Reading the Fleshy Maternal Shapes of Sir John Falstaff.

Candidate Number: 1401645Attention of Dr Eric Langley EN5731: The Works

Reading the Fleshy Shapes of Sir John Falstaff

A testament to the largeness of Shakespeare’s creation of Jack

Falstaff is that he looms larger in our cultural memory than any of

the other characters in The Henriad. Indeed, Falstaff, Shakespeare’s

“fat kidney’d rascal” (Pt I, II.ii 5-6)1, is often heralded as the

bard’s most glorious, comic creation. He is an entirely disreputable

character, who zealously pursues indulgences of the flesh. Such is

his desire that Falstaff is often likened to the Roman God of Wine,

Silenus -- an entity primarily associated with Holiday, riot, and

Carnival. When Falstaff first appears in the beginning of scene two,

he asks: “Now, Hal, what time of day is it, lad?” (Pt I, I.ii. 1).

The prince’s response sets the tone for the rest of the play:

Thou art so fat-witted, with drinking of old sackand unbuttoning

thee after supper and sleeping upon benches afternoon,

that thou hast forgotten to demand that trulywhich thou

wouldst truly know. What a devil has thou to dowith the

time of day? Unless hours were cups of sack andminutes

capons and clocks the tongues of bawds and dialsthe signs of

leaping-houses and the blessed sun himself a fairhot wench in a

flame-coloured taffeta, I see no reason why thoushouldst be so

1 William Shakespeare, Henry IV: Part One, ed. David Bevington, The OxfordShakespeare (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). All subsequentreferences are to this edition.

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superfluous to demand the time of the day (Pt I,I.ii. 2-11).

As well as appearing as an embodiment of both life force and

holiday, Falstaff has also come to stand as a key figure in the

literary grotesque. The grotesque, as a literary term, holds

numerous connotations. According to Willard Farnham, the grotesque

is a term larded on to anything “approximate to the image of man as

both rational and animal.”2 It also works to illuminate “the common

and appalling spectacles of human dereliction: a presentation of sin

in physical, graphical terms.”3 At the end of Henry IV, Falstaff

makes an association between physical monstrosity and immorality

when he says: “If I grow great, I’ll grow less, for I’ll purge and

leave sack, and live cleanly as a nobleman should do” (Pt I, V.iv.

163-165). “Falstaff’s plan for physical reform”, says Gail Paster,

“cannot be separated from a plan of moral reform, as his play upon

the quasi-religious paradoxes of great and less confirms.”4 Indeed,

as Antonio affirms in ‘Twelfth Night’: “None can be called deform’d

but the unkind” (III.iv. 377).5 That is, a person’s purity or honour

can be assessed next to the human body: the unkind are often

depicted as grotesque or suffering with disease. 2 Neil Rhodes, The Elizabethan Grotesque, (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul,1980), p. 6. 3 Neil Rhodes, The Elizabethan Grotesque, p. 14.4 Gail Kern Paster, The Body Embarrassed: Drama and Disciplines of Shame in Early ModernEngland, (New York: Cornell University Press, 1993), p. 131-132. 5 William Shakespeare, Twelfth Night, eds. J.M. Lothian and T.W. Craik, TheArden Shakespeare (London: Methuen & Co LTD, 1975).

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Mikhail Bakhtin’s, Rabelais and his World is considered to be a

seminal text on the literary grotesque. According to Bakhtin, the

grotesque body is a popular festive body that threatens all polite

society. It is, by its very nature, a riotous force seeking to

overturn hierarchical order; or, as Jung says, it serves to “expose

the ‘dirty-bottom’ of officialdom and the established regime.”6

Bakhtin’s definition does not separate the grotesque body from the

rest of the world. In fact, the grotesque body transgresses its

limits and purposefully extends its reach into the outside world via

the genitalia, the belly, and the mouth – “the sites of consumption

and bodily excavation.”7 Thus, the grotesque body is one that

outgrows itself, breaching the boundaries that make it a closed

system. In their book, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression, Peter

Stallybrass and Allon White provide a working definition of

Bakhtin’s grotesque body. They say it’s

An image of impure corporeal bulk with its orifices […]yawning wide and its lower regions (belly, legs, feet,buttocks and genitals) given priority over its upperregions (head, spirit, reason) […] It is never closedoff from its social or ecosystemic context.8

6 Jung quoted in Carl Rhodes and Alison Pullen, ‘Representing the d’other:the grotesque body and masculinity at work in The Simpsons’, eds. Robert IanWestwood and Carl Rhodes, Humour Work and Organization, (Oxford: Routledge,2007), p. 167.7 Gail Kern Paster, The Body Embarrassed, p. 14.8 Peter Stallybrass and Allon White, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression, (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986), p. 9.

