Falstaff as Parodist and Perhaps Holy Fool

Author(s): Roy Battenhouse

Reviewed work(s):
Source: PMLA, Vol. 90, No. 1 (Jan., 1975), pp. 32-52
Published by: Modern Language Association
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/461346 .
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Falstaff as Parodist and PerhapsHoly Fool
IT WAS SUGGESTED by Lord Fitz Roy
Raglan, in 1936, that "Shakespearehad in the
back of his mind the idea that Falstaff was a
holy man."1 And W. H. Auden, more recently,
has argued in cryptic fashion that Falstaff, while
overtly a Lord of Misrule, is nevertheless at heart
"a comic symbol for the supernatural order of
charity."2 By other scholars there has been an
understandable reluctance to pick up or probe
this possibility. For it fits not at all with Prince
Hal's view when banishing Falstaff as a profane
fool and abominable misleader. And no doubt
few of today's playgoers think of imputing charity
to a Falstaff whose prankish chicanery and brag-
gadocio seem to make him the very image of tra-
ditional vice, garnished at one time or other with
all the Seven Deadlies. Yet may not the fulsome
display of reprobation be more mask than inner
man? One of Auden's most tantalizing points is
to remind us that the Sermon on the Mount en-
joins Christians to show charity through a secret
almsgiving not trumpeted, and to fast while not
appearing unto men to fast. Could this be a clue
to the enigma of Falstaff's character? Perhaps so,
I think, provided we put beside it Lord Raglan's
intuition that Falstaff's vocation, in the public
world, is that of court fool and soothsayer. Such
a double hypothesis, in any case, seems to me to
warrant a trying out and testing. For it could
mean that while as "allowed fool" Falstaff is
shamming vices and enacting parodies, his inner
intent is a charitable almsgiving of brotherly
self-humiliation and fatherly truth-telling.
It could mean, further, that the relation of
Falstaff to the Lollard martyr Oldcastle, a matter
that scholars have puzzled over ever since Shake-
speare juggled their names, is a relation of para-
doxical affinity. For on the one hand, as the play's
Epilogue tells us, Falstaff is not the man Old-
castle (a solemn martyr for views unconventional
in his times); yet is not Falstaff, though comic,
also a nobleman whose seeming affronts to
officialdom make him a martyr? The mode of
32
ROY BATTENHOUSE
witnessing is of course different. A clown, if and
while Christian at heart, must mask his piety
under absurd posturings and perhaps facial leers.
His office is to offer spectacle of himself in the
lineaments of folly, as a mirror to the great of
their own imperfections. But such a vocation runs
the risk of banishment at the hands of princes
whose morals are those of worldly self-advantage
and political expediency. By such princes the
Fool's mirror is rejected as disreputably profane,
even when marginally it reflects Christian prem-
ises.
In Shakespeare'sHenry iv we can find, I think,
much evidence for this interpretation of Falstaff's
fate and of the enigma of his role. Let us listen,
for instance, to Falstaff's last words to Henry.
There are three of them: "God save thy Grace,
King Hal, my royal Hal!"; "God save thee, my
sweet boy!"; and third (here placing Hal as an
earthly god, but not God), "My King! My Jove!
I speak to thee my heart." Each of these last
words is an impeccably Christian prayer or plea,
and I see no reason to suppose any of them un-
genuine. A Jovian king deserves a jovial welcome,
whether his visit be to some tavern as an aproned
prentice or, as now, to public view in his royal
robes. But since "royal Hal" is after all less than
God, is it not appropriate to contextualize his
welcome by invoking God's grace for the saving
of the sweet boy within the official personage?
Alas, for thus speaking his heart Falstaff is pil-
loried. He is berated as a "vain" man, told to fall
to his knees in repentance, and warned not to ex-
pect "advancement" until he reforms. Is our
martyr wholly surprised? To the Shallows of this
world he ascribes the king's ungraciousness to
what Hal must "seem" in public, thus charitably
covering Hal's fault. But surely Falstaff has long
anticipated that his rejection would come to pass.
On his very first appearance in Part I he had said:
"God save thy Grace Majesty I should say, for
grace thou wilt have none." This prophecy has
been fulfilled. The prince whom Falstaff has
 Roy Battenhouse
labored to bring to knowledge of self has proved
to be instead a Pontius Pilate, a graceless judge
who has toyed with truth without staying for an
answer. And the location, ironically, is a place
near Westminsterand its "Jerusalem"aura.
As compared with Oldcastle's martyrdom, Fal-
staff's has been even more humiliating. But is this
not because his method of witnessing is more
secret, more conditioned by the ancient folk
wisdom of the Christian centuries? Recall, in this
connection, three of St. Paul's guidelines for being
a witness to gospel mystery:
God hathe chosen the foolish things of the world to
confounde the wise.... For the wisdome of this world
is foolishnes with God.
(i Cor. i.27, iii.19. All citations Geneva)
We approve ourselves . . . by honour and dishonour,
by evil reporte & good reporte, as deceivers, and yet
true. (ni Cor. vi.8)
For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against
. . . the worldlie governours, the princes of the
darkenes of this world, against spiritual wickednesses,
which are in the hie places. (Eph. vi.12)
These passages I think crucial for any insight into
Falstaff. The fat knight has a "gravity" quite in-
terior to his physical poundage: he lards the earth
not merely with his sweat, but covertly with a
Christian spirit as wise as serpents and as harm-
less as doves.
I of his own blood a sword which is later referredto
Let it be said at the start that my thesis, novel
though it largely is, and perhaps at first glance
preposterous, is not without wayside support from
the observations of other scholars. For while some
have emphasized the vice characteristics of Fal-
staff, Alfred Harbage has remarkedacutely:
Falstaff is the least effective wrongdoer that ever lived.
He is a thief whose booty is taken from him, a liar who
is never believed, a drunkard who is never befuddled,
a bully who is not feared. . . . Even his lechery is a
doubtful item.)
Harbage's comment here that Falstaf's wits are
never befuddled ought to be carefully noted by
producers of the play, who sometimes let Fal-
staff weave about the stage as if befuddled by
drink, and thereby add embellishments of stage
spectacle quite without warrant from the text.
The real Falstaff is in full control of his wits at all
33
times, despite his praise of sack and despite those
wine bills which he has, as clown, no doubt
planted in his pocket for the sake of the comedy
they will produce when his pockets are picked.
And as for a lechery which Harbage terms doubt-
ful, how can we believe it at all of the fat sixty-
year-old whom we see in Mistress Quickly's
tavern? The pose of fornicator, says W. H. Auden,
is jolly pretense, while all that we actually see
Falstaff doing in this scene is defending Nell from
a bully, Pistol, then setting Doll on his knee and
making her cry out of affection and pity for him
(p. 203).
Falstaff differs in one very important respect
from a vice character such as Ambidexter in
Thomas Preston's Cambises: Ambidexter goes
about planting suspicion, tempting Cambises to
hatred and fratricide, and constantly glorying in
his skill as a beguiler. By contrast there is in
Falstaff, as various scholars have noted, none of
this vicious guile. Time is the only thing Falstaff
beguiles; through his role as fall guy and buffoon
he is a comic butt of laughter and by his wit a
cause of wit in others.
The Gad's Hill robbery, let us recall, is not
instigated by Falstaff but by Poins and Prince
Hal, and during it Falstaff as highwayman uses no
violence other than roaring and bellowing. Then
afterward, by pricking his nose with grass (em-
blematically a pun on grace? Cf. the grace-grass
pun in Allts Well iv.v), he besmears with a bit
as a dagger of lath and brandished with the cry
ecce signmm. In short, there will be evidence
aplenty throughout the Henry iv plays that Fal-
staff's real genius is as artist, entertainer, and per-
haps gnomic seer. John W. Draper, writing in
1946, summed up well the case for regarding Fal-
staff as a professional jester both in the Henry
plays and in The Merry Wives. Not only Falstaf's
parade of gentility and of affected airs and graces,
. .. [and] his situations as comic soldier and comic
lover, but also his whole technique of speech, his prose
occasionally mixed with doggerel rhyme and his mock
flights, his absurd stories and grandiose petty lies, his
word-play and line sayings in pseudo-moralistic vein,
these stamp him as the Elizabethan fool par excellence,
to be recognized by any theatre-goer of the age.4
And other scholars, similarly, have characterized
Falstaff as a universal mimic and parodist, a
34 Falstaff as Parodist and Perhaps Holy Fool
charmer and amiable object lesson through his
clowning of human imperfection.5
Yet these commentators have tended to under-
estimate or misestimate the intellectual base that
underlies Falstaff's foolery. Draper, for instance,
ends by supposing that Falstaff belongs to the
category of knave-fool, rather than to the cate-
gory of politic-fool as Lear's fool was (p. 461).
And Harbage thinks Falstaff guilty of having no
principles, of having indeed an "inner vice" in his
lack of moral principle (p. 75). Even Cleanth
Brooks and Robert B. Heilman complain of Fal-
staff's having a child's lack of conscience. He is, in
their view, "fundamentally a moral anarchist,"
whose irresponsible frivolousness Prince Hal does
well to reject ultimately.6 My answer to this con-
tention must rely on wayside evidence tucked here
and there in the play as a whole. But let me here
question whether moral anarchy or lack of inner
principle is evident, for instance, in Falstaff's well-
known catechism on honor. What are the values at
stake when Falstaff asks, "Can honor set to a leg?
... Or an arm? ... Or take away the grief of a
wound?" His answer is that honor lacks a gift for
"surgery," that is, for medicinal healing. Can we
not infer, from these very lines, that health and
life, rather than an empty "word honor" is Fal-
staff's central concern? Indeed, the taking away of
the "grief" of a wound may be what Falstaff's own
comic recipe is all about. Mere repute of honor, or
what in another play Macbeth calls "mouth
honor," cannot assuage grief or heal a broken
arm. It is a hollow version of honor. Its merely
moonshine value is suggested by Hotspur's desire
to pluck it from the pale-faced moon and to serve
it in a spirit of revenge and oblation to Bellona,
goddess of blood and slaughter. That is why it
deserves to be mocked, as earlier it was by both
Prince Hal and Falstaff. But that is also why, now
that Prince Hal has himself put on a "bloody
mask" in order to outdo Hotspur and garner
Percy honors for his own purse, Falstaff needs to
offer as surgery for Hal's worldly ambition a prick-
ing of its bubble with humor.
In sum, honor has become in its social usage a
bone disjointed from its proper moral socket. Even
Prince Hal is now defending a broken version of
honor, namely, King Henry's broken pledge to
reward the Percies for having, with him, broken
their duty to King Richard. Under such circum-
stances of reciprocal faithlessness, honor is no
more than a counterfeit of itself; and hence to
die for it is not the death one properly owes God.
Wisely, therefore, Falstaff prefers to wait until
God calls him, and in the meanwhile to save his
own life by counterfeiting death. Moreover, by
counterfeiting a death and then a resurrection,
Falstaff can make comic fun of worldly versions
of salvation. He can shame their "sacrifice" by
shamming it, while offering, from under the sham,
an important truth, namely, that "he is but the
counterfeit of a man that hath not the life of a
man." What life means to Falstaff is a present
opportunity to reset a false concept of manhood
by bringing to it insight and parable.
In the opinion of D. A. Traversi, with which I
would agree, Falstaff is a significant contrast to
the figure of the Prince and is being used by
Shakespeareto pass judgment on the events in the
play, through open comment or through parody.7
He is a voice, says Traversi,that draws its cogency
from the author's own insight. On the basis of
an unfailing realism and clarity of vision, Falstaff
provides "a criticism of the whole political action,
both on the loyalist and rebel side," a criticism
notable also for its human sympathy for the
ragged Lazaruses of the age, the pitiful mortal
men who are the tragic victims of discreditable
interests manipulating them. And the ultimate
source of Falstaff's alert humanity, the source
that is also in Traversi's view "the key to Shake-
speare's deepest conception in this play," is a
background of inherited Christian tradition. In
evidence, Traversi cites Falstaff's admonition to
his tavern companions to "watch tonight, pray
tomorrow" (nI.iv), and his comment in the middle
of PartI:
Thou knowestin the stateof innocencyAdamfell; and
what should poor Jack Falstaff do in the days of
villainy? Thou seest I have more flesh than another
man, and therefore more frailty. (iii.iii)
Here, Traversi remarks, the reference to the
physical flesh is "subsidiaryto the spiritual mean-
ing of the word as sanctioned by Christian theol-
ogy," and Falstaff is both confessing his imperfec-
tion and relating it to the spiritual drama of man-
kind that lies between Creation and the Last
Judgment.
