia’s madness and drowning; Osric; Forinbras; the role of Laertes as an avenger; the grave digger and the churchyard funeral; and much else. Most of all, however, he expanded Hamlet’s own revenge role into an immensely complex and difficult (but always likable, indeed lovable) character, whose will to act is paralyzed by endless streams of thought which crowd into his brain and which he expresses in superb poetry.