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As formerly mentioned, then, the grotesque body is not presented in

“a private, egotistic form, severed from other spheres of life, but

as something universal, representing all people.”9 As a consequence,

the grotesque body is, using Bakhtin’s terms, ‘exaggerated’ and

‘immeasurable’. Its defining traits, however, are:

Impurity, protuberant distension, disproportion,clamour, decentred or eccentric arrangements, a focuson gaps, orifices and symbolic filth, […] physicalneeds and pleasures of the ‘lower bodily stratum’,materiality and parody.10

Any person in possession of the aforementioned traits is

simultaneously rendered low, absurd, and abhorrent. As an entity,

the grotesque body is not clean, regulated or hygienic, but invasive

of the world around it. In ‘Rabelais and His World’, Bakhtin

recognises that the grotesque body “is a body in the act of

becoming. It is never finished, never completed; it is continually

built, created and builds and creates another body.” There are a

plethora of bodily functions which lend themselves to the grotesque.

According to Bakhtin, they are:

Eating, drinking, defecation, and other elimination(sweating, blowing of the nose, sneezing), as well ascopulation, pregnancy [and] dismemberment. In all these

9 Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, (Bloomington and Indianapolis: IndianUniversity Press, 1984), p. 19.10 Peter Stallybrass and Allon White, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression, p. 23.

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events the beginning and end of life are closelyinterwoven. (317).

Leonardo Da Vinci’s Two

Grotesque Profiles11

Falstaff, the Henriad’s thieving wit, embodies the concept of

the grotesque body in numerous ways. In the world of the plays,

Falstaff is figured as an excessive, corporeal entity. What’s more,

Shakespeare continually draws his audience’s attention to the

debauched knight’s protrusive belly. In just three scenes, Hal and

his Eastcheap comrades rail against Sir John, naming him a “fat

rogue” (Pt I, II.ii 110), a “damn’d brawn” (Pt I, II.iv. 6-7), a

11 Leonardo Da Vinci, Two Grotesque Profiles, c. 1485-90. The distorted bodilyexperiences of the two profiles are typical of the grotesque form. Notealso their protrusive dimensions: nose, chin, and brow.

5

Candidate Number: 1401645Attention of Dr Eric Langley EN5731: The Works“fat kidney’d rascal” (Pt I, II.i. 5), a “fat guts” (Pt I, II.i.

29), “a whore-son round man” (II.iv. 134), a “swollen parcel of

dropsies” (Pt I, II.iv. 434), “a swollen rascal”, “Sir John Paunch”

(Pt I, II.i. 62), and “my sweet beef” (Pt I, III.iii 170).

Furthermore, Falstaff’s body is likened to a vast ‘hulk’12 on two

separate occasions with “a whole merchant’s venture of…stuff in him,

you have not seen a hulk better stuffed in the hold” (Pt II, II.iv.

69-71). As well as being figured by what goes into his stomach,

Shakespeare also describes what comes out of it:

Away, good Ned. Falstaffsweats to death, And lards the lean earth ashe walks along.Were’t not for laughing, Ishould pity him (Pt I, II.ii108-110).

Shakespeare’s continued focus on Falstaff’s protuberances,

openings, and effusions, place Falstaff’s body firmly within the

realm of the grotesque. Additionally, when Prince Hal proclaims

Falstaff to be a “mountain, open and palpable” (Pt I, II.iv. 224),

or a “bolting hutch of beastliness, that parcel of dropsies, that

huge bombard of sack, that stuffed cloak-bag of guts” (Pt I, II.iv.

433-438), he instantiates Falstaff as a grotesque body.