Critics who have seen in Falstaff a Lord of
Misrule may be correct, except for their own in-
adequate understanding of the role's implica-
 Roy Battenhouse
tions. It developed historically, we need to be re-
minded, as a Christianholiday exercise. Its licensed
mimicking of inverted moral order served two
concurrent purposes: (I) that of releasing mi-
metically, and thus confessing, the disorders of
Old Adam behavior which Everyman has in him;
and (2) that of clarifying thereby the mystery of
the New Adam to which Everyman is properly
called and obligated. This two-sided purpose is
parallel to the two-layered shape of the Second
ShepherdsPlay, where, as Willard Farnham has
noted, the sacred encompasses the profane, reach-
ing out to comprehend and enclose the vulgar
low of man's fallen nature within a total scrip-
tural truth climaxed by the Incarnation. It is
paralleled also in medieval graphic art: in cloister
decorations which portray monkey figures amid
the foliage adjacent to saints; in cathedrals whose
gargoyles spout healthful rainwater; and on
manuscript borders, where ass-eared humans can
be found presided over, for instance, by Moses
and David and trumpeting angels.8 The medieval
Feast of Fools was underpinned by this large
sense of the landscape of history. It was devoted
to celebrating, as Harvey Cox has pointed out in
a recent book, the mystery of Christ the harlequin,
a spirit of play amid a world of utilitarianism,and
a concept (as Cox phrases it) of "prayer as joke
or the joke as prayer." It sanctioned an overdoing
and "living it up," precisely in order to recognize
the delinquencies with which man is vexed, view-
ing these not cynically but with a confidence in
the ultimate goodness of life. Cox urges us to re-
vive this sense of festivity, reminding us that one
of the catacomb etchings of Christ depicts a
crucified figure with the head of an ass, and re-
minding us also of the movie The Parable, shown
at the World's Fair of 1966, which had as its
hero a circus clown as Christ figure.9This theme,
I might add, is allied to that of Anatole France's
Our Lady's Juggler: behind the Juggler's art was
his devotion to the Virgin.
Do we doubt that Falstaff belongs within this
tradition? Let us recall that Poins terms him "the
martlemas," that is, a St. Martin's Day summer
(2H4 Il.ii). Or let us recall that Doll affectionately
calls him a Bartholomew boar-pig (2H4 n.iv).
Bartholomew was the disciple, elsewhere in the
Gospels named Nathaniel, whom Jesus described
as a man "in whom there is no guile" (John i.47);
ard from the twelfth century on into the nine-
35
teenth his Saint's Day was the occasion of a great
public Fair including sideshows and rowdy enter-
tainment. This Fair owes its origin, moreover, to
a monk who had been a court jester under King
Henry I. Having decided to become a monk, he
built first a monastery near the shrine of St.
Bartholomew and soon afterward an annual fair
in the saint's honor.10 If these tandem activities
seem to us incongruous, let us recall that one
typical garb of medieval court fools was that of a
monk's cowl with ass-ears. Or let us remind our-
selves that in Shakespeare's Twelfth Night the
clown Feste turns curate when lessoning Malvolio,
all the while insisting that "Master Parson" is
what he really is. We know that in medieval cus-
tom the Feast of Fools was engaged in chiefly by
choir clerks, chaplains, and vicars. They under-
stood their horseplay paradoxically, as both a
"venting of the natural lout beneath the cassock"
and at the same time an affirmation of Christian
faith. Vested in pontificals, E. K. Chambers tells
us, they sang the Magnificat to the embellishment
of a hooting of sacrilegious ditties.1'
Falstaff may be alluding to an occasion of this
kind when he speaks of having lost his voice with
"halooing and singing of anthems" (2H4 I.ii).
In this same scene he rejects the stuffy Chief
Justice's notion that he can be writ down as a
wasted candle, the better part burned out. No,
he replies; rather, a wassail candle, that is, a
festival one. And he adds that although of tallow,
he has capacities of wax-a reference, I think, to
the wax candles used on church altars. Falstaff,
like a playful choir clerk on holiday, is here mock-
ing his social superior, a Lord Chief Justice. He
is doing so, first of all, by pretending to deafness.
Why so? The answer can be found in a clue which
scholars have failed to note. Falstaff's phrases in
describing his deafness carry an allusion to one
of the Prayer Book's well-known collects, the
one Elizabethans used on the Second Sunday in
Advent. The text of it is as follows (my italics):
Blessed Lorde, whiche hast caused all holye Scriptures
to be written for our learninge: Graunte us that wee
maye in such wyse lIe(lre them, reade, marke, learne,
and inwcardlydigest tileim, that by pacience and coin-
forte of tlly holye w\ordewe may embrace, and ever
holde faste the blessed hope of everlasting life, which
thou hast geven us in oure saviour Jesus Christe.'2
This collect, today known as Bible Sunday collect,
echoes in Falstaffs saying that he is troubled by
36 Falstaffas ParodistandPerhapsHoly Fool
"the disease of not listening, the malady of not
marking." It echoes also in other ways I shall
mention.
Throughout Falstaff's whole pose of deafness,
it should be evident that he is slyly commenting
on a deafness in his superiors, a disease in them.
He has heard, he says, that the king has fallen
into a dis-comfort-an apoplexy, a lethargy, a
whoreson sleepiness, a kind of deafness. And
Falstaff implies that it is this he is troubled about,
whereas the Chief Justice lacks the patience to
digest its significance. The "not marking" which
causes apoplexy (literally, failure-of-heart, but in
Henry's case no doubt a spiritual failure basi-
cally), Falstaff by his allusion to the Prayer Book
collect is tracing to a neglect of Scripture and
consequent loss of blessed hope, through man's
forfeiting of Christ's call to life everlasting.Indeed,
the sleepiness Falstaff talks of has its proper gloss,
very likely, in the Scripture passage used by the
Church to begin Advent, St. Paul's summons,
"Now is the time to awake out of sleep"; or in the
Advent collect that goes with it, "Almighty God,
geve us grace that we may caste awaie the woorkes
of darkenesseand put upon us the armor of light."
It is exactly this kind of armor (I think Falstaff
knows) that has been neglected, its meaning not
marked, by a King Henry and a Lord Chief
Justice who lack grace of the spirit to pray for it.
The times, Falstaff goes on to say, are coster-
monger times-that is, times when everything is
measured by its cash value. Because of "the
malice of this age," the gifts most "appertinent
to man" are disvalued, and valor is reduced to a
taming of bears-which implies, I would say, that
the function of bearherd has replaced that of
Shepherd. And the times are also those of no true
repentance, even on Prince Hal's part. Rather,
merely a comic substitute, a repenting "not in
ashes and sack-cloth, but in new silk and old
sack." In other words, old wine in new bottles-
the reverse of New Testament injunction. Or, a
secondary meaning of Falstaff's phrase could be:
"old ransacking in new silken rhetoric," the old
destructiveness clothed now in sleek diplomacy.
These facts of his times, it seems to me, Falstaff
knows and is teasingly making jest of while insist-
ing, with equal truth, that he is no ill angel, nor in
any way a misleader of the Prince. Rather, the
Prince is misleading him: "God send the compan-
ion a better Prince."
The scene I have examined is not the only one in
which Falstaff manages to testify, from under his
comic mask, to the hidden truth about his inner
and real self. We have noted, earlier,his declaration
that he is "no counterfeit" as a human being. And
elsewhere in Part I of the play we find statements
such as the following:
Thou hast done much harm upon me, Hal. God for-
give thee for it ! ... I'll be damnedfor nevera King's
son in Christendom. (i.ii)
Therelive not threegood men unhangedin England,
and one of them is fat, and grows old. (lI.iv)
Never call a truepieceof gold a counterfeit.(lI.iv)
Sweet Jack Falstaff, kind Jack Falstaff, true Jack
Falstaff,valiantJack Falstaff.[It'sthe othermembers
of the gang who warrantbanishing,he adds; but not
good old Jack.] (ii.iv)
The mock-trial situation has given Falstaff an
opportunity for putting on record (as if making a
legal "deposition") his answer to the charge that
he is a white-bearded Satan. Not so, he replies,
unless you regard it a sin to be old and merry. To
banish Falstaff would be as perverse a mistake, he
warns, as to hate Pharaoh's fat kine while cherish-
ing lean kine. There are fascinating implications in
this biblical allusion. Through it Falstaff is in-
timating, I would say, that England under King
Henry is comparable to an Egypt of spiritual
darkness tinder a troubled Pharaoh, and that
Falstaff embodies within this English-Egypt a
God-given plenty that could save England from
the famine figured in lean Prince Hal.
II
A figurative contrast between Falstaff and Hal
runs through the play. "Indeed I am not John of
Gaunt, your grandfather,"says Falstaff in punning
on Hal's thinness; and later the metaphors he
coins to characterize Hal have an edge of moral
evaluation. Though said affectionately and in jest,
a term such as "elfskin" alludes to the snakeskin
that elves were thought to garb themselves in, and
the term "starveling" could have reference to the
wastrel Prodigal of biblical parable. In Part II we
hear Falstaff refer to Hal as '"a good shallow
young fellow," good enough to chip bread and
serve as a pantryman. And this evaluation is not
really retracted by Falstaff's explaining that he
has dispraised Hal before the wicked lest the
 Roy Battenhoulse
wicked fall in love with him. Such explanation
merely confirms the original contention. Mean-
while, of course, Falstaff has been continually
emblematizing in himself the virtues of fat meat,
gravy, and above all, good wine. Perhaps the gen-
eral symbolism behind this contrast between
pantryman values and festival ones goes back to
the Joseph story, where (we may recall) a butler
was more esteemed than a baker, and where
Joseph as hero lessoned his brothers by planting
a diviner's winecup in a sack of grain.
Without pressing this analogy to Joseph, we
may note that Falstaff, when playing King Henry,
gratuitously puts into the king's chatter a sooth-
saying inkling of Hal's character vis-a-vis Fal-
staff's. Hal, says the impersonated Henry, is
knowable from his "villainous trick" of eye and
hanging lip, whereas in Falstaff there is a cheerful
look and pleasing eye, evident tokens of virtue, if
a tree may be known by its fruits. The clues here
to Falstaff's worth rest on two biblical allusions,
one to Ecclesiasticus xiii.27, "A chearful counte-
nance is a token of a good heart" (Geneva; also
Bishops),13and the other to the well-known Gospel
injunction to judge a tree by its fruits. But Hal,
who is thinking only of how differently his real
father would judge Falstaff, hastens to confute
Falstaff's suggestion, in effect deposing it. At this
point, however, had we not better ask: Was it wise
of Hal, earlier, to merely make sport of Falstaff's
allusion to another biblical adage, the one in
Proverbs about wisdom crying out in the streets
while no one regards it?1I Who, again in the
present situation, is disregardingwisdom?
The implications hidden under Shakespeare's
biblical echoes have been sadly neglected by com-
mentators. Although Richmond Noble, our fore-
most authority on Shakespeare's biblical knowl-
edge, remarked in his cataloging book that the
aptness of Shakespeare's allusions "often springs
a surprise" which afterward delights us (p. 68), he
demonstrated this aptness in only a few cases,
none of them from the two Henra' IV plays.
But such study can vastly repay our attention,
especially when allusions to Scripture appear in
the talk of so canny a fellow as Falstaff. They can
be, in fact, something like the tip of an iceberg,
signalizing a subsurface context of Bible story
which is relevant by analogy to the events taking
place in Shakespeare's story. I have already
touched on a few such instances, but now more
37
fully let me offer a more complex and interesting
example.
