1 00:00:02,830 --> 00:00:10,750 Great. So the final lecture in this series from autumn 2011 is on the first part of Henry the Fourth. 2 00:00:10,750 --> 00:00:15,100 So this is a play written in about 15 ninety six to seven. 3 00:00:15,100 --> 00:00:22,270 And therefore, although it's obviously got historical sequential links with Richard the second the previous 4 00:00:22,270 --> 00:00:27,490 play in the historical sequence and with Henry the fourth Part two and Henry the fifth, 5 00:00:27,490 --> 00:00:31,120 which are coming after it in historical chronology. 6 00:00:31,120 --> 00:00:36,990 It's actually I think got more in common in certain ways with the comedies of that period than with the histories. 7 00:00:36,990 --> 00:00:44,530 So, Richard, the second is a play, as I talked about earlier, in the term, all inversed very formal verse play. 8 00:00:44,530 --> 00:00:47,230 Henry, the fourth but one has a lot of prose in it. 9 00:00:47,230 --> 00:00:57,560 Proportions quite similar to Merchant of Venice say Merry Wives of Windsor plays about the same fifteen ninety six to seven period. 10 00:00:57,560 --> 00:01:06,190 It's not always clear, I think that Henry the fourth was intended as the first part of a pair of plays that I think that was always clear. 11 00:01:06,190 --> 00:01:15,440 And I'm going to try and talk a bit more about that during the lecture. It's first printed in fifteen ninety eight. 12 00:01:15,440 --> 00:01:25,760 And it's one of the most popular plays. In fact, it's the most popular Shakespeare play in print in the immediate 15 nineties into the 17th century. 13 00:01:25,760 --> 00:01:31,820 And I think that's largely because of the dramatic attractiveness of its fat anti-hero, Falstaff. 14 00:01:31,820 --> 00:01:39,890 And so the question I wanted to ask about this play is why is Falstaff fat? 15 00:01:39,890 --> 00:01:43,760 OK, so let's recap the plot of the play. 16 00:01:43,760 --> 00:01:50,270 Henry, the fourth, who has in the previous play, Richard, the second taken the throne from Richard. 17 00:01:50,270 --> 00:01:58,880 His cousin is beset from the outside of Henry, the fourth one by conspiracy, civil war and insubordination. 18 00:01:58,880 --> 00:02:04,820 And it's useful in a way, perhaps, to think about that, taking two forms, two substantive forms in the play. 19 00:02:04,820 --> 00:02:11,960 So it's over overburdened with civil war and insubordination because it comes in two quite distinct forms. 20 00:02:11,960 --> 00:02:21,080 The first we might describe as political. It's a rebellion led by the charismatic and chivalric Hotspur, supported by his father, 21 00:02:21,080 --> 00:02:26,660 Northumberland, his brother in law, Mortimer, who had to claim to be the rightful heir to the throne. 22 00:02:26,660 --> 00:02:36,160 The Welshman Glendower and Douglas Scott. Together, this is a coalition of noblemen who don't accept Henry the fourth's claim to the throne. 23 00:02:36,160 --> 00:02:43,840 That's the political threat that's more pressingly, though, we get the rebellion of Henry's son, Prince. 24 00:02:43,840 --> 00:02:55,340 How how ignores the court and his royal obligations, preferring instead the company of Falstaff in the taverns of East Cheap. 25 00:02:55,340 --> 00:03:00,050 The play tells the story of the gradual reconciliation of father and son, 26 00:03:00,050 --> 00:03:09,740 culminating in the Battle of Shrewsbury, where how killed Hotspur and protects his father from being attacked. 27 00:03:09,740 --> 00:03:14,210 Now, as I've already said, Henry, the fourth was a hugely popular play. 28 00:03:14,210 --> 00:03:20,900 It's hard for us to reconstruct the popularity of plays in performance just because the evidence is very hard to find. 29 00:03:20,900 --> 00:03:25,430 But we can do something about the popularity of plays in print. 30 00:03:25,430 --> 00:03:30,830 So I'm just gonna talk a little bit about print play statistics. 31 00:03:30,830 --> 00:03:39,230 We can see that the most popular play of the Elizabethan and Jacobean period in print is an anonymous play called Musa Doris Musa. 32 00:03:39,230 --> 00:03:43,550 Doris, Mr. Dawes is a strange kind of Winter's Tale light. 33 00:03:43,550 --> 00:03:51,080 Well worth looking at. If you're looking at that play, for some reason, this is a hugely popular best kind of a Best-Selling play. 34 00:03:51,080 --> 00:03:54,560 It has nine editions in 25 years. So nine editions. 35 00:03:54,560 --> 00:04:00,990 I mean, Sideris, this is an attempt to try and place Henry the fourth popularity in some kind of context. 36 00:04:00,990 --> 00:04:06,120 The next most popular plays by reprints are Dr. Fasters and the Spanish tragedy. 