Shakespeare's Style Page 8

  The Bastard is being ironic here, since his brother’s father is not really his own father.

  His disgust with verbal affectation looks forward to Hamlet’s reaction to Osric and especially to Laertes, who jumps into Ophelia’s grave:

  And if thou prate of mountains, let them throw

  Millions of acres on us, till our ground,

  Singeing his pate against the burning zone,

  Make Ossa like a wart! Nay, an thou’lt mouth,

  I’ll rant as well as thou. (5.l.280–84)

  The Bastard is uncomfortable with courtly rhetoric. “Bethumped” is again a colloquial word used only this one time by Shakespeare.

  The Bastard is triumphant in act 2, scene 1, but the deal suggested by Hubert and agreed upon by the kings of France and England—to marry Lewis, the Dauphin of France, to Blanch of Spain, niece to King John—is abhorrent to him. He sees it as the way of the world, an easy but corrupt transaction, and this is the context for his important speech about commodity: “Mad world! Mad kings! Mad composition [compromise]!” (2.1.561). In order to persuade King John to this base deal, the King of France has whispered in the ear,

  With that same purpose-changer, that sly devil,

  That broker [pander] that still breaks the pate of faith,

  That daily break-vow, he that wins of all,

  Of kings, of beggars, old men, young men, maids,

  Who, having no external thing to lose

  But the word “maid,” cheats the poor maid of that,

  That smooth-faced [deceitful] gentleman, tickling [flattering] commodity,

  Commodity, the bias of the world. (2.1.567–74)

  “Commodity” is not used very often by Shakespeare in this sense, which includes in its meaning and connotations self-interest, gain, expediency, commercial advantage, and profit. The “bias of the world” is a bowling image referring to the weight on one side of the bowling ball, which causes it to swerve on an uneven course; in other words, the bias of the world refers to its crookedness. The Bastard expatiates on his master image of commodity:

  The world, who of itself is peisèd [weighted] well,

  Made to run even upon even ground,

  Till this advantage, this vile drawing bias,

  This sway of motion, this commodity,

  Makes it take head [run] from all indifferency,

  From all direction, purpose, course, intent.

  And this same bias, this commodity,

  This bawd, this broker, this all-changing word,

  Clapped on the outward eye of fickle France,

  Hath drawn him [King John] from his own determined aid,

  From a resolved and honorable war,

  To a most base and vile-concluded peace. (2.1.575–86)

  Commodity is conveniently personified as a bawd, a broker, a pimp, who has a mellow and persuasive tongue. The Bastard ends his soliloquy with an ironic reversal:

  And why rail I on this commodity?

  But for because he hath not wooed me yet:

  Not that I have the power to clutch my hand [refuse the gift],

  When his fair angels would salute my palm,

  But for my hand, as unattempted yet,

  Like a poor beggar, raileth on the rich. (2.1.587–92)

  The Bastard resolves upon an expedient course, in which he will respond to all the opportunities that offer themselves. He will be practical in leading England out of the dangers in which it is beset.

  It is at this point that the Bastard takes over the leadership of England from King John. He flirts with commodity, as the inevitable way of the world, and concludes on an upbeat and positive note:

  Well, whiles I am a beggar, I will rail

  And say there is no sin but to be rich;

  And being rich, my virtue then shall be

  To say there is no vice but beggary.

  Since kings break faith upon commodity,

  Gain, be my lord, for I will worship thee! (2.1.593–98)

  He now proclaims that he will use commodity for England’s advantage.

  It is interesting that, in The Merchant of Venice, Antonio uses “commodity” in a sense close to that of King John. The doomed Antonio understands that the duke cannot refuse to honor Shylock’s bond:

  For the commodity that strangers [foreigners] have

  With us in Venice, if it be denied,

  Will much impeach the justice of the state,

  Since that the trade and profit of the city

  Consisteth of all nations. (3.3.27–31)

  Venice as an international trading center depends upon the sanctity of its commercial agreements, its commodity. Without commodity, an important business word, Venice could not continue to exist. Like commodity in King John, it is “the bias of the world” (2.1.574), indicating the base and practical way the world must be run.