Falstaff when comically impersonating King
Henry includes some pompous sermonizing as
follows:
Thereis a thing,Harry,whichthouhastoften heardof,
and it is known to many in our land by the name of
pitch. This pitch, as ancient writersdo report, doth
defile;so doth the companythou keepest. (IH4 ii.iv)
As editors note, the allusion is to Ecclesiasticus
xiii.l. But why does Falstaff's Henry ascribe it
vaguely to "ancient authors"? Very likely be-
cause Henry, here being impersonated as a
Euphuist, is being credited with a pretentiously
shallow knowledge like that of John Lyiy's
Euphues.15The neo-Greek Euphues was a showy
moralist who pirated scraps of authority from
sources he knew only superficially, using their
adages in utilitarian fashion to give himself a
reputation as wiseman, while himself living a
wanton life and betraying friends by slippery
preachments. Perhaps, therefore, Falstaff is
analogizing Euphues to King Henry: England's
king of politics is about as trustworthy as Lyly's
king of rhetoricians in Shakespeare's own day,
each being (if rightly assessed) an absurd moralist
(about as fraudulent, may we add, as Chaucer's
Pardoner). The moralizing of each is like a wax
nose, ambidextrous. In Henry's case, readers who
remember his practices during his rise to power
ought to realize how little right he has to lecture
against thievery. And, indeed, Henry's chief con-
cern, as portrayed by Falstaff, is not so much to
upbraid Hal's thieveryas to mend Hal's reputation
for respectability: what offends is that Hal is
"pointed at" for keeping disreputable company.
In the interviewscene which follows in the drama's
next act, we will hear Henry object to Hal's asso-
ciating with "rude society," with "shallow jesters
and rash bavin wits," and recommend instead a
courtesy "stolen" from heaven and dressed in
robes pontifical. Falstaff's prior parody of this
attitude contains a very accurate characterization
and forecast of the ethics of King Henry's court-
liness or courtesy.
But to return to our biblical allusion: Was
"rude society" what the author of Ecclesiasticus
had in mind when warning against pitch? Only in
a very different sense from King Henry's. Henry
understands pitch as referring to social inferiors,
38 Falstaff as Parodist and Perhaps Holy Fool
"vulgar company"' (Im.ii.41), rude in their rash
deportment. But what the Bible writer Ben Sira
means by pitch is high and mighty persons who
are morally rude in offering a friendship that
is false and beguiling. The fraudulent courtesy of
rich and proud thieves is described in a vignette,
from which let me quote (Geneva):
1. He that touchethpitch shall be defiledwith it: and
he that is familiar with the proude shal be like unto
him.
3. The riche dealeth unrighteously, and threateneth
with all: but the poore being oppressed must intreat:
if the riche have done wrong, he must yet be intreated:
but if the poore have done it, he shal straight waie be
threatned.
4. If thou be for his profite, he useth thee: but if ye
have nothing he wil forsake thee.
6. If he have nede of thee, he wil defraude thee, and
will laugh at thee: yea, he wil make thee a bare man,
and wil not care for it.
7. Thus wil he shame thee in his meat, until he have
supt thee cleane up twise or thrise, and at the last he
will laugh thee to scorne: afterwarde,when he seeth
thee, he wil forsakethee, and shake his head at thee.
9. Bewarethatye be not disceivedin thineown conceit
& brought down in thy simplenes.
12. Withdrawe not thyself from his speache, but beleve
not his many wordes: for with much communication
wil he temptthee, and laughinglywil he gropethee.
13. He is unmerciful,& kepethnot promises:he will
not spare to do thee hurt, and to put thee in prison.
14. Beware, & take good hede: for thou walkest in
peril of thine overthrowing:when thou hearestthis,
awakein thy slepe.
15. Love the Lord all thy life, and call upon him for
thy salvation.
It is evident that what pitch signifies for Ben Sira
is the high-stationed manipulator who uses a
hollow courtesy to hoodwink the unwary, offering
an unmerciful companionship which turns out to
be false friendship.'6And do not the details I have
quoted sum up perfectly the kind of man Henry
Bolingbroke is (and also the kind of man Hal may
be or may become)? That is the hidden irony of
Falstaff's allusion to Ecclesiasticus. King Henry, if
compared with Ben Sira, is a counterfeit moralist.
Hence he warrants Falstaff's impersonation of
him as comic in his preaching, in that when invok-
ing an ancient author's text whose true meaning
he does not know he distorts it and overlooks its
application to himself. (This is much like the
Wife of Bath's sermonizing as portrayed by
Chaucer: she alludes to texts from St. Paul which,
did she but know it, condemn her out of her own
mouth.)
Falstaff's parody is being offered to Prince Hal
as a forecasting of the sermonizing Hal can expect
from his father. Falstaff of course dare not un-
mask his own Ecclesiasticus remedy for avoiding
defilement by pitch, the remedy of awaking from
sleep. To openly advise Hal to call on the Lord
would fracture Falstaff's role as clown. Even as
clown, however, he can obey Ben Sira's counsel to
be wary of the unmerciful man, and he can wisely
practice the paradox of Proverbsxxvi:
4. Answernot a foole accordingto his foolishnes,lest
thou also be like him.
5. Answera foole accordingto his foolishnes,lest he
be wise in his own conceit. (Geneva)
Under guise of fool, Falstaff can mime the ways
of the highbrow, so as to nudge Hal to hear what
those ways are like, promising Hal he will be
"moved" (stirred out of sleep) if "the fire of grace
be not quite out of thee." The metaphor of grace
as afire, let us recall, is traditionally Christian.
But how does the Euphues parody relate to the
Cambises parody that precedes it? Note that
Falstaff when beginning his impersonation of
Henry asks for a cup of wine, the traditional set-
ting for a lampoon, and explains he wishes to look
red of eye, so it may be thought he has wept.
The vein of passion that follows is a jolly car-
icature of the famous tyrant known to Eliza-
bethans in Thomas Preston's Cambises, a play
named "A Lamentable Tragedy" on its title page
but "A Comedie" in the running title. That para-
dox (of comic tragedy or tragic comedy) is exactly
the tone Falstaff needs for his portrait of Henry;
for the career of Cambises is indeed something to
weep over, as his own wife does in Preston's play
when struck in conscience by her husband's acts of
royal murder. But the response of Cambises to her
weeping was to call her a "wretch most vile" and
sentence her to execution, because he himself had
no more conscience than a drunk, and the sole
object of his passion was to destroy anyone who so
much as questioned his morals. Cambises in
Preston's play married this queen only by over-
riding law with the excuse that he was forced to by
his great love for her--a love that any audience
must see as ridiculous (and lamentable) when it so
easily flip-flops into a vow to tear her to pieces in
the name of "all the Gods." The whole pattern of
Cambises' kingship, for anyone who recalls it, has
 Roy Battenhouse
analogy to the career of King Henry, who has, so
to speak, married himself to England illegally and
then proved his royal love by turning against
anyone who breathes mention of faults in him. Of
course, Falstaff dare not risk spelling out this
analogy.17 It is risky enough even to mention
Cambises, under pretext of making fun of this
stage king's rhetoric and ignoring his morals.
Nevertheless, in a sentence such as Falstaff's
"Weep not sweet queen for trickling tears are
vain," he epitomizes the tyrant's ambidextrous
fusing of sweet talk with ruthlessness, a character-
ization that then leads, logically enough, to the
candy deal of courtesy which follows a la Euphues.
If only Prince Hal were less shallow he would
perceive that here, in moral fact, is the truth about
his father Henry; and he would guess at Falstaff's
hidden warning to expect in Henry's love a con-
science eager to entangle Hal in its own pitch.
Falstaff is implying that if Hal, like Cambises'
queen, risks a liaison with this King, he can expect
a bedfellow who will cherish him only so long as
he condones the King's bloody policy and sup-
ports it. But alas, throughout this scene, what
Hal appreciates is solely the absurdity of Fal-
staff's supposedly madcap language and foolery,
not the insight into England's cultural situation
and its headmasterwhich Falstaff's swiftly moving
vignettes have capsulized as babble and oracle
rolled into one.
When, for his playing of the King, Falstaff
chooses, as if haphazardly, the three stage props
of chair, dagger, and pillow, Prince Hal's response
is merely to make fun of Falstaff:
Thy stateis takenfor a joinedstool, thy goldensceptre
for a leadendagger,and thy preciousrichcrownfor a
pitifulbald crown.
Of this reply Dr. Johnson said that it might better
have been omitted since it contains a repetition
of Falstaff's mock royalty. But Johnson is over-
looking the fact that, back in Act i, Scene i,
"damnable iteration" was a habit of Hal's, a
habit Shakespeare uses to indicate Hal's super-
ficiality-while at the same time the audience is
being made to focus on words that have a deeper
import than Hal knows. And here (in I.iv) the
regalia of royalty selected by Falstaff constitute,
though Hal does not realize this, a Falstaffian
parable of the pitiable baldness of Henry's king-
ship. The point has been recognized by at least
39
one modern commentator, James Winny. Falstaff,
says Winny,
presents more than a merely clownish figure of barn-
storming majesty. The parody relates specifically to
Bolingbroke, whose character Falstaff has assumed,
and these [three] comic properties have a satirical
point as sharp as the dagger which this alehouse King
clutches as his badge of authority. The usurper whose
crimes have debased the dignity of his royal office en-
joys as much right to crown and throne as Falstaff's
makeshift properties suggest.18
In other words, Falstaff is enacting a figure of
King Henry's makeshift royalty. What such
royalty amounts to, morally and ontologically, is
a reduction of office from throne to mere stool.
And now with a dagger his only scepter of power,
Henry has made his crowning concern the cush-
ioning of his head (let us say, a cushioning it from
anxiety over rivals), since this cushion must sub-
stitute for the round of golden duty which a crown
properly signifies and which Henry lacks.
The more specific meaning of the cushion has
intrigued occasional readers. Recently, William
S. Heckscher explained this pillow as a dramatic
emblem of the vice of Sloth, i.e., of what medieval
moralists termed Acedia, a spiritual laziness.
Heckscher points, in illustration, to Albrecht
Durer's engraving titled "The Doctor's Dream,"
in which a doctor sitting on his chair is shown
having fallen asleep, his head leaning against a
pillow, while a small devil at his ear uses bellows
to blow sinful ideas into the ear, indicative of the
dreams the doctor is having.'9These connotations
seem to me apt to King Henry's case, especially if
we recall Falstaff's later explanation to the Chief
Justice that apoplexy is a lethargy, "a kind of
sleeping in the blood," the kind (as I have sug-
gested) that St. Paul admonishes Christians to
awake from.
But further, simply by consulting a Bible con-
cordance, one can discover that Ezekiel used a
pillow image to describe the false peace that lying
prophets devise. Lying prophets, says Ezekiel
(xiii.18), are like women "that sowe pillowes
under all arme holes ["pillowes to lean upon," the
Geneva gloss explains], and make vailes upon the
head" to hunt souls and pollute them. With
Ezekiel's meaning in mind, I came across it again
when reading the best known of medieval political
treatises, the Policrcaicuis of John of Salisbury.
Here it occurs at a point where John is discoursing
40 Falstaff as Parodist and Perhaps Holy Fool
on false or hireling shepherds. In these knaves,
says John (Bk. vIII, Ch. xvii; trans. John Dickin-
son, The Statesman's Book, 1927, pp. 342-43),
there is
no valor to protect the truth in time of danger, in all
things it is payment that they seek. ... So long as they
prosper in their own concerns, so long as they realize
the olbjectsof their ambition and avarice, they hold in
small account the loss of the things of Jesus Christ.
These are the men that sew cushions and place pil-
lows beneath the head of a whole generation to snare
souls [Ezek. xiii.18], and consume the milk and clothe
themselves with the wool of the sheep which they have
as it were led into the sleep of negligence or rashness.
But a thief is proed by his works. (my italics)
Can anyone find a better commentary than this,
I wonder, on the works of Henry Bolingbroke?
The only thing better I can think of is to hide all
this commentary under a lightning flash of em-
blem, as Falstaff the artist does.
III
My own commentary, I fear, must seem pedan-
tically tedious, since to expound jokes is to ap-
pear flatfooted. Ideally, perhaps, one ought to
dance out the meaning like a striptease artist,
tossing off veils of enigma one by one until at
last the bare secret is flickeringly revealed. But to
do so would seem disreputable scholarship, to
which my audience would no doubt respond with
catcalls for more proof. So I must be content with
the humdrum rules of my vocation as armchair
professor and systematically spell out the hidden.