37 00:04:06,120 --> 00:04:10,590 They have eight and seven editions, respectively, in 25 years. 38 00:04:10,590 --> 00:04:17,400 So there's no Shakespeare play in the top three. We might think most, most most popular place, 39 00:04:17,400 --> 00:04:24,180 Shakespeare is a much more successful writer of narrative poems in this period than he is of plays in terms of print. 40 00:04:24,180 --> 00:04:31,080 So the most Best-Selling work by Shakespeare entirely through his lifetime is not a play at all. 41 00:04:31,080 --> 00:04:35,640 But is Venus and Adonis narrative a villian poem? 42 00:04:35,640 --> 00:04:43,060 And most references to Shakespeare during his lifetime are as a poet. The poet of Venus and AdOne is not as a playwright. 43 00:04:43,060 --> 00:04:52,750 So top of the list, though, of Shakespeare's plays is Henry, the fourth part, one with seven editions in just over 25 years. 44 00:04:52,750 --> 00:04:55,090 You can look at this kind of bibliographic information. 45 00:04:55,090 --> 00:05:02,770 So searching for the number of times a work is reprinted in a searchable resource listing all the publications of this period. 46 00:05:02,770 --> 00:05:08,020 That's called the English Shorter Title Catalogue. The English Shorter Title Catalogue. 47 00:05:08,020 --> 00:05:18,340 The E STC, which is online now. The extended title of the first edition from 15 NINETY-EIGHT covers some of the appeal of Henry the Fourth. 48 00:05:18,340 --> 00:05:26,710 This is its long title, The History of Henry the Fourth with the battle at Shrewsbury between the King and Lord Henry Percy, 49 00:05:26,710 --> 00:05:35,840 Sir named Henry Hotspur of the North with the humorous conceits of Sir John Falstaff. 50 00:05:35,840 --> 00:05:42,980 So if you're interested in sort of humour, play is like Johnson's everyman, every man and every man out of his humour. 51 00:05:42,980 --> 00:05:53,990 From about this same period, a humorous conceit is obviously linking the play with that with that form of comedy. 52 00:05:53,990 --> 00:05:59,120 So we can see from the layout of the title page that the humorous conceits of Sir 53 00:05:59,120 --> 00:06:04,970 John Falstaff are set aside visually sight typographically from the material, 54 00:06:04,970 --> 00:06:08,180 the historical material that precedes them. 55 00:06:08,180 --> 00:06:20,240 Sir John Falstaff is a challenge to the historical account that we get higher up the title page just as he is within the play itself. 56 00:06:20,240 --> 00:06:27,470 You can also see if you look at that title page. Lots of interesting things about Shakespeare in print at this point. 57 00:06:27,470 --> 00:06:35,060 No authorship on the title page, for instance. We don't get that for another two or three years. 58 00:06:35,060 --> 00:06:41,840 So all of all, the plays of Shakespeare published before fifty ninety nine are effectively anonymous. 59 00:06:41,840 --> 00:06:48,290 And more importantly, perhaps for what I want to argue about Henry the Fourth. There's no mention that this is part one. 60 00:06:48,290 --> 00:06:51,590 This is just called the history of Henry the fourth Henry. 61 00:06:51,590 --> 00:06:57,700 The fourth only becomes part one when it's reprinted in the Folio in 16 23. 62 00:06:57,700 --> 00:07:01,230 We've already talked about in relation to Richard the second, the what? 63 00:07:01,230 --> 00:07:06,330 That one of the organisational innovations of the Folio concerns, the history plays in particular. 64 00:07:06,330 --> 00:07:17,150 It's put the history plays into a chronological order of historical monarch and reordered their titles in order to make that progression clear. 65 00:07:17,150 --> 00:07:23,630 So in sixteen hundred, a play called The Second Part and the fourth was printed henceforth. 66 00:07:23,630 --> 00:07:27,830 Part two. But the two plays are never printed together, apart from in the Folio. 67 00:07:27,830 --> 00:07:31,100 And even after the second part of Henry the Fourth is being printed, 68 00:07:31,100 --> 00:07:37,910 there are publications of what we now know as the first part of Henry the Fourth, but which are just called Henry the Fourth. 69 00:07:37,910 --> 00:07:45,440 Does that make sense? Henry the fourth never really becomes part one, even though it has a part to play for audiences and readers. 70 00:07:45,440 --> 00:07:49,700 The point of that is it was experienced as a standalone play. 71 00:07:49,700 --> 00:07:57,380 And maybe Shakespeare wrote it as a standalone play, the sequel to Like The Merry Wives of Windsor, 72 00:07:57,380 --> 00:08:08,610 in which Falstaff also appears might be seen more as an opportunistic afterthought, cashing in on a highly successful, dramatic formula. 