Interestingly, the grotesque body of Sir John Falstaff bears an

12 A hulk was tantamount to a cargo-vessel according to Dover Wilson’s ‘The Fortunes of Falstaff’ (p. 27).

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Candidate Number: 1401645Attention of Dr Eric Langley EN5731: The Worksirrefutable similarity to another body commonly associated with the

literary grotesque - the body of the woman. Physically, Falstaff

approximates Ursula, “the sow of enormity” (III.v.)13 from Bartholomew

Fair, and Luce (/Nell) from The Comedy of Errors, “who is spherical like

[the globe]” (III.ii. 81).14 Another comparison can also be drawn

with the bawdy nurse from Romeo and Juliet, “who, like Falstaff, huffs

and puffs as she waddles on fat legs.”15 During the course of this

essay, I will continue to make clear the similarities between the

female sex and Sir John Falstaff’s own physiological composition.

More than that, however, I hope to illuminate how Hal’s ‘Eastcheap

phase’ (i.e. his time spent with Falstaff) is tantamount to a

gestation period in the womb. And that without Falstaff (and the

gestation his fat belly permits), there could be no Henry V; at

least, not the legendary figure he became.

As mentioned, then, Falstaff’s physiological composition is

exceedingly corporeal. He is all excess and flesh. Shakespeare’s

focus on Falstaff’s distended stomach carries associations of

pregnancy with it according to Valerie Traub. As the Henry plays

progress, Falstaff’s belly becomes ‘increasingly feminised’16. In

13 Ben Jonson, Bartholomew Fair, ed. Barry Cornwall, The Works of Ben Jonson, (London: Edward Moxon, 1838), p. 342. 14 William Shakespeare, The Comedy of Errors15 Valerie Traub, ‘Prince Hal’s Falstaff: Positioning Psychoanalysis andthe Female Reproductive Body’, ed. Barbara A. Mowat, The Shakespeare Quarterly,Vol. 40, No. 4, Winter, (1989), pp16 Ibid, p. 463.

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Candidate Number: 1401645Attention of Dr Eric Langley EN5731: The WorksHenry IV Part Two, Falstaff exclaims that he is “a sow that hath

overwhelmed all her litter but one” (I.ii. 11-12).17 His self-

identification is irrefutably grotesque, but also effeminising. In

her essay, ‘Positioning Psychoanalysis and the Female Reproductive

Body’, Valerie Traub makes an observation that transmutes Falstaff’s

masculinity into something feminine. Having come to blows with

Pistol, an Eastcheap bawd, and having swiftly “turned him out

o’doors”, Mistress Quickly asks Falstaff whether he is “not hurt

i’th’ groin? Me thought ‘[Pistol] made a shrewd thrust at your

belly” (II.iv. 207-208). Mistress Quickly immediately shifts the

emphasis form the masculine groin to the feminine belly,

emasculating Falstaff in spite of his (one and only) heroic deed: he

is now rendered a false-staff. Later on in Henry IV: Part Two, Falstaff

makes another link between “his belly, its effeminacy, and his

identity.”18 In response to knight Colevile’s question, “Are you not

Sir John Falstaff?” (IV.iii. 10), the fleshy knight responds

accordingly:

I have a whole school of tongues in this belly of mine,and not a tongue of them all speaks any other word butmy name […] my womb, my womb, my womb undoes me(VI.iii. 18-22).

17 William Shakespeare, Henry IV: Part Two, ed. Rene Weis, The OxfordShakespeare, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). All subsequentreferences are to this edition.18 Valerie Traub, ‘Prince Hal’s Falstaff…’, p. 463.