Yet now that I have indicated the body of my
thesis, let me offer next an expeditious review of
the whole wardrobe of Falstaffian drapery, by be-
ginning with the rlay's first comic scene and pro-
ceeding from there to subsequent showcases in the
total exhibit.
Falstaff's opening gambit is to ask Prince Hal
what time it is. The question is not about clock
time, as Hal too readily supposes. It is a proverbial
question about what "the real state of things
is"; and to ask it implied, in Elizabethan usage,
that the person being questioned was tardy in ap-
prehending what was going on.20 Hal proves his
tardiness of comprehension by jibing at Falstaff
for asking a superfluous question. "What a devil
hast thou to do with the time of the day?" "You
come near me now Hal," replies Falstaff, "for
we that take purses go by the moon." In other
words, for us thieves the times are those of night-
work and moonshine morals.
Around this theme Falstaff guides the ensuing
dialogue. He jests about shady gentlemen who
call themselves "men of good government," and
about their concern to buy themselves "a com-
modity of good names." Drawing from Hal a jest
about moonman's inconstant fortune, which ebbs
like the sea or rises to the gallows, he begs Hal
not to "hang a thief" when King, meaning per-
haps: Don't hang as a thief. His jest about a hang-
man's wardrobeof "suits" glances at King Henry's
politic guisings, and maybe also at Hal's suspected
ones. And then, Falstaff makes show of repen-
tance-as did Henry when first announcing his
crusade (and as Hal will do at the end of Pt. II).
"I must give over this life," says Falstaff, "and I
will give it over. By the Lord, an I do not, I am a
villain." But when Hal then tests this resolution
by asking, "Where shall we take a purse tomor-
row, Jack?" the answer is, "Where thou wilt,
lad," thus allowing Hal to be witty about the
absurd "amendment" from praying to purse-
taking. Hal is being promptedto expose "Monsieur
Remorse" as (by implication) a villain.
But does Hal recognize that Falstaff's resolu-
tion-as-amended is analogous to Henry's post-
ponement clause to allow him some Percy-taking
in lieu of crusade? Evidently not. Yet Falstaff has
supplied a mocking clincher: "Why, Hal, 'tis my
vocation, Hal. 'Tis no sin for a man to labor in
his vocation." Such a justification glances at
Henry's excuse that the labors of his kingly voca-
tion must supersede "our business" to the Holy
Land. Or more generally, the jest is aimed at
anyone who makes a showy business of piety
while at the same time turning the meaning of
"vocation" (for which see Eph. iv) into a license
for thievery. This covert meaning, however,
may be but one side of the jest. If looked at
from another angle, by turning over the coin, a
quite different and personal meaning is possible.
By "my" vocation Falstaff may be referring,cryp-
tically, to his own vocation as comic oracle in
which vocation there is indeed no sin since this
vocation is compatible with Christian vocation.
So, if Hal wills to propose thievery, Falstaff can
consent to a "match"-in theft only ostensibly,
while actually one of wits, in which Falstaff fore-
knows he cannot be saved "by merit" of any deeds
of his as highwayman, but only by an inner grace
 Roy Batt enhouse
through which the escapade can be converted into
comic parable. Falstaff's truth has a dazzling
double-sidedness.
The farce at Gad's Hill enacts a political
parody.21Its moral is stated in Falstaff's comic
cry, "A plague upon it when thieves cannot be
true one to another." The relevance of this to the
breach of trust between King Henry and his former
supporters should be evident. We have seen the
Percies complain, a scene earlier, that Henry in
his scandalous seizing of the crown has but used
the Percies as the ladder to his design, his mere
cords or hangmen. Such a fall guy role Falstaff
lets himself play in Hal's little game at Gad's
Hill, so that Hal can seize the booty and then
laugh like an Ambidexter over the success of his
trickery. But there is also a more immediate
political parallel: King Henry has sent the Percies
to attack the Scots, but as soon as the Percies have
acquired prisoners Henry has demanded this
captured loot in contravention of customary
rights.22In effect, King Henry is thieving from the
Percies, while all they can do is fulminate and con-
coct a retaliation which turns out to be politically
about as farcical as Falstaff's concocted story of
how he peppered and paid home two men in
buckram suits. The "two" whom Falstaff is re-
ferring to are no doubt Hal and Poins, the two
who later glory in having outfoxed Falstaff, just
as in the drama's main plot the two who set up and
then put down Hotspur are King Henry and West-
moreland. We can easily infer that Falstaff has
been deliberately playing a mock-Hotspur role in
the whole jest, even to the point of magnifying
valiancy as Hotspur is later satirized for doing--
taking on "some fourteen" in an hour. The dif-
ference between main plot and subplot is merely
that whereas Hotspur undertook a real rebellion
and a genuine thievery when prompted by the
devious King Henry, Falstaff undertook only a
mock thievery and a storybook retaliation against
his treacherous setter-on, Prince Hal. That is the
difference between history and art. Yet art has its
own truth, a figurative truth, which refutes Prince
Hal's notion that Falstaff's story is a mere pack of
lies. "Art thou mad?" replies Falstaff. "Is not the
truth the truth?" It is not here Falstaff who is clay-
brained or stupid. "By the Lord," he concludes,
"I knew ye as well as he that made ye." When
Falstaff swears by the Lord, we had better believe
him.
41
The truth about England's times and cultural
situation has meanwhile been figured quite
bluntly by low-class knaves in an innyard scene.
"This house is turned upside down since Robin
Ostler died," remarks a carrier of the party that
will soon be robbed. And Prince Hal's proxy,
Gadshill, after pumping this carrier for secret in-
formation, boasts that his own party is made up
of maltworm noblemen who ride up and down on
the commonwealth to make her their booty, after
first liquoring her with their brand of justice.
Through such language, the commonwealth is
being likened to a whore and her customers. Hence
when we encounter Mistress Quickly, a scene later,
we are prepared to understand her inn, also, as a
kind of emblem of England in miniature. It is a
hangout for Corinthian lads, whom the Hostess
appropriately calls "harlotry players." And when
a sheriff knocks on the door to interrupt their
games, this figure seems reminiscent of the fell
Sergeant Death in the old play Everymlan, who
entered to announce a day of reckoning. The
sleeping Falstaff, with pockets full of testimony to
wastrel living, symbolizes foxily the state of the
household.
It is to this tavern that Falstaff returns, after a
scene in which we see Prince Hal offering repen-
tance not to God but to King Henry, and vowing to
serve him by putting on a "bloody mask." Such
an unchristian version of repentance is the object
of some parody mumblings by Falstaff as he enters
the tavern. Then, summoning Bardolph (who had
betrayed Falstaff after the Gad's Hill escapade,
and who in Pt. Ii we will see as a crony of Hal's),
Falstaff declares that he sees in Bardolph's face a
memento mori. For Bardolph's nose is as red as
the fires of hell; indeed, it suggests Dives, the
biblical glutton, who robed himself in purple but
burned in hell. Bardolph's face, says Falstaff,
needs amending, for at present its only usefulness
is to serve as a comic lantern on the ship of state.
The reference to Bardolph as "our admiral" sug-
gests to me that Falstaff is indirectly commenting
on Prince Hal. That is, Falstaff is implying that
ship's-officer Hal, by indulging a nose for political
advantage and forgetting '"what the inside of a
church is made of," has become a Dives of purple
robes ("garment all of blood'") :nd fiery face (its
"stain" a "bloody mask"), now serving as a
lantern on Henry's ship of state, yes, but a comi-
cally hell-bound instance of knighthood. If this
42 Falstaff as Parodist and Perhaps Holy Fool
interpretation seems incredible, I ask my reader
to suspend judgment until we come to Falstaff's
later allusions to Dives.
Falstaff next turns immediately to a parody of
what the coming battle will be all about. "Who
picked my pockets?" he asks, and adds, "This
house is turned bawdyhouse; they pick pockets."
In particular, he claims to have lost a valuable
"seal ring of my grandfather's."This referenceto a
lost heirloom (which Mistress Quickly says was
only copper) sounds to me like a veiled allusion
to the title of King which the Percy party feels
King Henry has copped, and which he in turn
accuses the Percies of trying to steal from him.
(Or, the copper seal ring may be the heirloom title
the Percies have through Mortimer, and which
they feel robbed of when Henry refuses to ransom
Mortimer. The emblem works both ways.) Mis-
tress Quickly's indignant rejection of Falstaff's
charge, and her counterchargethat he is but pick-
ing a quarrel to beguile her of what he owes her, is
an attitude we have seen taken by each of the
political parties. Both Henry and Hotspur have
manufacturednew grievances as a cover for failing
to pay old and outstanding debts.
How can this impasse be resolved? Falstaff uses
a tactic very much like the one we will see King
Henry use just before the battle of Shrewsbury:
he grandly offers to "forgive" his accuser (though
he himself has started the quarrel)and promises to
be "tractable to any honest reason" (though in
fact his own honesty is the point most in question).
"Go, make ready breakfast," says Falstaff.
"Thou seest I am pacified." The gullible Hostess
yields. Hotspur at Shrewsburywould have done so
too (had Worcester not prevented), when King
Henry offers softsoap (iv.iii.49-51 and v.i.106-08)
in the name of "friendship." But Falstaff has a
wry comment on such friendship: "Hal, if thou
seest me down in battle, and bestride me so, 'tis
a point of friendship" (v.i.122). That is, Henry's
"friendship" premises always that others accept a
downedrelationship.
Falstaf's use of cajolery to add one more break-
fast to his list of debts to Mistress Quickly is ex-
emplified also in Part II of the play. In a scene just
after the rebels have resolved on a new attempt to
force King Henry to pay his debts to them, Mis-
tress Quickly makes her second attempt to make
Falstaff pay up, this time summoning Fang and
Snare to arrest him. Her complaint is that she has
been fubbed off and fubbed off from day to day,
and made to serve him both in purse and in person
by his deceitful promises. Falstaff's grand reply is,
"As I am a gentleman. Come no more of it....
Come, and 'twere not for thy humors, there's not a
better wench in England"-to which he adds other
sweet talk till he has persuaded her not only to
withdraw her action but to lend him furthermoney
and invite him to supper. This scene, in effect,
anticipates by way of parody the tactics that the
King's party will use in cajoling the Gaultree
rebels to lay down their arms and trust the king,
only to find themselves again victimized. The one
difference, significantly, is that Falstaff does at
least reward Mistress Quickly with his jolly
presence and good-hearted companionship, where-
as the King rewards his creditors with ruthless
death warrants. Falstaff as Fool repays his debts
with entertainment, like an actor who pays with
impromptu skits. (If any reader thinks him a
sponger, I suggest a pondering of I Cor. ix.9:
"Muzzle not the mouth of the ox that treadeth
out the corn." Then consider also, when reading
Hal's crude roasting of Falstaff as a "Manning-
tree ox" in ]H4 n.iv, the aura of holiness that sur-
rounds oxen in Christian lore-not least the
legendary symbolizing of St. Luke as the ox-
Evangelist and of Aquinas as the oxlike scholar.)
But let us turn to Falstaff at Shrewsbury.There
he engages in various comic antics, but no killings
except metaphoric ones. His wine bottle is his
symbol of comic valor-it is a hot pistol, he says,
that will sack a city and has already put an end to
gunpowder Percy. Does he not mean he has done
so by witty lampoon? That same inspired pot-
shotting can be aimed now in other directions. In
taking time to "breathe" boasts, Falstaff is prob-
ably mimicking Hal's penchant for adroitly timed
self-advertising. And in playing dead but reviving
when threatened with disemboweling, he is glanc-
ing at Hal's policy of hiding out from court duty
until some vital or gut interest is at stake, then
emerging to be wondered at. Falstaff's earlier
proverb (in iv.ii), that the latter end of a fray
"Fits a dull fighter and a keen guest," has been
noted by Leonard Unger as aptly characterizing
the policy of both the Henrys, who alike have a
knack for being "seldom seen" until the moment
is opportune for reaping what others have sown.'23
Falstaff's capping jest at Shrewsbury, his carrying
Hotspur's corpse off the field on his back, is surely
 Roy Battenhouse
satire on the concern for trophies that has moti-
vated Hal no less than Hotspur. The comment,
"I'll follow, as they say, for reward," is Falstaff's
epitome of the ethic of the times. This ethic's out-
come, as its proponents half recognize, is no more
than "food for wornms";and Falstaff has satirized
such a breakfast, a moment earlier, by speaking
of having led his ragamuffins where they are
peppered. He is mocking, I think, the graceless
dining he ascribed to Hal as early as I.ii.22.