73 00:08:08,610 --> 00:08:14,590 And the popularity of Henry the fourth. The thing that makes it become part one that spawns merry wives. 74 00:08:14,590 --> 00:08:20,280 And part two is, I think, Falstaff. Crucial to false starts, 75 00:08:20,280 --> 00:08:28,870 characterisation is his fatness house first words to him when we first meet both Howe and Falstaff in the play's second scene. 76 00:08:28,870 --> 00:08:35,830 Call him Fat Whitted. And there is constant banter about his appetite for food and drink names for Falstaff. 77 00:08:35,830 --> 00:08:40,540 Reiterate his size. Fat Guts, Horse Hawson Round Man, Fat robe. 78 00:08:40,540 --> 00:08:45,740 A gross fat man as fat as butter. So just that word fat comes a score. 79 00:08:45,740 --> 00:08:49,300 A score or more of times in the play. How long is it a go, Jack? 80 00:08:49,300 --> 00:08:58,190 Since now I know NI asks how Falstaff blames size and Greeves for blowing him up like a bladder. 81 00:08:58,190 --> 00:09:02,640 How advises him to lie to hide on the ground during a trick. 82 00:09:02,640 --> 00:09:06,850 And Falstaff asks, have you any levers to lift me up again? 83 00:09:06,850 --> 00:09:14,230 Later he described himself as fat and old in a climactic sequence in the play An Active Scene 84 00:09:14,230 --> 00:09:21,820 five where Falstaff and and how act out in the Tavern an interview between Howe and his father, 85 00:09:21,820 --> 00:09:28,570 the King Falstaff fatness is one of the things they discuss ventriloquism. 86 00:09:28,570 --> 00:09:38,530 His father's disapproval. How addresses Falstaff, who is pretending to be how there is a devil haunts the in the likeness of an old fat man. 87 00:09:38,530 --> 00:09:49,150 A ton of man is thy companion. And then he extemporise is an ex of a very extravagant sequence of similes piled up for false. 88 00:09:49,150 --> 00:09:57,850 Sighs An example of the rhetorical figure of Copiah. Copious notes which we might think Falstaff actually physically represents. 89 00:09:57,850 --> 00:10:06,160 Falstaff sticks up for himself. If to be fact is to be hated, then Faro's lean kind are to be loved, 90 00:10:06,160 --> 00:10:11,080 referring to the biblical symbols of famine in Joseph's dream in the Old Testament. 91 00:10:11,080 --> 00:10:19,810 So images of Bulc, particularly his size and fatness, the word fat and its cognates pepper the play. 92 00:10:19,810 --> 00:10:24,550 It's really impossible to get away from the fact that Falstaff is fat. 93 00:10:24,550 --> 00:10:29,620 So before we ask why he might be fired, let's just step back for a minute to see how very unusual this is. 94 00:10:29,620 --> 00:10:37,930 In Shakespeare's writing, very few characters in Shakespeare are given specific physical characteristics. 95 00:10:37,930 --> 00:10:43,060 We hear that Cassius in Julius Caesar has a lean and hungry, hungry look, 96 00:10:43,060 --> 00:10:48,670 just as the apothecary in Romeo and Juliet has been worn to the bones by misery. 97 00:10:48,670 --> 00:10:52,960 We know how old Juliet is. And strangely, we know we know how old Jago is, too. 98 00:10:52,960 --> 00:11:00,100 But for most other characters, we've got very little sense of their of their age, either A Midsummer Night's Dream. 99 00:11:00,100 --> 00:11:05,050 We know that one of Heleno and Hermia is fair and the other dark and one is tall and the other short. 100 00:11:05,050 --> 00:11:10,390 But it's intrinsic to Midsummer Night's Dream that nobody can remember which is which. 101 00:11:10,390 --> 00:11:16,270 Beyond this handful of immediate examples, most of which have thematic rather than specifically personal resonances. 102 00:11:16,270 --> 00:11:21,880 There isn't much more in the way of physical description in Shakespeare's plays. 103 00:11:21,880 --> 00:11:29,370 There are a few very rare occasions where a physical description of a character is so at odds with what we think the character ought to look like. 104 00:11:29,370 --> 00:11:34,540 Which is got not idea in itself. How would we know what the character looks like except through physical descriptions? 105 00:11:34,540 --> 00:11:37,960 So these occasions when a physical description is so at odds with the image we 106 00:11:37,960 --> 00:11:41,860 have of a character that editors have tried to manipulate the reference away. 107 00:11:41,860 --> 00:11:50,680 Examples of that might be Gertrude's description of Hamlet in the final fencing match with Laertes as fact and scant of breath. 