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Candidate Number: 1401645Attention of Dr Eric Langley EN5731: The WorksAs Traub asserts, “the associational chain from pig [/brawn], sow,

groin, belly, to womb effects a transposition from the grotesque

body to the female reproductive body.”19

As formerly mentioned, Falstaff is instantiated as a leaky

vessel, “[larding] the lean earth, as he walks along” (H1, II.ii

109). When we concern ourselves with descriptions of Falstaff’s

body, ‘Tallow’ is a word frequently applied to the fat, errant

knight. Within a sixteenth century context, ‘tallow’ was understood

to mean liquid fat; “as well as dripping or suet or animal fat

rendered down.”20 Of course, both fat and suet are emblematic of

carnival celebration. Although, as Dover Wilson asserts, The Merry

Wives of Windsor does not belong to the Falstaff canon, it certainly

does show Falstaff at his leakiest (he somehow leaks into another

play after his own death in Henry IV: Part Two). While assisting

Mistress Page with her dirty linen, Sir John laments to the

disguised Ford:

Think of that, a man of my kidney! Think of that – thatam as subject to heat, as butter; a man of continualdissolution and thaw; it was a miracle to ‘scapesuffocation. And in the height of this bath, when I wasmore than half sweated in grease, like a Dutch dish, tobe thrown into the Thames, and cooled, glowing-hot, in

19 Valerie Traub, p. 463.20 Dover Wilson, The Fortunes of Falstaff, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,1943), p. 28.

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that surge […] Think of that – hissing hot: think ofthat, Master Brook! (III.v. 98-105).21

In his seminal work, The Fortunes of Falstaff, Wilson claims that

Falstaff’s likening to a greasy tallow-catch “betokens […] nothing

more mysterious than a dripping-pan to catch the fat as the roasting

joint turned upon the spit before the fire.”22 In spite of Wilson’s

assertion, I would argue that Sir John’s bodily effusions liken the

fat knight, once again, to the female reproductive body. Indeed, the

hot, moist body of Sir John Falstaff provides an antithesis to the

dry, well-regulated body of man. That a woman’s body was clammier

than man’s was founded in contemporary scientific theory that

subsequently filtered through into the literature of the age. In

Thomas Middleton’s (or Cyril Tourneur’s) The Revenger’s Tragedy,

incontinence (or leakiness) is intrinsically linked to the female

sex; while attempting to bond with Lussurioso, Middleton’s Revenger,

Vindice, says: “Why are men made closed./ But to keep thoughts in

best? I grant you this./ Tell some woman a secret overnight./ Your

doctor may find it in the urinal i’th’ morning” (I.iii. 80-83).23

Thus, the openness of the female body lies in direct contrast to the

closed body of man. Thomas Nashe also wrote about the fundamental

leakiness of women in his lachrymose work Christes Tears Over Jerusalem. In

21 William Shakespeare, The Merry Wives of Windsor, eds. Stephen Greenblatt,Walter Cohen, Jean Elizabeth and Katherine Eisaman Maus, The NortonShakespeare, (W.W. Norton, 2008). 22 Dover Wilson, The Fortunes of Falstaff, p. 28.23 Thomas Middleton and Cyril Tourneur’s, The Revenger’s Tragedy, ed. C. R. A.Foakes, (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996), p. 48.

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Candidate Number: 1401645Attention of Dr Eric Langley EN5731: The Worksthis works Nashe equates women to “excremental vessels of lust”. He

also posits this rhetorical question to his readership: “what are

you [women] but sincks and privies to swallow in men’s filth?”24 The

woman’s body, then, is an excremental receptacle: a container of its

own filth and excrement, before being publicly evacuated (via

sneezing, sweating, and shitting). Of course, Falstaff is typified

by such bodily processes. During a dialogue with the Lord Chief

Justice, the aforementioned tells Sir John:

L. Chief Justice: What, you are as a candle, thebetter part burnt out.Falstaff: A wassail candle, my lord,all tallow – if I did say of wax, my growth wouldapprove the truth.L. Chief Justice: There is not a white hair on yourface, but should have his effect of gravity.Falstaff: His effect of gravy, gravy,gravy (I.ii. 152-158).

From the preceding dialogue, Falstaff’s verbal fecundity is made

apparent by his ‘gravy’ quip, for it is ‘more than just a feeble

jest on his table manners, as usually seems to be assumed’25. Indeed,

the mention of gravy refers to the strands of sweat that bedew the

fat knight’s round face. “In fact, to use a seventeenth-century

expression, applicable to one bathed in perspiration, he may be said

perpetually to ‘stew in his own gravy.’”26 Falstaff’s tenure as an

24 Thomas Nashe quoted in Gail Paster’s, The Body Embarrassed, p. 154.25 Dover Wilson, The Fortunes of Falstaff, p. 29.26 Ibid, p. 29.