We lack evidence, actually, that any of Fal-
staff's recruits ever took part in the battle. They
never appear, except as viewed from a distance on
a road near Coventry (in Iv.ii), where Hal terms
them "pitiful rascals" and Falstaff replies, "Tut,
tut, good enough to toss, food for powder."
Falstaff's voiced heartlessnesshere we may take as
his comic assessment of the temper of the times
and of the war's leaders. The conscripts them-
selves come alive for us only in Falstaff's solil-
oquy, where his imagination can make of them a
kind of figtlra of the abused state of England's
poor, preyed on by iheir superiors. He pictures
them as "slaves as ragged as Lazarus in the
painted cloth, where the glutton's dogs licked his
sores," and goes on to say that "you would think
that I had a hundred and fifty tattered prodigals
lately come from swine-keeping, from eating
draff and husks." This carefully phrased biblical
allusion has fascinating implications. For if these
fellows have come from swine-keeping and eating
husks, they are prodigals whose employer has been
that "far country" taskmaster of Bible story who
undernourisheshis help; and if they have "lately"
left such a master to follow Falstaff, perhaps Fal-
staff figures the good Father of the parable whom
a prodigal seeks when he "comes to himself" and
remembers. If this seems hard to believe, note
the other allusion to them as Lazarus. Lazaruswas
a holy soul who went to heaven, specifically to
Abraham's bosom (which in Henry V Mistress
Quickly fumbles over when saying where Falstaff
went at his death). These Lazaruses, during their
worldly years, are bondaged to a rich Dives who
lives in purple, but their hope lies elsewhere. It is a
stroke of genius on Falstaff's part (alias Shake-
speare's) to join as he does allusions to the two
parables (in Luke xv--xvi)of the famished Prodigal
and the underfed Lazarus, challenging us to see
their point of affinity in an unfatherlyDives, under
whom (i.e., under King Henry) England's Prodi-
43
gals and Lazaruses alike have been fated to serve.
Only a wily jester could contrive so truthful an
enigma.
The Dives allusion is one Falstaff cannot let
alone. He turns to it again in Part II of the play,
when talking about the refusal of a certain "Master
Dumbledon" to provide him clothes:
Let him be damned, like the glutton! Pray God his
tongue be hotter! A whoreson Achitophel! (i.ii)
Here the Dives of hot tongue is being compared to
Achitophel, the traitor who for a hoped-for
worldly advantage deserted the good King David
to serve instead a vain and self-righteousAbsalom.
Whom could Falstaff be glancing at? If we recall
that Achitophel was a vile politician who helped
bring in Absalom on a "reform" platform, we can
scarcely miss the object of Falstaff's comment
since either Henry iv or later his son fits this pat-
tern.
No reader of the play should be so unimagina-
tive as to suppose a literal Master Dumbledon, to
whom Falstaff sent orders for cloak and slops, any
more than a literal Doctor to whom Falstaff was
in the habit of sending his water for urinalysis.
Falstaff in this scene is engaging in wit gambits
with his newly acquired young page, Robin,24of
whom Falstaff himself tells us: "If the Prince put
thee into my service for any other reason than to
set me off, why, then I have no judgment." Robin
has been educated as a jester, and now Falstaff is
testing how far his own inventions can elicit
matching ones in the page. And in this imaginative
game the lad does well. Probably because he
guesses that the "doctor" question is aimed at the
Prince who has sent Robin to doctor the fat
knight, the page reports a diagnosis such as Hal
would have given: Falstaff is full of "diseases."
Then when Falstaff jests about the page's em-
ployer, Hal, as having a dubious face-royal, in
need of God to "finish" it, the page knows well
enough who in the next question Master Dumble-
don is: he is a person who values "security" and
"likes not the security" of Falstaff's company.
Falstaff's witty explosion then follows, in which
the unnamed Hal is likened to a Dives and
Achitophel. Both allusions, as shown in my previ-
ous discussion, are thoroughly apt, for Hal is be-
coming a second Henry in his gluttonous concern
for security, and that is what Falstaff is fretting
over essentially. For security's sake, Hal is be-
44 Falstff as Parodist and Perhaps Holy Fool
coming an Achitophel-deserter of Falstaff.
Falstaff rounds off his point by a cryptic men-
tion of Dumbledon's "lantern," alongside a ques-
tion about Bardolph, the page whose lantern nose
we previously heard satirized, and who is now
typically busy with the only thing he understands,
horse trading. Meanwhile, of course, if we as
auditors have any doubts as to who Dumbledon
the tailor is, we need only recall Falstaff's much
earlier reference to Hal (in 1H4 II.iv) as "You
tailor's yard," or Falstaff's earlyjests to Hal about
the "suits" that make up a hangman's wardrobe,
or Henry's practice at Shrewsbury of dressing
various of his followers in his own royal face-of-
cloth (a practice the biblical king Ahab had
adopted to "secure" his evil life, as playgoers
familiar with the Bible might be expected to re-
call). Metaphor is archetypal meaning, the sub-
liminal equipment of every great artist.
The basic reason why Falstaff prompts dialogue
about diseases and tailoring on his first entrance
into Part II of the play is that these two motifs
now characterize the drift of England's history
and will do so throughout the play's subsequent
action. Since the commonwealth is sick, as various
other characters in this play tell us, Falstaff's
talk is about the nature of this sickness. But as we
have already noted, he finds the land's Chief
Justice deaf to any true understanding. The Jus-
tice, like his superiors, is interested only in tailor-
ing a new military expedition for his own security.
To Falstaff, such a prescription for the land's dis-
ease is mere waste (or waist); it ignores the heait
of the matter. "I can get no remedy," he laments,
"against this consumption of the purse." His
chief meaning is that bankruptcy is the ironic
result of the public seeking for "security." Ex-
haustion of the spiritual exchequer is the looming
fate of Bolingbroke and his opponents alike, after
a lifetime of extended credit and unpaid debts.
(Further connotations of purse may be hovering
metaphorically: the pursed or frowning brow of
men consumed by anxiety; or the pursy lungs of
tubercular consumption and a probable pun on
the Percy party, which the King is trying to coii-
sume, as if, absurdly, health could come from
eating up their pursiness. On the other side, com-
parably, the image of a dog returningto its vomit
is used by the Archbishop in the next scene,
i.iii, echoing I Peter ii.22.) Falstaff sees this disease
as "incurable,"but adds that wit can turn diseases
into commodity-that is, make them profitably
laughable.
On two later occasions Falstaff characterizeshis
times as Roman times, specifically, like those of
Julius Caesar. To Hal, as a son "nearest his
father" (meaning morally nearest), Falstaff writes:
I will imitate the honorable Roman in brevity. I com-
mend me to thee, I commend thee, and I leave thee.
(2H4 Il.ii)
Summed up here, in mocking mirror, is the brevity
of the Roman sense of honor, and its three typical
phases: recommending oneself, as if offering
friendship; commending the person one seeks to
use; and then desertinghim when no longer useful.
We have seen this pattern in the career of Henry
Bolingbroke. Falstaff sees Henry's son as about to
duplicate it, and so makes jest of it in his own
name. But then he tucks in as good counsel:
"Repent at idle times as thou mayest, and so fare-
well." That is, Hal could fare well, if he would
repent. But until he does, Falstaff is signing him-
self "thine" only ambiguously, awaiting what use
Hal will make of the good counsel.25
The second Caesar allusion occurs later, in Act
iv, right after the scene of John of Lancaster's
treachery at Gaultree forest. Lancaster has hypo-
critically ascribed his victory to God; but a more
genuine act of God is Coleville's decision to give
himself up "gratis" to Falstaff.SGFalstaff then
reports to Lancasteras follows:
And here, travel-tainted as I am, have, in my pure and
immaculate valor, taken Sir John Coleville of the
Dale, a most furious knight and valorous enemy. But
what of that? He saw me, and yielded, that I may
justly say, with the hook-nosed fellow of Rome, "I
came, saw, and overcame."
This whole passage is marvelous parody of
Caesar's literary style and moral self-image. But
at whom is the parody directed? When a court
jester inflates himself to look like a Caesar he
usually has some member of the court in mind
as the covert object of his satire. In this case, it is
almost certainly John of Lancaster. For Falstaff
knows that Prince John has done his overcoming
at Gaultree in a "hook-nosed" way, which was
about as "pure and immaculate" morally as
Caesar's methods typically were, and it is this fact
Falstaff is glancing at through his mirror of par-
able. Caesar is a fit emblem of John; their two
majesties are basically alike. If we see this we
 Roy Battenhouse
smile with Falstaff in secret insight. But is Caesar
an emblem of Falstaff himself? The very incon-
gruity of such an idea is the cause of our laughter
at Falstaff.
Yet "pure and immaculate" is a morally valid
description of Falstaff's valor in taking Coleville,
since this taking involved no fraud. A disillusioned
Coleville simply sought out Falstaff as the one
good man he could remember amid a world of
betrayers. (Coleville is much like the biblical
prodigal who finally came to himself and returned
to a father.) But Falstaff, in making report of this,
must as clown translate his joy into a mock mode
for audience entertainment; and for this artistic
end (devoid of moral deception) he has the nose
to hook to himself the ridiculous pose of a mighty
Caesar, prince-of-this-world. Perhaps an added
motive for his doing so was a hope to be granted,
in reward for his entertaining Prince John, the
custody of Coleville and thus a saving of Coleville.
There is a hint of this in Falstaff's ending his skit
by saying: "let me have right, and let desert
mount"; let it "shine" by something "good." But
although Falstaff reminds John, further, that a
"famous true subject" took Coleville, John disre-
gards the knight's right to the prisoner-in this
respect duplicating Bolingbroke's ignoring of
customary right in the case of Hotspur's prisoners.
Coleville is sent to execution, and Falstaff's
offices have failed to achieve mercy for him. But
they have given everyone laughter-and some-
thing more for anyone who can read with insight.
Falstaff's last effort of good office under comic
guise is the farcical entertainment he plans for
Hal's coronation. Having discovered in Glouces-
tershire a foolish Justice Shallow, Falstaff resolves
to "devise enough matter out of this Shallow to
keep Prince Harry in continual laughter." So, on
hearing of Hal's accession, he baits the booby
Justice with a euphoric invitation to "choose what
office thou wilt in the land, 'tis thine." Any
Justice greedy enough to be lured to London by
so open-ended an invitation, or by the counsel
"Let us take any man's horses," richly deserves
the eventual discomfiture of finding his expecta-
tions evaporate. Falstaff's consolation, "Master
Shallow, I owe you a thousand pound," but "I
will be the man yet shall make you great," is a
splendid parallel to the consolations we saw him
offer Mistress Quickly-and is, like those, a par-
ody of the policy of Henry Bolingbroke in fool-
45
ing fools with bubble promises. Neither King
Hal nor the Chief Justice appreciates this aspect
of the comedy, but it has been the substance of
Falstaff's clownage from the beginning. His con-
cern all along has been to tell the time of day, by
enacting parables of the realm in mock-heroic
guise, for the sake of self-knowledge. But now
even their surface ridiculousness is inopportune.
Tolerable as it may have been in out-of-court
situations, it is not deemed so in a king's presence,
particularly on a day for which this new king has
planned, to his political advantage, a counter-
demonstration of his public respectability.
Readers of the scenes in Gloucestershire ought
to suspect that Justice Shallow is in some way
figurative of the state of England. For one thing,
the names of the recruits Shallow offers Falstaff
are obviously metaphoric of a general impoverish-
ment, which Falstaff highlights when examining
Shadow, Feeble, Wart, Mouldy, and Bullcalf.27
Then there is also Justice Shallow's giddy justice
in "countenancing" William Visor, a knave,28and
his nostalgia for Nightwork and a bona robca;and
(as James Winny has noted) his "lip-service to
death by uttering sententious platitudes while
eagerly watching the market":
Death, as the psalmistsaith, is certainto all, all shall
die.