108 00:11:50,680 --> 00:11:57,970 Nobody really wants a fact. Hamlet has been all kinds of editorial work to say how she doesn't really mean that he's fat. 109 00:11:57,970 --> 00:12:02,650 Or maybe the idea that Taliban's witch, like a mother, sick secour acts, has blue eyes, 110 00:12:02,650 --> 00:12:06,600 all kinds of work to try and show how blue eyes were really negative thing, 111 00:12:06,600 --> 00:12:10,650 when clearly the burden of evidence is that blue eyes were actually quite positive. 112 00:12:10,650 --> 00:12:15,640 Not particularly as it is, which is at all. So for the most part, though, 113 00:12:15,640 --> 00:12:23,290 Shakespeare does not give his characters extensive physical descriptions and nor is their appearance of particular dramatic interest. 114 00:12:23,290 --> 00:12:26,920 While we know that Shakespeare writes with a definite group of actors in mind, 115 00:12:26,920 --> 00:12:32,140 that's to say that's one of the most crucial differences between Shakespeare and other dramatists of this period. 116 00:12:32,140 --> 00:12:39,460 You remember, Shakespeare is an in-house dramatist, writing for a group of a group of actors he already knows as opposed to the freelance work. 117 00:12:39,460 --> 00:12:47,410 But just about everybody else does. During this period. So he does capitalise on that fixed group of actors and their particular talents. 118 00:12:47,410 --> 00:12:54,150 But he doesn't particularly capitalise on what they look like physically. So what's the upshot of all that? 119 00:12:54,150 --> 00:13:01,060 Falstaff, Fatna says, I think the most thoroughgoing physical designation we ever get in Shakespeare. 120 00:13:01,060 --> 00:13:04,900 So that whereas, for example, it's quite possible, I think, to read Othello. 121 00:13:04,900 --> 00:13:10,810 I think it would be different to see Othello, but it's quite easy to read Othello and to forget that Othello is black. 122 00:13:10,810 --> 00:13:17,200 So references to Othello is blackness are very prominent at the beginning of the play, but they tend to fade away. 123 00:13:17,200 --> 00:13:24,790 Alas, of a few zijlaard of racially and sort of grammatically inflected imagery right at the end of that play. 124 00:13:24,790 --> 00:13:31,870 But we could read Othello and lots of people do, I think, read Othello and forget that the main character is black. 125 00:13:31,870 --> 00:13:39,730 I think it's almost impossible to imagine reading Henry the Fourth without remembering that Falstaff is fat. 126 00:13:39,730 --> 00:13:48,730 So the density of these signifiers of fatness is also significant when compared to Shakespeare's sources. 127 00:13:48,730 --> 00:13:52,090 Although Falstaff, as he appears in the play, 128 00:13:52,090 --> 00:14:01,510 seems to be an a historical character who is enjoyably adrift from the serious political and military business we associate with history plays. 129 00:14:01,510 --> 00:14:06,700 He does have a real and rather controversial historical source. 130 00:14:06,700 --> 00:14:10,450 The source for Falstaff is the long, loud night, Sir John. 131 00:14:10,450 --> 00:14:20,800 Old Castle Old Castle was martyred in the early 15th century and included in John Fox's extensive prehistory of English Protestantism. 132 00:14:20,800 --> 00:14:29,350 The Book of Martyrs. So as you know, Foxes Foxes is using history to suggest that Protestantism was sort of always existed. 133 00:14:29,350 --> 00:14:35,950 And all the good people in the past were really Protestants and the bad people were really Catholics, all Catholics. 134 00:14:35,950 --> 00:14:43,780 One of the good people in this story and his martyrdom is is pictured and discussed by Fox in that really, 135 00:14:43,780 --> 00:14:49,390 really important Bible off of prescient, as in the Book of Martyrs. 136 00:14:49,390 --> 00:14:56,560 So he was understood by Elizabethan England to be a heroic religious man who anticipated precedented and who lived before Protestantism. 137 00:14:56,560 --> 00:15:01,660 But he anticipated it and died for his beliefs. 138 00:15:01,660 --> 00:15:08,110 There is pretty firm evidence that in its first incarnation, and very possibly in its first performances, 139 00:15:08,110 --> 00:15:20,980 Falstaff name was Old Castle Howl's phrase, My old Lord of the Castle doesn't make much sense if it wasn't the epilogue to part two of Henry. 140 00:15:20,980 --> 00:15:27,270 The fourth teases the audience with the sense. The Falstaff both is and is not Old Castle. 141 00:15:27,270 --> 00:15:30,910 I mean, that's not quite explicitly. 142 00:15:30,910 --> 00:15:40,920 The complete Oxford Shakespeare, the collected edition edited by Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor, reinstates the name Old Castle for Falstaff, 143 00:15:40,920 --> 00:15:46,020 suggesting that because this was the way the play was originally written, the job of the editor is to get back to that. 144 00:15:46,020 --> 00:15:49,980 And so, too, to delete Falstaff and to put Old Castle instead. 