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Candidate Number: 1401645Attention of Dr Eric Langley EN5731: The Workseffeminate leaky vessel is also established by his ability to ‘blab’

(to talk), for “talking is also a form of leaking.”27

According to Bakhtin’s paradigm, excremental functions form

the basis of the grotesque body. Although Bakhtin refrains from

gender specifics in his treatise, the woman is implicitly

instantiated as a grotesque body because of her ability to

menstruate, lactate, and give birth: leak, that is. “The following

leaves the woman, particularly in respect to her breasts and

genitals, completely open.” As Valerie Traub suggests, Falstaff can

be viewed as a grotesque body without even considering his maternal

functions (he is, after all, the Lord of Misrule). “However,

precisely because gender is repressed in Bakhtin’s account, the

demonstration of its salience is all the more pressing.”28 During the

early modern period, a female’s womb was considered to be an

unstable and hostile environment. Laurent Joubert, a preeminent

physician working in France during the sixteenth century, described

the female womb (or uterus) as “unclean, filthy, and foul.”29 He also

penned an evocative poem describing the animistic, violent, and

twisted nature of the womb:

Withered womb, with your fifty-tworoots,

27 Gail Kern Paster, The Body Embarrassed, p. 28 Valerie Traub, Prince Hal’s Falstaff, p. 464. 29 Gail Kern Paster, p. 174

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Plus one nobody talks about,Move away from the ribs;That is not where you and yours belong. Move away from the backbone;You are not comfortable there.Move away from the bottom of the belly,Where you cannot stretch out.Bump up against the belly button,There where the Virgin Mary carried her

dear Son. Crick, crack, womb, return where you

belong.30

Plato also held this animistic view of the womb, believing

that the womb was “an independent animal which wilfully wandered the

woman’s body causing disease.”31 He adhered to the belief that the

womb was capable of smell and violent bouts of movement. Although,

as Mark J. Adair attests, Plato’s views on the womb were

‘unsophisticated’, they were carried through into the early modern

period32. Simon Forman, for example, says that:

all noisum thinges doth trouble the matrix and makesher vomite up those humurs or excrements that ar inher. And againe doth encline and drawe to all sweateand savorie thinges.33

As well as promoting ‘sweate’ and ‘excrements’, childbirth

engendered a plethora of other bodily evacuations. Jacques

30 Laurent Joubert, The Second Part of The Popular Errors, ed. Gregory David deRocher, (Tuscaloosa: The University of Alabama Press, 1995), p. 193-194.31 Gail Kern Paster, p. 174.32 Mark J. Adair, ‘Plato’s view of the Wandering Uterus’, ed. John F.Miller, The Classical Association of the Middle West and South, Vol. 91, No.2, Winter,(1995-96), p. 135.33 Simon Forman, ‘Matrix and the Paine Therof’, ed. Barbara H. Traister,Medical History, Vol. 35, (1991), p. 443.

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Candidate Number: 1401645Attention of Dr Eric Langley EN5731: The WorksGuillemeau, for example, writes about the winds and vapours “that

are shut up, and inclosed in the neather belly of a woman with

child.”34

That childbirth provoked the rising of those mists and vapours

is particularly interesting in the light of Prince Hal’s soliloquy

in the first part of the Henriad:

Yet herein I imitate the sun,Who doth permit the base contagious cloudsTo smother up his beauty from the world,That, when he pleases to be himself,Being wanted he may be more wondered atBy breaking through the foul and ugly mists Of vapours that did seem to strangle him. (Pt I, I.ii. 186-92)

Those ‘base contagious clouds’, along with the ‘foul and ugly

mists’, recall the great evacuation of childbirth (or renewal),

according to early modern theories. Indeed, Hal’s rebirth will be

achieved by “breaking through the foul and ugly mists / of Vapours

that did seem to strangle him (Pt I, I.ii. 196-197). Of course, the

aforementioned vapours also signify Hal’s own toxic relationship

with Falstaff, “That villainous abominable misleader of youth […]

that old white bearded Satan” (Pt I, II.iv. 445-446). For all

intents and purposes, then, Hal must break free of Falstaff’s

suffocating womb if he is to achieve the renewal he so desperately

34 Jacques Guillemeau, Childbirth, or The Happy Deliverie of women, (rpt. Amsterdam:De Capo Press, 1972), p. 126.

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Candidate Number: 1401645Attention of Dr Eric Langley EN5731: The Workscraves. In the end, of course, Hal does break free from the foul and

ugly Falstaff, and is thus crowned Henry V.