How a good yoke of bullocks at Stamford fair? (iii.ii)
Though as country squire this Justice has now
outgrown the cheeseparing look of his famined
youth, and has "a goodly dwelling and rich," he
himself speaks the truth of his attainments when
in his cups: "Barren, barren, barren, beggars
all" (v.iii.8). Such a confession, I suggest, might
equally be King Henry's.
And why this barren outcome? In Shallow's
case, we can relate it to his fractional memory of
what the "psalmist saith." Shallow (like a Dr.
Faustus reading Scripture)has picked up only the
first half of Psalm xc, verse 3: "Thou turnest man
to destruction: again thou saiest, Return, ye
sonnes of Adam" (Geneva). Ignoring the biblical
call to "Return," Shallow sees man as simply
fated to die. He has ignored also the psalmist's
explanation that toil and trouble are signs of
God's wrath on man's secret sins, for which the
remedy is as follows:
12. Teache us so to nomberour dayes, that we may
applie our hearts unto wisdome.
46 Falstaff as Parodist and Perhaps Holy Fool
14. Fil us with thy mercyin the morning;so shal we
rejoiceand be glad all our dayes.
17. And let the beautieof the Lord our God be upon
us, and directthou the worke of our hands upon us,
even direct the worke of our hands. (Bishops reads:
"O prosperthou our handyworke")
Wisdom, mercy,joy, and God's beauty are notably
absent from Shallow's life. And it can scarcely be
happenstance that Shallow's melancholy follows,
by less than a hundred lines, a similar melancholy
in King Henry:
O God, that one might readthe book of fate,
. . . how chance's mocks
And changesfill the cup of alteration
... O, if this were seen,
The happiestyouth, viewinghis progressthrough,
. . . Would shut the book and sit him down and die.
(iii.i.45-56)
Neither Henry nor his mirror likeness, Shallow,
has had an ear tuned to the Good Book.
Nor are any counsels from that book suggested
in the legacy Henry gives Hal, to "busy giddy
minds with foreign quarrels." Way back in I
Henry Iv, Act II, Scene iv, Falstaff had likened
Hal's subjects to "a flock of wild geese." And now
(in 2H4 v.i) we hear him say, of Master Shallow
and his men, that their spirits "are so married in
conjunction with the participation of society that
they flock together in consent, like so many wild
geese." This jest, together with the wild-goose
chase that Falstaff enacts with Shallow, could be
a comic forecast of events to come-for instance,
of Hal's adventure into France, which (in H5 II.iv)
we will hear the French ascribe to a "giddy, shal-
low, humorous youth." Falstaff has been our
oracle of England's time of day: an era of giddy
shallowness, all too human or gooselike.
IV
Falstaff's death as reported in Henry V gives us
our final clue to his character. Here Nym's lament
that the King "hath run bad humors on the
knight" and Mistress Quickly's that the King
"has killed his heart" set the tone. But more im-
portant is Mistress Quickly's faith that Falstaff
is "not in Hell." He is "in Arthur's bosom," she
says, and his going was finer than a "christom"
child's. This tribute, in its comic muddling of
religious language, indicates to us a Mistress
Quickly whose intuition of Falstaff's goodness
outstrips her understanding of it. Her limits of
comprehension we can see in her report of how she
comforted Falstaff when on three or four occa-
sions he cried out "God, God, God." She has-
tened to counsel that there was no need yet for
him to trouble himself with such thoughts. Her
horizons are foggy, yet not so much as to blot out
her belief in Falstaff's honesty and trueheartedness
(stated at the end of 2H4 Ii.iv). Through her very
babblings and misplacings, therefore, we can
guess at facts which her assessment shortchanges.
The dying man may have been crying out to God
not in desperation, but as commending his soul to
God. And if his countenance resembled what her
fuddled language glances at, a "chrism" child
(one anointed with holy oil), the heaven he went
to must have been Abraham'sbosom, not Arthur's,
or at least not merely Arthur's.
And of what "table of green fields" was Falstaff
thinking?29 Several scholars have suggested an
allusion to the "green pastures" of the Twenty-
Third Psalm.30There is added support for this con-
jecture, I think, if we consider also the "table"
image and the earlier one of anointing with oil
that underlies Mistress Quickly's comparison to a
christened innocent. All three images are those of
the Psalm. So, very possibly, Falstaff (who in
1H4 II.iv had said, "I would I were a weaver, I
could sing psalms") was here mumbling to himself
("reciting," says Hardin Craig) the Psalmist's
confession of faith-and including, unheard by
Mistress Quickly, a mention in verse 5 of "mine
adversaries"(Geneva; or "enemies," King James
Version), against whom God's table is a saving
resource.
In Falstaff's case, who could the adversariesbe?
For the Psalmist, they are figured most clearly in
the "Babylon" of Psalm cxxxvii. (Babylon is the
land of the spiritually confused, the babblers of
this world.) They require of their captives "songs
and mirth" (Geneva, verse 3), thus posing for
God's faithful the problem: "How shall we sing a
song of the Lord in a strange land?" The Psalm-
ist's answer is: "Let not my right hand forget its
cunning" (King James and Bishops), or "forget to
play" (Geneva). That can have been likewise the
recipe chosen by Falstaff (the Falstaff who when
dying "smiled upon his fingers' ends," thankful
perhaps for the handiwork spoken of in Psalm
xc. 17). In New Testamenttimes a hoary-headed St.
 Roy Battenhouse
John had a problem like the Psalmist's when
Rome-as-Babylon was the adversary,and wise old
St. John's recipe was to speak in veiled language
of the "whore of Babylon" (Rev. xvii). So when
Falstaff "talked of the whore of Babylon," he was
no doubt reapplying this concept to the England
of his own day. That is, England's civilization
under King Henry is like a Babylonishly Roman
"strange land" (or "far country"), amid which
our Sir Jack Falstaff (if we but probe the context
of his biblical allusions) is a covert St. John, with
an apocalyptist's genius for figuring the history of
his times in a language of archetypal symbol. And
those of us who do not grasp this can only stay
behind with Mistress Quickly, as admirers of
Falstaff's mirth but puzzled by its meaning (rather
like the "Egyptians in their fog" about whom
Feste jests in Twelfth Night).
It is Falstaff who has been practicing the true
sense of Ephesians v: redeeming time through
making manifest "unfruteful workes of darkenes'"
in "dayes [that] are evil," while secretly "speaking
unto your selves in psalmes and hymnes, and
spiritual songs, singing and making melodie to the
Lord in your hearts" (Geneva; italics mine).
Prince Hal's purpose has been but a counterfeit
redeeming, reductively political, which Falstaff re-
deems in the sense of re-estimates, re-evaluates.31
This has been the ironic base of the playfulness
between Falstaff and his world.
Among recent scholars, even Richmond Noble,
unfortunately, failed to see the import of his own
remark that Falstaff's use of the Bible "not only
discloses a well-instructedyouth, but also suggests
an educated man" (Shakespeare's Biblical Kiiowl-
edae, p. 169). Educated, indeed. For if this com-
pliment was intended in any sense patronizingly,
the joke may be on us. It would be an irony worthy
of the greatest of jesters to die speaking a cryptic
farewell to a naughty world. A greater than the
ironist Socrates (whose physical symptoms of
death, foot to knees upward, Falstaff's parallel)
has departed. But only his physical heart is
"fracted"; we have grounds for thinking his spirit
"corroborate" with wisdom's own eternity.
My survey of Falstaff's entire role has shown
how wise he is about the ways of Caesar, Cam-
bises, Euphues, gay Corinthians, and Ephesians
of the old church (i.e., worshipers of Diana, servi-
tors of illusion, in a comedy-of-errors world of
enticingly silver but actually coppersmith values).
47
And his insight for understanding this world of
fog and moonshine, I have argued, derived from
St. Paul, the Gospels, Psalms and Proverbs, the
Apocalypse, and the piety of an urbane Ben Sira,
that ancient contender against the Hellenists who
outdid them with his Ecclesiasticus. Out of a per-
spective grounded in this heritage, Falstaff was
able to devise his double-sided mirrors of comic
nonsense and authentic truth, while combining in
his own person a heavenly vocation with the
earthly one of Fool.
By repeated references to the parable of Dives
and Lazarus,Falstaff has figuredhis times as those
of the rich fool Dives, and himself as the age's
Lazarus,fated to enjoy only crumbs from the table
of its rulers, but with an inner faith in the table of
Psalm xxiii. The Lazarusparable, in my reading of
the play, is more central than that of the Prodigal
Son, at least for interpreting FalstaffT.For al-
though Falstaff may have been a once-upon-a-
time prodigal, he is at heart now a Lazarus,mirror-
ing in his merrily accepted "sores" the wounded
relationships of the Dives world, "the injuries of a
wanton time" (IH4 v.i.50). As jester he can offer,
for the taking away of grief, a delightful mockery
of the "honor" catechism of present Diveses, and
simultaneously can covertly witness his own inner
Holy Land pilgrimage, while glancing at the
aborted one of King Henry and Prince Hal.
Their plight is indeed humorous--and as old as
that of Goodman Adam fallen among thieves
(through traveling, as Augustine would say, to
Jericho's city-of-the-moon and leaving nman's
mystical Jerusalem). For what is history if not
the existential manifestations of some latent
paradigm; and what is art if not the simultaneous
hiding and disclosing of the present's radical sig-
nificance through figura'?
Since Dover Wilson turned to parable for his
well-known interpretation to the Henry' Iv plays,
may not I be pardoned for doing so, too'? The
structure of the dramatic action, Wilson believes,
rests on the Prodigal Son story, since Shake-
speare's hero is a prodigal young Hal, who re-
pents by returningto his father's house; he returns
to Chivalry in Part I, and to Good Go ernment in
Part a. The analogy here tendered is a tantalizing
one. Yet as a parallel to the biblical hero some-
thing is askew, especially when Wilson himself
explains that Hal's sin was "not against God,"
but a sin of Vanity in violation of Chivalry and
48 Falstaff as Parodist and Perhaps Holy Fool
Justice.32Critics of Wilson's analogy have ob-
jected that Hal is a much more businesslike
traveler into a far country than his anonymous
predecessor; he assures us he is going to enjoy
j]ust enough riotous living to make his father glad
to see him home again, and this purpose makes
his action chiefly political.33But the basic differ-
ence, as I have earlier noted, is total: the father to
whom Prince Hal returns is no heaven-virtued
father, but instead a counterfeit of the Bible's
father. While King Henry may seem like the
biblical father in proposing for his son a royal
"robe," that robe (ironically) is Hal's own blood
which, as calf, he is being asked to risk; and the
"ring"'(or crown), which Hal is given in Part II,
establishes on him nothing but the "giddy"justice
of a tennis-game war. The whole transaction,
thus, is secularized man's ironic substitute for
true chivalry and true good government. What
Hal has come home to, spiritually, is the swine
owner's Dives table in a far country: that is what
makes him a true prodigal, unreformed of heart,
but now newly "busy" instead of idle. Sloth in a
physical sense he has put behind; but sloth in its
medieval spiritual sense of a dried-up heart is
his now more than ever.
This carefully ambiguous "placing" of Hal's
success- a return to Respectability achieved, but
by a forfeiting of Humaneness-is the measure of
Shakespeare'ssense of history in his drama Henry
IV.The new Harry will be a "mirrorof all Christian
Kings,"34but alas in a rather Turkish way (if we
consider substance more than surface) which
merely counterfeits Christian values. His reign
will be as colorful as his justice is shallow, and
with barren consequences. Falstaff rightly divined
and forecast "a good shallow" bread-chipper.The
very quality of Falstaff's diction, throughout the
drama, lhas reflected an intelligence superior to
Hal's. The fat knight's prose can pirouette and
vault, where thin Hal's is pedestrian and repeti-
tious-for instance, in his mere multiplication of
the brutish, when calling Falstaff "that trunk of
humors, that bolting hutch of beastliness, that
swollen l)arcel of dropsies." Such language is but
fulsome tirade (as is similarly Hal's coronation
speech when banishing Falstaff); its esthetics antic-
ipates, as has been remarkedrecently by Milton C.