145 00:15:49,980 --> 00:15:57,330 So if you're reading the play in that edition, you may so far be wondering who is this person who doesn't appear at all in your play? 146 00:15:57,330 --> 00:16:03,310 Now, the historical old castle then was a devout and principled man and not a man noticeably fat. 147 00:16:03,310 --> 00:16:12,030 He certainly isn't very fat as he's being grilled in one of foxes images of martyrdom. 148 00:16:12,030 --> 00:16:14,340 It's clear that the that old castles, 149 00:16:14,340 --> 00:16:21,840 Elizabethan successors who were powerful men in the Elizabethan caught and powerful in particular in relation to the theatre. 150 00:16:21,840 --> 00:16:29,130 It's clear that they took exception to seeing their noble ancestor pilloried by Shakespeare and forced the change of name. 151 00:16:29,130 --> 00:16:33,060 It's not clear that that was done in a in a kind of formal way or, you know. 152 00:16:33,060 --> 00:16:37,680 This is not a don't think this is the action of government censorship. 153 00:16:37,680 --> 00:16:46,230 I think this is pressure, informal pressure from powerful people forcing a change on the on the play. 154 00:16:46,230 --> 00:16:50,520 The Chamberlains men's great rivals, the admirals men capitalised on this, 155 00:16:50,520 --> 00:16:55,740 upset by producing a more acceptable version of the old Cassells story in the play. 156 00:16:55,740 --> 00:16:59,730 Sir John. Old Castle in this companion play. 157 00:16:59,730 --> 00:17:08,130 Old Castles. Religious opposition to the Catholic Church represented in the place of John Castle by the villainous Bishop of Rochester allies. 158 00:17:08,130 --> 00:17:14,250 It with the popular anti Catholicism of the early modern stage. Is it really, really worth looking at alongside Henry? 159 00:17:14,250 --> 00:17:18,270 The fourth part one to show how just to get a clearer sense of how Shakespeare 160 00:17:18,270 --> 00:17:25,290 has satirised this much more Orthodox presentation of the Protestant martyr. 161 00:17:25,290 --> 00:17:35,310 Ironically, this play, the play, this John Castle is reprinted in 16 nineteen, not six sorry, 16 19 claiming to be by Shakespeare. 162 00:17:35,310 --> 00:17:43,860 And it's also one of a package of plays, apocryphal plays largely added to the Third Folio of Shakespeare's work in sixteen sixty three. 163 00:17:43,860 --> 00:17:48,210 So it's never quite fully separate from Shakespeare, but that's what I'm trying to say there. 164 00:17:48,210 --> 00:17:57,810 Even though it's the kind of propagandist flipside of what Shakespeare does to our castle in the character of Falstaff. 165 00:17:57,810 --> 00:18:02,220 So Falstaff was fact, then what? Why? 166 00:18:02,220 --> 00:18:09,360 I'm not particularly interested here in obvious statements like Falstaff is fat because he is lazy or Falstaff is fat because he drinks too much. 167 00:18:09,360 --> 00:18:12,870 He clearly does, but that's because he's fat rather than the other way around. 168 00:18:12,870 --> 00:18:18,180 This is a literary, I think, not a medical question, although if you Google the question of Falstaff Fatma's, 169 00:18:18,180 --> 00:18:23,040 there is a striking literature on the medical symptoms of Shakespeare characters. 170 00:18:23,040 --> 00:18:28,740 This is an essay in the medical journal. Whoever knew there was such a journal sounds like something from Have I Got News for you? 171 00:18:28,740 --> 00:18:36,630 Called Obesity Surgery. This is about Falstaff and morbid obesity diagnosis, false golf symptoms. 172 00:18:36,630 --> 00:18:44,550 But it ends quite interestingly, it uses Falstaff as a sort of ideal patient for all the symptoms of morbid obesity. 173 00:18:44,550 --> 00:18:48,630 Physicians and surgeons must work to maintain the health of the world's Falstaff. 174 00:18:48,630 --> 00:18:49,770 It's a great idea, isn't it? 175 00:18:49,770 --> 00:18:56,250 Physicians and surgeons must work to maintain the health of the world's Falstaff and possibly by curing their morbid obesity. 176 00:18:56,250 --> 00:19:02,230 Allow them to be judged on their real merits and vices rather than on their bulk Falstaff. 