  Chapter 12

  Falstaff’s Hyperbole in the

  Henry IV Plays

  Falstaff is a creative and imaginative speaker. He is, by his own declaration (in 2 Henry IV), “not only witty in myself, but the cause that wit is in other men” (1.2.9–10). As he says in this same passage: “The brain of this foolish compounded clay, man, is not able to invent anything that intends to laughter more than I invent or is invented on me” (1.2.7–9). Invention, or imagination, describes the ability of a poet or writer to find an appropriate subject matter. It would be going far to describe Falstaff as a poet, but he is excellent at using language creatively. I should like to talk about hyperbole in this chapter, which, like metaphor, offers a way of going beyond the literal meaning of words. In Falstaff’s case, it may also be called exaggeration—or just plain lying—because hyperbole thrusts beyond ordinary usage.

  To continue with this same passage, Falstaff expatiates on the young page that Prince Hal has sent him:

  Thou whoreson mandrake [a root shaped like a man], thou art fitter to be worn in my cap than to wait at my heels. I was never manned with an agate [a small figure carved in a jewel] till now, but I will inset you neither in gold nor silver, but in vile apparel, and send you back again to your master, for a jewel—the juvenal [juvenile], the Prince your master, whose chin is not yet fledge [feathered, covered with hair]. (1.2.14–20)

  This is just a small sample of Falstaff’s witty and complex style. He goes on with elaborate wordplay on the king’s “face-royal,” or ten shilling coin, which will never have any need for a barber, since it is the face affixed on an English coin.

  Falstaff’s hyperbolizing on the number of assailants he has faced in the robbery at Gadshill in 1 Henry IV is an excellent example of his facility with words. His first enumeration is a large, rounded figure: “A hundred upon poor four of us!” (2.4.162–63). The number suddenly declines in his next speech:

  I am a rogue if I were not at half-sword with a dozen of them two hours together. I have scaped by miracle. I am eight times thrust through the doublet, four through the hose; my buckler cut through and through; my sword hacked like a handsaw—ecce signum! I never dealt better since I was a man. (2.4.165–71)

  The numbers keep changing wildly. When Gadshill says “We four set upon some dozen—,” Falstaff corrects him: “Sixteen at least, my lord” (2.4.175–76). The numbers expand as Falstaff expatiates on his heroic performance: “if I fought not with fifty of them, I am a bunch of radish! If there were not two or three and fifty upon poor old Jack, then am I no two-legged creature” (2.4.186–89).

  What is interesting in this passage is how the numbers keep going up and down with unaccountable speed. When he is being more specific about the battle, Falstaff begins modestly by accounting for only “Four rogues in buckram” (2.4.197). But as the tale proceeds, the number grows:

  Prince. What, four? Thou said’st but two even now.

  Falstaff. Four, Hal. I told thee four.

  Poins. Ay, ay, he said four.

  Falstaff. These four came all afront and mainly thrust at me. I made no more ado but took all their seven poi
nts in my target, thus. (2.4.198–203)

  Prince Hal and Poins egg Falstaff on in the practical joke, since they know that only the two of them set upon the fat knight. The number keeps increasing from nine to eleven, and the prince is suitably astounded: “O monstrous! Eleven buckram men grown out of two!” (2.4.220–21). When Falstaff is finally caught out in his exaggerations, he refuses to give any reasons for his tale: “If reasons were as plentiful as blackberries, I would give no man a reason upon compulsion, I” (2.4.240–42). Of course, there is a built-in pun on “reasons,” pronounced like our “raisins.”

  Hal delivers a bunch of hyperboles about Falstaff’s size: “this bed-presser, this horseback-breaker, this huge hill of flesh” (2.4.244–45), but the fat knight overtops him with hyperboles about Hal’s meagerness:

  ‘Sblood, you starveling, you eelskin, you dried neat’s [ox’s] tongue, you bull’s pizzle [penis], you stockfish [dried cod]—O for breath to utter what is like thee!—you tailor’s yard [yardstick], you sheath, you bowcase [holder for unstrung bows], you vile standing tuck [rapier]! (2.4.246–50)

  The phallic imagery is evident here, including wordplay on “yard,” meaning both “yardstick” and “penis.” Falstaff always gives more than he gets verbally, and he is no match even for the clever Prince Hal.