Nahm, the moral world of Thomas Hobbes.35On
the other hand, the style of Falstaff's speech re-
flects a paradoxical abandon and economy. Its
air of the extempore under strict control recalls,
for a critic such as Richard David, a trick of voice
like that of the great "doctors and divines" of the
seventeenth century.36
Falstaff is inevitably downgraded as compared
to Hal by critics insensitive to tonalities of rhythm
and allusion. Some, seeking to schematize the
drama within a formula of Aristotelian ethics,
credit to Hal a golden mean between the extremes
of moral excess they see in Falstaff and Hotspur.
Others prefer a Hegelian formula, by which they
can see Hal as outwitting Falstaff and outfighting
Hotspur, thus transcending them both. And still
others, trying for a "balanced'' view, read both
Falstaff and Hotspur as irresponsible and child-
like, while Hal is said to mature into the respon-
sible king England needs, though sacrificing in-
evitably a child's attractive spontaneity. But none
of these interpretations can explain the drama's
sandwich-style placing of main plot and comic-
plot scenes. And in supposing that maturity and
childlikeness must be qualities exclusive of each
other, a medieval topos is being ignored, that of
the uper senex (the old young man, more charming
than in youth), inspired by Bible texts which value
a spiritualized childlikeness. According to Ernst
R. Curtius, one extrabiblical instance of this
topos is the Pussio SS. Perpetiuae et Felicitutis,
where the martyrsare vouchsafed a vision of God
"as a hoary old man with snow-white hair and a
youthful countenance.'37
We need to have this topos in mind when we
read Falstaff's dialogue with the Lord Chief
Justice. Falstaff poses a riddle by saying: "You
that are old consider not the capacities of us that
are young." The Justice then expresses incredulity
that Falstaff should call himself young, in view of
his white beard, among other things. To which
Falstaff replies:
My Lord, I was born about three of the clock in the
afternoon, with a white beard and something a round
belly. . . . The truth is, I am only old in judgment and
understanding. (2H4 i.ii)
Here, wittily stated, is the /eui senex or senex
iuwenis paradox. Moreover, it is accompanied by a
biographical statement that can be understood, I
think, only as a testimony to having been "born
again" (as Nicodemus, in John iii, was told he
must be, while he questions whether a man can "be
born again when he is old"). And further, the
 Roy BattenhotLse
specific referenceto three o'clock in the afternoon
reflects probably Mark xv.39, where at that hour a
Roman centurion, on witnessing the death of
Jesus, cried out: 'Truly this man was the Son of
God." (Or, as witty readers of the 2 Adc;it collect
often say: "Read Mark, and inwardly digest.")
An eye-opening experience analogous to the
centurion's (proportionately similar, though not
of course identical) could very possibly have been
Falstaff's. When? On an afternoon at Coventry, I
suggest, when Thomas Mowbray was banished,
unjustly sacrificed to Richard's self-protectionist
policy. Acccpting the unjust sentence, Mowbray
went to Venice, where we are told he gave "his
pure sonl uuto his captain Christ, / Under whose
colors he had fought so long" (R2 Iv.i.99-100).
In such circumstances, what choice of vocation
might Mowbray's page (whom Shallow tells us
Falstaff was) decide on? A page's training was
often that of wit-cracking along with apprentice-
ship in knighthood; and a Falstaff "born" by his
exFperienceat Coventry may well have decided
that, like a disciple separated fronmhis lord, he
could continue loyalty to him through the voca-
tion of jester-knight which we see Fllstaffexempli-
fving. But such a choice involved for Falstaff, as
we know, an ultimate fate like that of his master,
Mowbray. Must not the page have anticipated
that it would? Add another pagZe,then, to an old
story: "Sweet peace conduct his sweet soul to the
bosom Of good old Abraham" (R2 iv.i.103).
Though some of my readings in this essay may
seem questionable, yet surely there reniain enough
others of certain enough weight to give, all told,
a mass of cumulative probability to the hypothe-
sis I have been developing. If readers object that
my interpretations require an unbelievably close
reading, I can only say that medieval and Renais-
sance artists valued obscurity,3^following in this
respect the view of St. Augustine in his De Doc-
frila Christiana. And besides, in the Bible itself,
parables w^erea form of art for hiding the meaning
from some and revealing it to others. As Sarah
Velz has pointed out in a recentessay on "Measure
Notes
1 Te HIero: A Studyll ill Tradition, ll, (ll, ndlDron77
(1936; rpt. New York: Random, 1956), p. 111.
2 rTheDer'.s HaII/ (New York: Random, 1962). p. 198.
Falstaff radiates happiness without apparent cause, Auden
says, and "this untiring devotion to making others laugh
49
for Measulreand Mark Iv," Christ himself "as a
parabolist is of necessity an ironist, since the
stories he tells the crowd have only literal meaning
to his listeners, while his disciples are later shown
a figurativeand personal application." And Velz's
study goes on to demonstrate a point that is
central to my own essay; namely, that a biblical
allusion in Shakespearerests on a large subsurface
context of biblical matter which is al'so themati-
cally at work in the play.:39Moreover, as is nowa-
days being explained by Paul Ricoeur, the meaning
of a text is not behindl the text but i2nfiont of it;
i.e., in the modes of being-in-the-world, to which
the text refers. We are intended to understand the
text by moving from what it says to what it talks
about, what it opens up in the character of the
real world.1"So although we live today under the
shadow of what Mircea Eliade has termed "de-
sacralization," and imprisoned by what Nathan
Scott laments as "a death of the figural imagina-
tion,"''let us hope this imagination is not really
dead, only slumbering.
A groundling who after attending a perfor-
mance of Henry Iv goes away with the haunting
feeling that he has seen a jolly old St. Nick or a
Robin Hood cannot be altogether wrong. For
the play not only shows Falstaff outwitting "St.
Nicholas' clerks," but, much later, in backwoods
Gloucestershire, offering "a health" to Justice
Silence and thus loosing the tongue of this dumb
man to sing- of Shrovetide, and of "Robin
Hood, Scarlet, and John." That is miracle enough.
Let skeptics try to evaporate it if they can. But if
they suppose preferable the counterfeit miracle
of Hal's "conversion," or the sanctimony with
which Hal's brother John hails Falstaff's banish-
ment as a "fair proceeding," generations of
Falstaff lovers must and will demur. Unless, of
course, one means byfai'r a Vanity Fair's ironic
comedy.
Indiana Unicesihit'
Bloomington
becomes a comic image for a love which is absolutely self-
giving" (p. 206).
As lThey Liked It (New York: Macmillan, 1947), pp.
75-76.
"Falstaff, 'A Fool and Jester,'" Modernl Language
50 Falstaff as Parodist and Perhaps Holy Fool
Quarrterly,7 (1946), 435-62; my quotation is from p. 461.
5 See, e.g., Mark Van Doren, Slhakespeare (New York:
Holt, 1939), p. 107, and Willard Farnham, "Mediaeval
Comic Spirit in the English Renaissance." in Joseph
Qiincv AdanmsMemorial Studies, ed. James McManaway
et al. (Washington, D. C.: Folger Shakespeare Library,
1948), p. 436. Farnham, p. 430, notes that Erasmus in
Praise of Foll' says fools are "vastly pleasing to God."
6 UInderstan7dinigDrama (New York: Holt, 1948), rpt. in
the revised Norton Critical Ed. of Henry Tv, Part I, ed.
James L. Sanderson (New York: Norton, 1969), pp. 215-
29, esp. 218-19.
7"Helnry iv, Part t: History and the Artist's Vision," a
revised version of his Scrutinyiessay of 1947, rpt. in Sander-
son's Norton Ed. of the play, pp. 327-31. Unfortunately,
Traversi's illustrations are limited to those few Tcite.
8 See Willard Farnham, The SlhakespeareanlGrotesqlue
(Oxford: Clarendon, 1971), pp. 32-46. I have reviewed
Farnham's and other very recent views of Falstaff, in
Studies inl EnlglishlLiteratulre1500-1900, 12 (1972). 411-15.
9 The Feast of Fools (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ.
Press, 1969), pp. 23, 139-45.
10See Howard Harper, Days anld Customs of All Faiths
(New York: Fleet, 1957), pp. 218-19; or John Doran, Tlhe
History of Court Fools (London: R. Bentley, 1858), p. 104,
which reports that this Jester, Rahere, still played the fool
when a monk. E. K. Chambers (The Medieval Stage,
Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1903, ii 381) speaks of plays
by parish clerks of a Guild of St. Nicholas which "may
have had some connection with Bartholomew Fair"; and
(I, 268) he mentions St. Martin's Day miming, in which
someone dressed in a bishop's robes went about distribut-
ing nuts and apples.
'n The Medieval Stage, i, 325. The festivity depends, as
Chambers notes, on the Depossuittheme in the Magnificat,
at which point in the office the baculum, or pastoral staff,
was taken by a lowly subdeacon. See also Barbara Swain,
Fools and Folly during the Middle Ages and Renaissance
(New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1932), esp. pp. 54-63,
where the fool's role as satirist is emphasized.
12 The Prayer-Book of Queen Elizabeth, 1559, rpt. with
a historical introd. (London: Griffith: Ancient and Mod-
ern Library of Theological Lit., 1890), p. 61.
13 This allusion is overlooked by Richmond Noble in
his Shakespeare's Biblical Kioswledge (London: S.P.C.K.,
1935), although Noble catalogs more than 50 allusions to
Ecclesiasticus in the whole of Shakespeare and concludes
that it was one of Shakespeare's favorite books. Murray
Abend supports Noble on this point by adding 20 more
instances of allusion to Ecclesiasticus in "Some Biblical
Influences on Shakespeare's Plays," Notes and Queries, 195
(1950), 554-58; but Abend, too, misses the one I have
cited. Ecclesiasticus (written by Ben Sira) means "church
book," because it was used as a manual in teaching morals
to the early church; it was very popular in the teaching of
the Fathers. That may be the reason for Shakespeare's
interest in the book. There is ironic needling, however, in
Falstaff's ascribing to King Henry an interest in someone
of "cheerful look"; for this is what Henry has neglected,
and his own dubious prosperity has deprived him of any
genuine cheerfulness. Falstaff manages to suggest that
while cheerfulness may be what Henry subconsciously longs
for his present fate is to have instead the tricky hangdog
look which his son carries as a family heritage.
14 See IH4 i.ii. Hal, recognizing the allusion, repeats it
only to disregard it. Falstaff's reply, "0, thou hast dam-
nable iteration, and art indeed able to corrupt a saint," may
mean: it is damnable to repeat Scripture without taking it
to heart, not applying it to oneself, since this is how a
saintly person (or a saintly author's message) is corrupted.
15 Euphues in a letter to Philautus says (without identifying
the source of his allusion): "Hee that toucheth pitch shall
be defiled," in a context that associates pitch with women
(in R. Warwick Bond's T/le ComnpleteWorks of JolhnlLyl',
London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1902, I, 250); and in a letter
to Livia (Bond, I, 320) he associates pitch with wanton
women, while assuring Livia that she can "handle pitch and
not be defiled." Such moralizing is shifty, and far from
Ecclesiasticus. One wonders, therefore. whether Shake-
speare in making parody of euphuism may be glancing also
at Lyly the author, whose intellectual shallowness Bond has
commented on (I, 77, 148, 162). C. S. Lewis, in English
Literatulreof tile Sixteenth Celnturv(Oxford: Oxford Univ.
Press, 1954), p. 314, has remarked that Lyly's palinode
against wit in Euphues requires no moral theology and no
experience of life. And G. K. Hunter has noted, in JohnI
Li/v (London: Routledge, 1962), that Lyly's dramas pay
homage to the ethos of court life, whereas for Shakespeare
the world of the court is not self-sufficient but "placed" in
relation to other ways of life, as evidenced by the un-Lylian
palinode at the end of Lore's Labor's Lost (p. 348). Since
Falstaff, as I read him, is mocking a courtly king's sense
of virtue, is he perhaps Shakespeare's spokesman for a
medieval wit that outdoes and judges Lyly's "university"
wit?
16 Pitch in the biblical sense was apparently well under-
stood by Dante; see Inferno, Cantos xxi-xxii, where Bar-
rators (who sell justice by trafficking in public offices) are
shown quarreling with each other in their circle of fraud.