If, as I have suggested, Falstaff bears a maternal relation to

Hal, their sojourn into Eastcheap is tantamount to a gestation

period in the womb. In her book, ‘Showing Like a Queen’, Katherine

Eggert espouses the view that Falstaff’s femininity resides within

his ability to disrupt heroic enterprise – a theme evidenced in The

Faerie Queene. Although true, Falstaff plays a larger role in Hal’s

development than is normally assumed. Eastcheap, for Hal, is a locus

of drama and theatricality, and The Boar’s Head Inn, is where all

order is turned upside down. Looming over all of this, of course, is

Sir John Falstaff, “the chef propagator of theatrical activity [in

the world of the play].”35 Hal’s dalliances, however, incur the wrath

of Henry Bolingbroke. King Henry IV equates his cousin Richard II’s

downfall to his over-exposure:

The skipping King, he ambled up and downWith Shallow jesters, and rash bavin wits,Mingled his royalty with cap’ring fools, Grew a companion to the common streets,Enfeoffed himself to popularity,That, being daily swallowed by men’s eyes, They surfeited with honey, and began To loathe the taste of sweetness, whereof a little More than a little is by much too much (Pt I,

III.ii. 60-73).

35 Katherine Eggert, Showing Like a Queen: Feale Authority and Literary Experiment in Spenser,Shakespeare, and Milton, (Pennsylvania: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000),p. 79.

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Evidently, Bolingbroke cannot comprehend Hal’s madcap Eastcheap

phase (a period of gestation, I would argue). Yet, it proves

invaluable to Hal’s eventual development, as can be evidenced by the

two archbishops in the opening of Henry V:

Canterbury: The courses of his youth promised itnot.The breath no sooner left his father’s bodyBut that his wildness, mortified in him,Seemed to die too. Yea, at that very moment Consideration like an angel came And whipped th ’offending Adam out of him, Leaving his body as a Paradise T’envelop and contain celestial spirits.

Ely: We are blessed in the change (I.i. 25-38)36.

Thus, Hal’s time spent among the commoners has allowed the young

Prince to break through the foul and ugly mists “that did seem to

strangle him.” What’s more, the prince’s tavern phase can be

configured as an educational phase, with Falstaff figuring as his

effeminate tutor (Hal sucks in the theatricality of Falstaff).

Michel de Montaigne in a treatise on education espoused the view

that a beneficial education had its foundations in experience and

not in ‘rote knowledge’. According to Montaigne “[a] mere bookish

learning is a poor, paltry learning; it may serve for ornament, but

36 William Shakespeare, Henry V, ed. Gary Taylor, The Oxford Shakespeare,(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008).

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Candidate Number: 1401645Attention of Dr Eric Langley EN5731: The Worksthere is yet no foundation for any superstructure to be built upon

it […].”37 Rather, says Montaigne:

Let him examine every man’s talent; a peasant, abricklayer, a passenger: one may learn something fromevery one of these in their several capacities, andsomething will be picked out of their discourse whereofsome use may be made at one time or another; nay, eventhe folly and impertinence of others will contribute tohis instruction.38

As we may recall, Hal proclaims himself “the sworn brother to a

leash of drawers” (Pt I, II.iv. 6-7) and boasts that he can “drink

with any tinker in his own language (Pt I, II.iv. 17-18). Hal’s

dalliances with the common-folk are a “necessary phase in his

education” and help him to achieve the status of a charismatic

military leader. That Hal has learned the art of improvisation and

theatre from Falstaff, while gestating in the womb, is made clear by

his battle-speech at the field of Agincourt. In his book,

‘Shakespeare, Machiavelli, and Montaigne’, Hugh Grady acknowledges

that King Harry has successfully “bridged the considerable class gap

between [himself], the men of quality, and the common troops”:

We few, we happy few, we band of brothers.For he today that sheds his blood with meShall be my brother; be he ne’er so vile,

37 Michel de Montaigne, ‘Of the Education of Children’, Quotidiana, (2007)<http://essays.quotidiana.org/montaigne/education_of_children/> [accessed06/01/2014].38 Michel de Montaigne, ‘On the Education of Children’.