  When the two move into performances as the king and as Falstaff himself (and vice versa), Falstaff insists on outplaying and overreaching the Prince: “Give me a cup of sack to make my eyes look red, that it may be thought I have wept; for I must speak in passion, and I will do it in King Cambyses’ vein” (2.4.387–90). He prepares for his role like a professional actor, parodying Thomas Preston’s old play King Cambyses (1569) in the ranting style. This is like the readiness of Bottom in A Midsummer Night’s Dream to take on the role of Pyramus in “Ercles’ [Hercules] vein, a tyrant’s vein” (1.2.41). Bottom boasts that he “could play Ercles’ rarely, or a part to tear a cat in, to make all split” (1.2.30–31). Bottom and Falstaff are similar histrionically, but Falstaff is hardly naïve like Bottom. He is always self-conscious and purposive.

  In his punning dialogue with the Lord Chief Justice in 1 Henry IV, Falstaff insists on his youth, but the Lord Chief Justice strongly disagrees:

  Do you set down your name in the scroll of youth, that are written down old with all the characters of age? Have you not a moist eye, a dry hand, a yellow cheek, a white beard, a decreasing leg, an increasing belly? Is not your voice broken, your wind short, your chin double, your wit single, and every part about you blasted with antiquity, and will you yet call yourself young? (1.2.180–87)

  Falstaff answers with his own hyperbolical history:

  My lord, I was born about three of the clock in the afternoon, with a white head and something a round belly. For my voice, I have lost it with hallowing [sanctifying] and singing of anthems. To approve my youth further, I will not. The truth is, I am only old in judgment and understanding; and he that will caper with me for a thousand marks, let him lend me the money, and have at him! (1.2.188–95)

  Falstaff is not to be put down. His challenge to the Justice for a capering (dancing) contest is, of course, never to take place, but Falstaff is indomitable even in the face of supreme authority.

  For a more extensive sample of Falstaff’s hyperbolical wit, we have his long disquisition on his companion Bardolph’s red face in 1 Henry IV: “Thou art our admiral [flagship], thou bearest the lantern in the poop—but ‘tis in the nose of thee: thou art the Knight of the Burning Lamp” (3.3.26–28). Falstaff plays on the romantic tale of Amadis, Knight of the Burning Sword, as will Beaumont and Fletcher later in their play The Knight of the Burning Pestle. But once Falstaff begins on his comic narration, he is not to be put down:

  I never see thy face but I think upon hellfire and Dives that lived in purple; for there he is in his robes, burning, burning. . . . O, thou art a perpetual triumph, an everlasting bonfire-light! Thou hast saved me a thousand marks in links and torches, walking with thee in the night betwixt tavern and tavern . . . I have maintained that salamander of yours with fire any time this two and thirty years. God reward me for it! (3.3.33–51)

  Cold-blooded salamanders were supposed, in Pliny’s natural history, to be able to live in fire. This long speech is spoken in grudging praise of Bardolph, although he doesn’t seem to think so.

  Like Shakespeare’s fools, Falstaff has a number of set speeches on comic topics that are not necessarily related to the action in hand. I think the best of these is his long soliloquy on sherry in 2 Henry IV. The speech is ostensibly addressed to Prince John of Lancaster, Hal’s brother, a “sober-blooded boy” who “drinks no wine” (4.3.88–90). “Sherris-sack” is apostrophized as if it were an active force:

  A good sherris-sack hath a twofold operation in it. It ascends me into the brain, dries me there all the foolish and dull and cruddy vapors which environ it, makes it apprehensive, quick, forgetive [creative], full of nimble, fiery, and delectable shapes, which, delivered o’er to the voice, the tongue, which is the birth, becomes excellent wit. The second property of your excellent sherris is the warming of the blood, which, before cold and settled, left the liver white and pale, which is the badge of pusillanimity and cowardice. (4.3.96–106)

  The upshot of the working of sherry may be seen in Lancaster’s brother, Prince Hal:

  Hereof comes it that Prince Harry is valiant, for the cold blood he did naturally inherit of his father, he hath, like lean, sterile, and bare land, manured, husbanded, and tilled with excellent endeavor of drinking good and good store of fertile sherris, that he is become very hot and valiant. (4.3.117–23)

  Falstaff functions as an entertainer, a performer, who contributes little to the historical action but is vital to the tone and mood of the play.