Their lake of pitch signifies the pelf in which they frolic in
their trickery, diving to hide or emerging to harpoon each
other. Dante treats them, as Dorothy Sayers notes (Inferno,
London: Penguin, 1949), with "a mixture of savage satire
and tearing high spirits" (p. 205). His burlesque, a though
more grim than Falstaff's, is, I think, not dissimilar; and I
suspect Shakespeare knew of Dante's placing of these civic
robbers immediately next to the Hypocrites. Hotspur's
imagery of dicing to pluck up "honor" (i.iii) and Hal's vow
to tear Hotspur to make him "render every glory up"
(ii.iii) resemble Dante's imagery.
17 In Preston's play Ambidexter, when commenting to
the audience on Cambises' slaying of Praxaspes' son, de-
clares the king's virtue "fained" (1. 608) and then predicts
that "ye shall see in the rest of his race / What infamy he
will work against his own grace" (11. 619-20). Falstaff
merely implies a similar assessment of Henry. But does he
not also intuit that in Henry's case "the rest of his race" (in
the person of Henry's son) will work the infamy of striking
at the heart of a latter-day good counselor's son, Falstaff
himself? That analogy could have been a further reason
 Roy Battenhouse
for his choice of the Cambisesstory for thematicmaterial.
18 The Player King (London: Chatto & Windus, 1968),
pp. 106-07.
19 "Shakespearein His Relation to the Visual Arts,"
Research Opportlunities in Renaissance Drama, 13-14
(1970-71), 8. Nearly this same meaning,I may add, can be
found in Lyly'sEuphues,just a few lines beforethe "camo-
mile" simile. Writing of "ripest wits," Lyly says: "one
flatereth another in hys owne folly, and layeth cushions
underthe elbowe of his fellowe, when he seeth him take a
nap with fancie" (Bond, i, 195). Samuel Chew, The Pil-
grimageof Life (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1962),Fig.
70 (date 1601),shows a cushion on the head of a tempting
female who representsFlesh; he infers that the cushion
signifies Sloth or Lechery. More important,see also 2H4
v.iv, where a cushion is spectacularly associated with
Doll's pretensionsto pregnancy-i.e., to a motherhoodthat
is as speciousand absurdas is fatherhoodin King Henry's
ethics.
20 See Tilley, as summarizedin the New VariorumHenry
the Fourth:Part , ed. SamuelB. Hemingway(Philadelphia:
Lippincott, 1936), p. 26. Theologians such as Reinhold
Niebuhrhavehelpedus distinguishbetweentime as chronos
and time as crisis. Crisis time is the hour of "our day" in
relationto JudgmentDay; i.e., it is the apocalypticdimen-
sion of the temporal. Commentatorswho are unalert to
this meaning have applauded Hal's retort that Falstaff's
question is absurd because (as Brooks and Heilman say)
"Falstaffhas properlynothingto do with the worldof time"
(Sanderson,p. 223). Actually, however,the real absurdity
is Hal's, in his not comprehendingthat Falstaff'squestion
has everythingto do with time.
21 Cf. James Winny's view, p. 109, that the Gad's Hill
robbery "is manifestlya comicallyscaled-downversion of
Bolingbroke's original crime, followed by a matching
sequel in which a group of fellow-conspiratorsattempt to
snatch the booty from their successful partners." But
Winny, while seeing Falstaffoften as a satiricalparallelto
Bolingbroke, concludes that Falstaff himself is "morally
bankrupt"(p. 130).Thus Winny fails to integratehis own
fragmentaryinsights.
22 Accordingto the medievallaw of arms, Hotspur had
the right to retainall the prisonersexcept the Earl of Fife.
On this point, see the New Arden I Henryiv, ed. A. R.
Humphreys(London: Methuen, 1960), p. 8, or the New
Variorum,ed. Hemingway, p. 21. Thus Hotspur's initial
answer to the King's demand (i.i.93-94) accords with
customarylaws, but the King takes occasion to force his
largerdemand. Holinshedtells us the Percieshanded over
the Earl of Fife while claiming the other prisoners as
properly theirs. Shakespeareshows them promisingthe
Earl of Fife, but breakingthat promisewhen provokedby
Henry. The King is the provocateur of a confrontation.
23 The Man in the Name (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minne-
sota Press, 1956), pp. 12-13. To be "seldom seen" is King
Henry's advice in 1H4 iii.ii, and I suspect that his further
advice to appearin "robepontifical"is reflectedin Falstaff's
mock impersonationof "TurkGregory."
24 Robin acquiresa name only in Merry Wires. But we
see him as a witty jester in each of his earlierappearances
51
(2H4 I.ii and I.i-ii; H5 ii.ii and Iv.v). Note that he regards
Pistol as a roaring devil whose nails can be pared with a
wooden dagger, an echo of Falstaff's"daggerof lath" in
IH4 ii.iv. This suggeststo me that, dramatically,this Boy is
perhapsin H5 a quasi-fulfillingof Shakespeare'spromiseat
the end of 2H4 to "continuethe story, with Sir John in it."
Much of Falstaff'sshrewdspiritcontinuesin Robin. J. W.
Draper, in "Falstaff'sRobin and Other Pages," Studiesin
Philology, 36 (1939), 476-90, ignores Robin's wit and in-
sight, sees him rather as an instance of the pitiful lot of
Elizabethanyoung noblemen'ssons takenin "service,"and
supposes (as I cannot) that he is abused by Falstaff and
eventuallyin MW betrayshim.
25 For the sake of swiftness of argument,my summary
has reducedthe complexityof the parody. Actually, Fal-
staff's "Repent . . ." can be understood simultaneously in
two senses: eithlerin the sinceresense I have mentioned,or
as a continuingmock of Hal's misplacedsermonizingand
thus as a forecast of what a "pious" Hal will say in the
coronation scene ("as we hear you do reform . . . We will
. . . Give you advancement").Falstaff'sjests are double-
sided. Hence, also, Falstaff's "Thine by yea and no" is
both ambiguouspromiseand a mock of Hal's duplicity.If
readas a dig at Hal it means: "Promiseand break-promise
is the way you've been using me." (This fickle yea-and-nay
St. Paul rebukedin ii Cor. i.17-20, and so does King Lear
when saying that "aye" and "no" are no good divinity.)
Regardingthe double sense of farewell,compare Portia's
report to Shylock of Gobbo's message: "His words were
farewell mistris, nothing else" (MV ii.v.45).
26 PrinceJohn's comment,"more his courtesythan your
deserving,"is true because Coleville'ssurrenderhas been
gratis, undeservedthroughany militantaction by Falstaff,
who arrivedat Gaultreeafter all was over. But at another
level (dramaticirony)the remarkappliesto its speaker:this
Prince"took" the rebels more by their foolish courtesyin
trustinghim than by any deservingof his.
27 I sense a kind of equivalencebetweenthese 5 recruits
and the 5 principalsin the Gaultreeepisode. Mouldy and
Bullcalf, the 2 who are allowed to buy themselves off,
parallel in this respect Westmorelandand John of Lan-
caster,who at Gaultreeuse the briberyof false promisesto
save themselves.On the other hand, the 3 recruitswho are
not spared Shadow,Feeble,and Wart-are mirrorequiva-
lents of Mowbray,the Archbishop,and Hastings,who get
"pricked down" by execution at Gaultree. Surprisingly,
there are featuresin the portraitsof each of the 5 that en-
able the reader to guess at specific equivalences.Mouldy
says he has been drafted on an earlieroccasion (as West-
moreland was by Henry to meet the Hotspur rebellion)
and that he is needed to do his old dame's "drudgery"(cf.
Westmoreland'sdrudge role). Bullcalf says he is diseased
with a "cold"-thus matching the coldness of John of
Lancaster,stressedfor instanceby Falstaffwhen speaking
of the meritsof sack. Shadowis describedas being of little
substancecomparedwith his father-which at Gaultreeis
true of young Mowbray, a poor substitute for the elder
Mowbraywho died fightingas a crusaderfor Christ.Feeble
is strikinglyparallelto the Archbishop,in being "as valiant
as the wrathfuldove and most magnanimousmouse."And
52 Falstaff as Parodist and Perhaps Holy Fool
Wart, who is made to march up and down to show he can
"chargeyou and dischargeyou," duplicatesin this respect
the role of Hastingsat Gaultree.In short, Shakespearehas
integratedhis low-level comedy with high-levelhistory, by
presentingus in the Gloucestershireyokels 5 parodyequiva-
lents of the 5 would-be "noblemen"at Gaultree.The im-
plicationis that in Henry'sEnglandfarceis truth,while the
truthfulnessof politiciansis a kind of farce.
28 Thereis a parallelto this in King Henry'sacceptanceof
Warwick'splea on PrinceHal'sbehalf(2H4 iv.iv), followed
by the King's admitting, a couple of speeches later, that
"my brain is giddy"(1. 110). Ten occurrencesof the word
giddyin H4 throughH6 are but one indicationthat Shake-
speare sees giddiness as a cultural characteristicof the
epoch.
29 Let me suggest that Theobald's brilliantemendation
to "babbledof green fields" might have been even better
had he simply interpolatedthe word "babbled"while re-
taining"a table of greenfields."
30 E.g., Hardin Craig, Shlakespeare: The Complete
Works (Chicago:Scott, 1951),p. 247; also WilliamBurgess,
The Bible in Shakespeare (Chicago: Winona, 1903), p. 59,
and J. H. Walter, ed., New Arden Henry v (London:
Methuen, 1954), p. 47. But note, further,that this psalm's
image of "oil" is associated in Psalm xlv with a gift of
"gladness" to the man who loves righteousness,an idea
which Matt. vi.17 reinforces, and which Falstaff has
exemplified.
31 D. J. Palmer, in "CastingOff the Old Man: History
and St. Paul in Henry iv," Critical Quarterly, 12 (1970),
267-83, admits that Hal's purpose is to renew his reputa-
tion ratherthan to be renewed"in the spirit of the mind"
as stipulatedby Eph. iv.33. But whereas Palmerseems to
justify Hal by saying that "in a sense" Hal has cast off
the "old man" when he buries his father, King Henry, I
would insistthat such a fulfillingis no morethan a counter-
feit of the Paulinephraseand would urgereadersto ponder
especially Eph. v.6, "Let no man deceive you with vaine
words,"and (verse 14),"Awakethou that sleepest."
32'John Dover Wilson, The Fortunes of Falstaff (Cam-
bridge,Eng.: UniversityPress,1943),p. 24.
33 Peter Alexander, in Modern Language Review, 39
(1944), 409, as cited in the New VariorumSupplementto
Henry iv, Part /, ed. G. B. Evans, Shakespeare Quarterly, 7
(1956),91. And cf. Goddard,cited on p. 93.
34This phrase is that of the entrancedchorus in H5 i1;
Prologue,1.6. But among the variouspossiblemeaningsof
"mirror,"this chorus probably has in mind only that of
exemplar or "model," whereas Shakespearemay have in
mind two additionalmeanings:(1) a beguilingglass (as in
Richard ii's lament, "O flattering glass . . . That does be-
guile me"); and (2) a story offeringwarning,as in Mirror
for Magistrates.
5 "Falstaff, Incongruityand the Comic: An Essay in
49 (1968), 289-321;
Aesthetic Criticism,"ThlePersocnalist,
see esp. pp. 289-300.
36 The Janus of Poets (Cambridge,Eng.: UniversityPress,
1935),p. 40.
37 European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, trans.
WillardR. Trask(New York: Pantheon.1953),pp. 98-101.
38 See the note by Lewis Soens, in his RegentsCriticsEd.
of Sir Philip Sidney's Defenseof Poesy (Lincoln: Univ. of
Nebraska Press, 1970), pp. 77-78. Sidney himself in his
peroration(p. 55) exhorts: "Believewith me that thereare
many mysteriescontainedin poetrywhich of purposewere
writtendarklylest by profanewits should be abused."
39 In Shakespeare Survey, 25 (1972), 37-44.
40 In an unpublished paper summarized by Joseph
Sittler,in "The Scope of ChristologicalReflection,"Inter-
pretation, 26 (\1972), 335.