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This day shall gentle his condition.And gentlemen in England now abedShall think themselves accursed they were not here,And hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaksThat fought with us upon Saint Crispin’s day. (‘HV’,IV.iii. 60-67).

Naturally, Hal’s class-transcending rhetoric is a product of his

time spent in Eastcheap. Indeed, Hal assures his foot-men that he

will elevate them (the ‘vile’) over the propertied ‘gentlemen’ lying

in their beds at home. Such rhetoric instils a sense of benevolence

in his lower ranks, ensuring a mighty military performance from

them. In ‘Richard II’, the king is tasked with putting down an Irish

rebellion with the aide of an unhelpful Welsh army; in ‘Henry IV’,

the Welsh are in open rebellion, alongside the Scots, who strictly

oppose Bolingbroke’s reign. But in ‘Henry V’, Harry has successfully

united England, Wales, Scotland, and Ireland to fight under his

banner. “The notion of a Great Britain as a nation state”, says Paul

A. Cantor, “is almost fully articulated in Henry V.”39 The key to

Henry’s success, then, is his ability to converse with the all

stratums of society: a skill he procured, as formerly mentioned,

from his tavern-phase in Eastcheap. Moreover, Henry V’s skills of

rhetoric are honed by his teacher, the fat knight Falstaff: the

master rhetorician of ‘Henry IV parts I & II’. As Eggert attests,

“Falstaff’s speech displays and amplifies bewitching qualities […]39 Paul A. Cantor, ‘Shakespeare’s ‘Henry V’: From the Medieval to the ModernWorld’, ed. John Albert Murley and Sean D. Sutton, Perspectives on Politics inShakespeare (Oxford: Lexington Books, 2006), p. 20.

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Candidate Number: 1401645Attention of Dr Eric Langley EN5731: The WorksWhether or not his postures compel belief, they remain attractive

and encourage dalliance among their endless, profligate fantasies.”40

One begins to wonder whether Falstaff would be a good king.

Many courtiers’ within the Shakespearean canon have a propensity for

flattery, especially if it entails social advancement. The

relationship between the young prince and the fat knight, however,

is void of any flattery whatsoever. If anything, the errant knight

is given to mocking his master and king to be with his arsenal of

quips. Duchess of malfi…

That Sir John is instantiated as a woman in the Henry plays is

hard to refute. Not only do his orifices and leakiness mark him as a

female, but so do his actions. For instance, Sir John actively

flouts the manly, militaristic values of the court in his

denouncement of honour: “What is honour? A word. What is in that

word honour? Air.” He proves as much during the battle of

Shrewsbury, where he flees from conflict and counterfeits his own

death. Further to his cowardice, “Falstaff also bears a maternal,

pre-oedipal relation to Hal, one signified in the swollen belly

Falstaff calls his womb.”41 In spite of his female agency, and status

as a coward, Falstaff is responsible for the birth of Henry V.

Truly, Jack’s affiliation with Hal allowed the prince to reach his

40 Katherine Eggert, p. 79-80. 41 Ibid. p. 79.

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Candidate Number: 1401645Attention of Dr Eric Langley EN5731: The Worksfull potential: teaching the young prince the importance of

language, improvisation, and brotherhood. Without Falstaff, Hal

would never have succeeded in uniting England, Wales, Ireland, and

Scotland. He would never have surpassed his father in popular public

opinion either. But unfortunately for Falstaff, there was nothing

left for Hal to learn from him, hence Henry’s harsh rejection of “I

know thee not Old Man.”

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23


Reading the Fleshy Maternal Shapes of

Sir John Falstaff.

Shakespeare’s ‘The Works

Course’.24


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Reading the Fleshy Maternal Shapes of Sir John Falstaff.

Documents

Transcript of Reading the Fleshy Maternal Shapes of Sir John Falstaff.