CHAPTER VII

THE STORY OF FALSTAFF

An innovation-A permanent artistic principle in the treatment of history by fiction-An Aristotelian induction-A tetralogy and a pageant-Its unity of theme and treatmentThe tradition of Chaucer-Falstaff and the InterludesMeaning of Interlude-Falstaff in The Merry WivesPrince Hal and Henry V.-Characters and their creators— David Copperfield-Johnson on Falstaff-The dismissal of Falstaff Why Shakespeare killed him-The scenes at the Boar's Head-The apotheosis of good-fellowship.

(1)

ANYONE, coming to the two parts of King Henry IV.—which in fact make one can see that here is something new. Though his acquaintance with other history plays of the time be slight ; even though it be confided to the other history plays of Shakespeare, he cannot miss to perceive, in the mixture and blend of high political intrigue, of royalties, proud nobles and rebellious wars, with footpads, tapsters, bawds and all the fun of the fair on Gad's Hill and in Eastcheap, an innovation upon the old method of chronicle drama. I am not pretending, of course, that the innovation has come at a stroke; that, as Pallas Athene from the head of Zeus, the invention sprang upon the world fully armed and complete out of Shake

speare's brain. For (1) as a matter of history, when a new and strong idea, such as Elizabethan drama, starts fermenting, all manner of men bring their grapes to the vat; (2) as a matter of history, the germ of the Gad's Hill frolic is to be found in an old play, The Famous Victories of King Henry the Fifth, on which Shakespeare undoubtedly worked; and (3) again, as a matter of history, Prince Hal's youthful follies were a tradition so fixed in men's minds that no play about him could dispense with them.

But when all this has been granted, when we note how Falstaff is no sooner introduced than he takes charge and establishes himself as the real hero of the play; how he compels everyone into his grand circumference; what a globe this earthy carnal man is, and how like a globe of earth he rolls; how, from his first merry encounter with Henry to his last sorrowful one, he is and remains (as Hazlitt said) the better man of the two; why, then, as we go on to read Scott, Dumas, Thackeray or any great historical novelist, we cannot miss to observe how powerful an innovation Shakespeare made of it. It has set up a permanent artistic principle in the treatment of history by fiction; the principle that, in drama or novel of this kind, your best protagonists, and the minor characters you can best treat with liveliness as with philosophy, are not those concerning whose sayings and doings you are circumscribed by known fact and documentary evidence, but rather some invented men or womenpawns in the game upon whose actions and destinies you can make the great events play at will. Thus

not only does Falstaff give Scott the trick of Dugald Dalgetty, Dumas the trick of The Three Musketeers, Charles Reade the trick of Denis the Burgundian; not only is Mistress Quickly the artistic mother of Madame Sans Gêne; but if we take almost any historical novel of the first class-Esmond, or L'Homme Qui Rit, or The Cloister and the Hearth, or La Chartreuse de Parme, or The Tale of Two Cities, or Tolstoy's War and Peace-we shall find the protagonists of the story to be figures evoked from the vaguest shadows of history, when they are not (as more often happens) pure figments of the author's brain.

I touched upon this principle in my first paper, on Macbeth. It was Aristotle, of course, who first laid hold of the secret, when he asserted that "poetry is a more philosophical and a higher thing than history; for poetry occupies itself in expressing the universal, history the particular. The particular is, for example, what Alcibiades did or suffered." And this (let me say) was a very remarkable discovery for Aristotle to make by induction from the Greek dramatists, who concerned themselves mainly with the dooms of kings and royal houses—

Sometime let gorgeous tragedy

In scepter'd pall come sweeping by,

Presenting Thebes' or Pelops' line. . . .

But these, to be sure, were mythical, or, at most, legendary, allowing Eschylus or Sophocles to choose a great deal and to invent no little. So with Shakespeare There had, once upon a time, been an actual

Lear, an actual Cymbeline, and both were kings; an actual Hamlet, Prince of Denmark; an actual Macbeth, who made himself king. These, however, are legendary figures, evoked from the penumbra of Holinshed or Saxo Grammaticus; and Shakespeare calls them up almost in what shape he wills, to be reinspired with life and played with as his genius may choose. Obviously he could not play thus with the houses of York and Lancaster, whose rivalries were not only documented but fresh in men's memories. Red, or white, or parti-coloured-if I may adapt Cowper

The rose was just washed, just washed by the shower,
Which Henry to Edward conveyed-

and Richard to another Henry, and a third Henry to another Edward, to Mary, and to Elizabeth. The blood and the tears that had washed it alternate red and white were too recent. The Elizabethan audience knew these champions of York and Lancaster— these cousins, making young men bleed for their sordid domestic quarrel.

And Abner said to Joab, "Let the young men now arise and play before us." And Joab said, "Let them arise." Then there arose and went over by number twelve of the servants of Benjamin, which pertaineth to Ishbosheth the son of Saul, and twelve of the servants of David.

And they caught everyone his fellow by the head, and thrust his sword into his fellow's side: so they fell down together, wherefore that place was called Helkathhazzurim (or the Field of Strong Men) unto this day.

The many men so beautiful!
And they all dead die lie. . . .

An Elizabethan audience, at any rate, knew all about Civil War, or their fathers had told them. Let the reader recall the two little vignettes that Shakespeare introduced into the Third Part of King Henry VI.,

Enter a Son that hath killed his Father, with the dead body," and its pendant, "Enter a Father, that hath killed his Son, with the body in his arms." How poignant they are, for all their conventionality! I confess that to me the sad but yet selfish comment of Henry VI.

Sad-hearted men, much overgone with care,

Here sits a king more woeful than you are, seems little if at all less hollow, as it holds far less sophistry, than the famous but sentimental, selfish, sophistical meditations of Henry V. after the honest soldier Williams has floored him in argument. But this is a matter of opinion touching, in these times, upon politics: I will not press it.

(2)

Coming back to our business, which is Shakespeare's workmanship, I will ask the reader to peruse King Richard II., King Henry IV. (both parts), and King Henry V. in succession, and note

(1) that, as a pageant, they follow in straight and almost undivided succession-as all the evidence of data goes to show they were composed in fairly rapid succession;

(2) that they carry the house of Lancaster from its usurpation to its highest point of prosperity;