177 00:19:02,230 --> 00:19:08,010 Though would not be Falstaff. I want to argue if you were not fat, this is not a symptom which could be taken away from him. 178 00:19:08,010 --> 00:19:17,700 This is him. We've discussed earlier in this lecture series the difference between readings of Shakespeare, which plays characters as primary, 179 00:19:17,700 --> 00:19:25,670 that is, they see the plays as fiction, which managed to convince us that the characters pre-date what's happening to them in the play. 180 00:19:25,670 --> 00:19:33,890 And characters are secondary, produced by and for the needs of a particular and dominant plot. 181 00:19:33,890 --> 00:19:38,480 I think I want to suggest that we might think of Falstaff fatness less as an 182 00:19:38,480 --> 00:19:44,390 individualising characteristic of his personality and more as part of a role, 183 00:19:44,390 --> 00:19:50,900 a structural role. Shakespeare wants this personage to play in Henry the Fourth, 184 00:19:50,900 --> 00:19:57,290 but this immediate idea that Falstaff is a role rather than a character or a function rather than a person. 185 00:19:57,290 --> 00:20:01,080 This is not uncontroversial. 186 00:20:01,080 --> 00:20:09,510 Indeed, we could say that the whole critical methodology of Shakespearean character study is built on the study of Falstaff. 187 00:20:09,510 --> 00:20:23,190 So he's not just a character. He's in some sense the character Morris Morgan's 1777 publication, an essay on the dramatic character of John Falstaff. 188 00:20:23,190 --> 00:20:26,730 It's both the first full length account of the Shakespearean character, 189 00:20:26,730 --> 00:20:35,130 but also the first book length study of Shakespeare at all, the first work of literary criticism on Shakespeare in book form. 190 00:20:35,130 --> 00:20:40,800 Falstaff is therefore foundational to the discipline we're all involved in. 191 00:20:40,800 --> 00:20:45,540 Morgan attempts to defend Falstaff against charges of cowardice. 192 00:20:45,540 --> 00:20:56,640 Here he he's engaging with moralist criticism of the 18th century like that of Dr. Johnson, which took a very dim view of Falstaff behaviour. 193 00:20:56,640 --> 00:20:59,820 Morgan's attempt, though, to defend Falstaff surely misses the point. 194 00:20:59,820 --> 00:21:06,750 False that Falstaff is a coward, which is the thing Morgan is trying to disprove, is actually vital to the play. 195 00:21:06,750 --> 00:21:15,300 But Morgan does represent the beginning of a tradition which has perhaps Harold Bloom as its most recent or prominent exemplar. 196 00:21:15,300 --> 00:21:22,830 In his book, Shakespeare The Invention of the Human Bloom develops his thesis that Shakespeare has invented 197 00:21:22,830 --> 00:21:29,370 modern ideas of the human through his gifts of characterisation via two specific examples. 198 00:21:29,370 --> 00:21:34,960 The first is predictable enough Hamlet. But the second is Falstaff. 199 00:21:34,960 --> 00:21:37,780 So Falstaff becomes for Bloom one pillar, 200 00:21:37,780 --> 00:21:45,250 one of the twin pillars that on which his whole theory that Shakespeare invents cannot draw, invents the human. 201 00:21:45,250 --> 00:21:49,360 Bloom credits his own youthful encounter with Sir Ralph Richardson, 202 00:21:49,360 --> 00:21:54,910 performing the role of Falstaff with his own lifelong fascination with Shakespeare's characterisation. 203 00:21:54,910 --> 00:22:01,450 So he says, when he took when Bloom talks in interviews about his interest in Shakespeare, he talked about Falstaff as kicking it all off. 204 00:22:01,450 --> 00:22:09,670 So he's reprising in his own life the kind of Morgane beginnings of Shakespeare criticism. 205 00:22:09,670 --> 00:22:16,940 In an interview about his work with Vanity Fair, Blum describes Falstaff as the most intelligent person in all of literature. 206 00:22:16,940 --> 00:22:22,660 Just a curious thing to say, really. But so says the most intelligent person in all of literature literature. 207 00:22:22,660 --> 00:22:28,720 But he also suggests that there is something about Falstaff, which is less personal and more general. 208 00:22:28,720 --> 00:22:32,680 This is in a phrase where he he says that Hamlet is a kind of harbinger of death. 209 00:22:32,680 --> 00:22:36,580 It's a nice idea about Hamlet. This is his he isn't just talking to that skull. 210 00:22:36,580 --> 00:22:40,510 He somehow is the skull. He is the gateway to death. At where? 211 00:22:40,510 --> 00:22:45,250 And on the other hand, he says Falstaff is life. Falstaff is the blessing. 212 00:22:45,250 --> 00:22:52,250 Falstaff is life. Falstaff is the blessing. That's Bloom being interviewed by Vanity Fair. 213 00:22:52,250 --> 00:22:55,340 Like blooms, many of these accounts are Falstaff. 214 00:22:55,340 --> 00:23:03,020 Tip over from the specifically personal to the more general and metaphorical, as if Falstaff is very fatness, 215 00:23:03,020 --> 00:23:11,500 makes him exceed individual humanness and take on instead a kind of symbolic function. 