  As a final example of Falstaff’s hyperbolizing, we have his brilliant character sketch of Justice Shallow in 2 Henry IV. It is also a long soliloquy spoken directly to the audience:

  Lord, Lord, how subject we old men are to this vice of lying! This same starved justice hath done nothing but prate to me of the wildness of his youth and the feats he hath done about Turnbull Street [a disreputable London street], and every third word a lie, duer paid to the hearer than the Turk’s tribute. I do remember him at Clement’s Inn like a man made after supper of a cheese-paring. When ‘a was naked, he was, for all the world, like a forked radish, with a head fantastically carved upon it with a knife. ‘A was so forlorn that his dimensions to any thick sight were invisible. ‘A was the very genius of famine, yet lecherous as a monkey, and the whores called him mandrake. (3.2.307–20)

  Falstaff, the fat man, is carried away by the meagerness of Shallow: “you might have thrust him and all his apparel into an eelskin—the case of a treble hautboy [oboe] was a mansion for him, a court” (3.2.329–32). It is as if Falstaff, in hyperbolical fashion, wants to extract every last morsel of wit from his topic. It is interesting that he thinks that the subject of Justice Shallow will provide unlimited entertainment for Prince Hal: “I will devise matter enough out of this Shallow to keep Prince Harry in continual laughter the wearing out of six fashions, which is four terms [court sessions], or two actions [lawsuits], and ‘a shall laugh without intervallums [intervals between terms]” (5.1.80–84). It is clear from this passage that Falstaff is always on the lookout for comic materials to amuse Prince Hal.

  Chapter 13

  The Banishment of Falstaff in the Henry IV Plays

  It is clear that when Prince Hal becomes king, he will banish Falstaff. This is established in the first scene of 1 Henry IV in which we see them together (1.2). It is a necessary fact of the plays that Prince Hal must banish Falstaff to become king. It is repeated over and over again that Prince Hal is only playing the scapegrace temporarily to establish his insight into ordinary English folk. The tavern in Eastcheap serves as an educational institution for Hal, but he is only following in his father’s footsteps.

  We remember what King Richard II in Richard II said ab
out Hal’s father, Bolingbroke, and his “courtship to the common people”:

  How he did seem to dive into their hearts

  With humble and familiar courtesy,

  What reverence he did throw away on slaves,

  Wooing poor craftsmen with the craft of smiles . . .

  Off goes his bonnet to an oyster-wench;

  A brace of draymen bid God speed him well,

  And had the tribute of his supple knee. (1.4.24–33)

  Bolingbroke becomes King Henry IV by deposing Richard and having him executed, but Richard could almost be talking about Prince Hal in this passage.

  In act 1, scene 2 of 1 Henry IV, Falstaff seems excessively concerned with what the Prince will do “when thou art a king” (1.2.23–24). This establishes a point of worry throughout these two plays. Hal participates in the robbery at Gadshill with his friend Poins as a kind of practical joke: “Well then, once in my days I’ll be a madcap” (1.2.142). The stolen money is paid back afterward. The joke, of course, is on Falstaff. Hal’s long soliloquy at the end of this scene is needed to establish the fact that he is playing the “madcap” for his own amusement and without incurring any harm to affairs of state. He is emphatic that he knows exactly what he is doing and that his association with low fellows like Falstaff and his crew is temporary: “I know you all, and will awhile uphold / The unyoked humor of your idleness” (1.2.192–93). “Idleness” is a strong word indicating foolery and foolishness.

  Hal already anticipates the high style of kings when he speaks of himself as imitating 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,