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It has been observed that critics who write about Shakespeare reveal more about themselves than about Shakespeare, but perhaps that is the great value of drama of the Shakespearian kind, namely, that whatever he may see taking place on stage, its final effect upon each spectator is a self-revelation.
Shakespeare holds the position in our literature of Top Bard, but this deserved priority has one unfortunate consequence; we generally make our first acquaintance with his plays, not in the theatre, but in the classroom or study, so that, when we do attend a performance, we have lost that naïve openness to surprise which is the proper frame of mind in which to witness any drama. The experience of reading a play and the experience of watching it performed are never identical, but in the case of Henry IV the difference between the two is particularly great.
At a performance, my immediate reaction is to wonder what Falstaff is doing in this play at all. At the end of Richard II, we were told that the Heir Apparent has taken up with a sort of dissolute crew of unrestrained loose companions. What sort of bad company would one expect to find Prince Hal keeping when the curtain rises on Henry IV? Surely, one could expect to see him surrounded by daring, rather sinister juvenile delinquents and beautiful gold-digging whores. But whom do we meet in the Boars Head? A fat, cowardly tosspot, old enough to be his father, two down-at-heel hangers-on, a slatternly host-ess and only one whore, who is not in her earliest youth either; all of them seedy, and, by any worldly standard, including those of the criminal classes, all of them failures. Surely, one thinks, an Heir Appar-ent, sowing his wild oats, could have picked himself a more exciting crew than that. As the play proceeds, our surprise is replaced by another kind of puzzle, for the better we come to know Falstaff, the clearer it becomes that the world of historical reality which a Chronicle Play claims to imitate is not a world which he can inhabit.
If it really was Queen Elizabeth who demanded to see Falstaff in a comedy, then she showed herself a very perceptive critic. But even in The Merry Wives of Windsor, Falstaff has not and could not have found his true home because Shakespeare was only a poet. For that he was to wait nearly two hundred years till Verdi wrote his last opera. Falstaff is not the only case of a character whose true home is the world of music; others are Tristan, Isolde, and Don Giovanni.
Though they each call for a different kind of music, Tristan, Don Giovanni, and Falstaff have certain traits in common. They do not belong to the temporal world of change. One cannot imagine any of them as babies, for a Tristan who is not in love, a Don Giovanni who has no name on his list, a Falstaff who is not old and fat, are inconceivable. When Falstaff says, When I was about their years, Hal, I was not an eagles talent in the waist; I could have crept into an aldermans thumb-ringwe take it as a typical Falstaffian fib, but we believe him when he says, I was born about three in the afternoon, with a white head and something of a round belly.
Time, for Tristan, is a single moment stretched out tighter and tighter until it snaps. Time, for Don Giovanni, is an infinite arithmetical series of unrelated moments which has no beginning and would have no end if Heaven did not intervene and cut it short. For Falstaff, time does not exist, since he belongs to the opera buffa world of play and mock action governed not by will or desire, but by innocent wish, a world where no one can suffer because everything he says and does is only a pretense.
Thus, while we must see Tristan die in Isoldes arms and we must see Don Giovanni sink into the earth, because being doomed to die and to go to hell are essential to their beings, we cannot see Falstaff die on stage because, if we did, we should not believe it; we should know that, as at the battle of Shrewsbury, he was only shamming. I am not even quite sure that we believe it when we are told of his death in Henry V; I think we accept it, as we accept the death of Sherlock Holmes, as his creators way of saying, I am getting tired of this character; we feel sure that, if the public pleads with him strongly enough, Shakespeare will find some way to bring him to life again....
Reading Henry IV, we can easily give our full attention to the historical-political scenes, but, when watching a performance, attention is distracted by our eagerness to see Falstaff reappear. Short of cutting him out of the play altogether, no producer can prevent him stealing the show. From an actors point of view, the role of Falstaff has the enormous advantage that he has only to think of one thingplaying to an audience. Since he lives in an eternal present and the historical world does not exist for him, there is no difference for Falstaff between those on stage and those out front, and if the actor were to appear in one scene in Elizabethan costume and in the next in top hat and morning coat, no one would be bewildered. The speech of all the other characters is, like our own, conditioned by two factors, the external situation with its questions, answers, and commands, and the inner need of each character to disclose himself to others. But Falstaffs speech has only one cause, his absolute insistence, at every moment and at all costs, upon disclosing himself. Half his lines could be moved from one speech to another without our noticing, for nearly everything he says is a variant upon one themeI am that I am.
Moreover, Shakespeare has so written his part that it cannot be played unsympathetically. A good actor can make us admire Price Hal, but he cannot hope to make us like him as much as even a second-rate actor will make us like Falstaff. Sober reflection in the study may tell us that Falstaff is not, after all, a very admir-able person, but Falstaff on the stage gives us no time for sober reflection. When Hal or the Chief Justice or any others indicate that they are not bewitched by Falstaff, reason might tell us that they are in the right, but we ourselves are already bewitched, so that their disenchantment seems out of place, like the presence of tee-totalers at a drunken party.
Suppose, then, that a producer were to cut the Falstaff scenes altogether, what would Henry IV become? The middle section of a political trilogy which could be entitled Looking for the Doctor.
The body politic of England catches an infection from its family physician. An able but unqualified practitioner throws him out of the sickroom and takes over. The patients temperature continues to rise. But then, to everybodys amazement, the son of the unqualified practitioner whom, though he has taken his degree, everyone has hitherto believed to be a hopeless invalid, effects a cure. Not only is the patient restored to health but also, at the doctors orders, takes another body politic, France, to wife.
The theme of this trilogy is, that is to say, the question: What combination of qualities is needed in the Ruler whose function is the establishment and maintenance of Temporal Justice? According to Shakespeare, the ideal Ruler must satisfy five conditions. 1) He must know what is just and what is unjust. 2) He must himself be just. 3) He must be strong enough to compel those who would like to be unjust to behave justly. 4) He must have the capacity both by nature and by art of making others loyal to his person. 5) He must be the legitimate ruler by whatever standard legitimacy is determined in the society to which he belongs.
Richard II fails to satisfy the first four of these. He does not know what Justice is, for he follows the advice of foolish flatterers. He is himself unjust, for he spends the money he obtains by taxing the Commons and fining the Nobility, not on defending England against her foes, but upon maintaining a lavish and frivolous court, so that, when he really does need money for a patriotic purpose, the war with Ireland, his exchequer is empty and in desperation he commits a gross act of injustice by confiscating Bolingbrokes estates.
It would seem that at one time he had been popular, but he has now lost his popularity, partly on account of his actions but also because he lacks the art of winning hearts. According to his successor, he had made the mistake of being overfamiliarthe ruler should not let himself be seen too often as humanand in addition, he is not by nature the athletic, physically brave warrior who is the type most admired by the feudal society he is called upon to rule.
In consequence, Richard II is a weak ruler who cannot keep the great nobles in order or even command the loyalty of his soldiers, and weakness in a ruler is the worst defect of all. A cruel, even an unjust king, who is strong, is preferable to the most saintly weakling because most men will behave unjustly if they discover that they can with impunity; tyranny, the injustice of one, is less unjust than anarchy, the injustice of many.
But there remains the fifth condition: whatever his defects, Richard II is the legitimate King of England. Since all men are mortal, and many men are ambitious, unless there is some impersonal principle by which, when the present ruler dies, the choice of his successor can be decided, there will be a risk of civil war in every generation. It is better to endure the injustice of the legitimate ruler, who will die anyway sooner or later, than allow a usurper to take his place by force.
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