216 00:23:11,500 --> 00:23:20,400 That Falstaff has a symbolic function in the play, represents more than a single person, is something Falstaff himself aspires to. 217 00:23:20,400 --> 00:23:29,460 In Henry the Fourth in that scene I've already mentioned in which he and how rehearse the prince's interview with his disapproving father, 218 00:23:29,460 --> 00:23:39,120 Falstaff, as Howe defends Falstaff against the charges, rather, as Morgan and numerous led to critics go on to do. 219 00:23:39,120 --> 00:23:43,170 This is his this is his defence. Sweet Jack Falstaff. Kind. 220 00:23:43,170 --> 00:23:48,220 Jack Falstaff. True. Jack Falstaff. Valiant. Jack Falstaff. 221 00:23:48,220 --> 00:23:54,150 Banish not him by Harry's company. Panish not him by Harry's company. 222 00:23:54,150 --> 00:23:58,770 Banish plump jack and banish all the world. 223 00:23:58,770 --> 00:24:02,670 Banished plump jack and banish all the world with something quite interesting to do semantically. 224 00:24:02,670 --> 00:24:06,750 And the difference between fat and plump there I think. 225 00:24:06,750 --> 00:24:11,910 I mean just note is that Howells claim sorry Falstaff claim to haoles affections. 226 00:24:11,910 --> 00:24:15,960 Here is the claim that he represents more than himself. 227 00:24:15,960 --> 00:24:22,170 He is in some sense all the world. No wonder then he's fat. 228 00:24:22,170 --> 00:24:33,300 The suggestion here is that Falstaff represents a vision of life, a physical, self-centred enjoyment of existence, and we can see this quite easily, 229 00:24:33,300 --> 00:24:42,600 identifying him with popular cultural archetypes such as the Lord of Misrule, the person who presides over merriment and festivity. 230 00:24:42,600 --> 00:24:49,560 For example, look at the kind of ideas which are developed and codified in black teens. 231 00:24:49,560 --> 00:25:02,550 Famous Theory of Carnival. In his highly influential book, Rabelais and His World, Mikhail Bakhtin argues for a socially subversive, 232 00:25:02,550 --> 00:25:07,380 carnivalesque culture of festivals and holidays in premodern culture. 233 00:25:07,380 --> 00:25:08,850 And these are the times in the year. 234 00:25:08,850 --> 00:25:18,780 These are the sort of festive moments where a carnivalesque energy, a suppressed energy, which is physically located somehow let rip. 235 00:25:18,780 --> 00:25:29,420 So the carnival gives expression to the kind of physical energies of the body, the things that are suppressed all the rest of the year. 236 00:25:29,420 --> 00:25:36,180 For Bakhtin, the carnivalesque finds its visual expression in a trope he called the grotesque body, 237 00:25:36,180 --> 00:25:44,880 the grotesque body, a leaky, porous physicality preoccupied with scatological and sexual fulfilment. 238 00:25:44,880 --> 00:25:48,990 A body which challenges notions of decorum and pre-eminently the notion that 239 00:25:48,990 --> 00:25:55,500 the mind controls the body or that the mind is a higher order than the body. 240 00:25:55,500 --> 00:26:00,360 It's quite easy, I think, to see how Falstaff bulky, sweaty, snoring, 241 00:26:00,360 --> 00:26:04,920 farting presence could be related to this bacteria and idea of the grotesque 242 00:26:04,920 --> 00:26:10,590 body and perhaps by extension to the challenging carnivalesque underworld, 243 00:26:10,590 --> 00:26:19,050 which threatens to undermine official authority. That's what by Bakhtin says is it is life affirming and and energetic about Carnival. 244 00:26:19,050 --> 00:26:28,530 It's a challenge to official orthodoxy fatness. Then here becomes joyful, exuberant, provocative, anti-establishment. 245 00:26:28,530 --> 00:26:33,120 The epitome of carnival. Perhaps, as Bardot puts it. 246 00:26:33,120 --> 00:26:40,620 You are so fat, Sir John, that you must needs be out of all compass sense that Falstaff cannot be confined. 247 00:26:40,620 --> 00:26:50,310 And his fatness is one evident symbol of that. So we can see perhaps that Falstaff has moved in this argument from being Shakespeare's invention 248 00:26:50,310 --> 00:26:58,110 of the human to being Shakespeare's symbolic understanding of a carnivalesque social world. 249 00:26:58,110 --> 00:27:01,800 Let's try and see if we can move on with an analogy. 250 00:27:01,800 --> 00:27:09,270 The nearest analogy in contemporary culture that I can imagine for Falstaff is the cartoon father, Homer Simpson. 251 00:27:09,270 --> 00:27:18,840 We all know that Homer Simpson is a loser, wastrel, inadequate father, positively dangerous worker at the Springfield nuclear power plant. 252 00:27:18,840 --> 00:27:23,310 Here are a few choice Homer isms, Lisa. 253 00:27:23,310 --> 00:27:28,860 If you don't like your job. I'm sorry. I wish I could do the accent, but I can't. Lisa, if you don't like your job, you don't strike. 254 00:27:28,860 --> 00:27:33,870 You just go in everyday and do it really half arsed. That's the American way. 255 00:27:33,870 --> 00:27:37,860 Some when you participate in sporting events, it's not whether you win or lose. 256 00:27:37,860 --> 00:27:43,560 It's how drunk you get. If something's hard to do, then it's not worth doing. 257 00:27:43,560 --> 00:27:46,760 Now, these are funny because they are countercultural. They set up that. 258 00:27:46,760 --> 00:27:54,210 They rhetorically set up to establish a statement which seems to demand a pious answer if something's hard to do. 259 00:27:54,210 --> 00:27:58,140 Try harder. It's not whether you win or lose. It's the taking part. 260 00:27:58,140 --> 00:28:03,330 We all know how the sentences are supposed to supposed to finish. 261 00:28:03,330 --> 00:28:07,020 But Homer's rhetoric is funny because it is anticlimactic. 262 00:28:07,020 --> 00:28:17,150 He mimics a kind of bumper sticker or Hallmark card cliche morality, but completes it with his own realist or pathetic conclusion. 263 00:28:17,150 --> 00:28:24,330 And that makes Homer attractive precisely because he is not up to the ideals that our culture bombards as with. 264 00:28:24,330 --> 00:28:30,720 And maybe therefore he allows us similarly to fail to reach those ideals. 265 00:28:30,720 --> 00:28:39,420 Now let's listen to one of Falstaff musings at the end of Act five, scene one amid the chaos of the Battle of Shrewsbury. 266 00:28:39,420 --> 00:28:47,590 The battle between the forces of the King and the rebellion of Hotspur and his associates, Falstaff is suddenly alone onstage for a brief soliloquy. 267 00:28:47,590 --> 00:28:57,840 I think it's his first and only soliloquy in the play. I think we're prepared, we're prepared, and we think we know what's going to happen here. 268 00:28:57,840 --> 00:29:05,790 This is a point heavily cued by the structure of repentance, which in some way governs the whole play, 269 00:29:05,790 --> 00:29:08,250 and then to come back to that idea of repentance in a minute. 270 00:29:08,250 --> 00:29:13,530 But I think it's a point where we expect that the no mark selfish drunk is going to come good. 271 00:29:13,530 --> 00:29:15,910 It's a cliche we're all familiar with, I'm afraid. 272 00:29:15,910 --> 00:29:23,760 An example I could think of is that drunk ex pilot Pams into the Independence Day and blows up the spaceship. 273 00:29:23,760 --> 00:29:27,510 Remember? Anyway, that's that's actually a really, really good example of that. 274 00:29:27,510 --> 00:29:30,840 But I can see it's not it's not quite done. 275 00:29:30,840 --> 00:29:34,560 But you know either the trope I'm talking about someone who is a loser all the way 276 00:29:34,560 --> 00:29:38,280 through and is going to do something heroic and self sacrificial probably at the end, 277 00:29:38,280 --> 00:29:44,010 which is going to make everything okay. I think that's what we're being cute to think Falstaff is going to do. 278 00:29:44,010 --> 00:29:49,380 So what does Falstaff say when he's on stage alone? What his honour. 279 00:29:49,380 --> 00:29:53,710 But then he goes on what? His honour, a word. What is that honour. 280 00:29:53,710 --> 00:29:58,320 Air can on a set to a leg. No. Or an arm? 281 00:29:58,320 --> 00:30:02,370 No. Or take away the grief of a wound. No. 282 00:30:02,370 --> 00:30:10,610 Honour hath no skill in surgery then. No. Falstaff ends by describing this as his catechism. 283 00:30:10,610 --> 00:30:19,350 And nicely ironic and subversive use of a statement of belief. The catechism is the questions and answers by which somebody affirms their faith. 284 00:30:19,350 --> 00:30:28,500 To puncture pious and cliched definitions of honour. And to replace them instead with the pragmatic and selfish concerns of the vulnerable body, 285 00:30:28,500 --> 00:30:32,730 which will not be protected from injury by these lofty ideals like Homer. 286 00:30:32,730 --> 00:30:40,830 That's to say Falstaff sets up a rhetoric of piety, draws on our familiarity with the way we know we ought to behave. 287 00:30:40,830 --> 00:30:47,370 And like Homer deflates that expectation. Telling the self-interested or taboo truth. 288 00:30:47,370 --> 00:30:57,120 It's easy, isn't it, to see how the old Kastle family took exception to this, since the doctrine of pragmatism is so entirely opposite to Sir John O. 289 00:30:57,120 --> 00:31:03,980 Castle's fate. For unflinching adherence to his own deeply held beliefs. 290 00:31:03,980 --> 00:31:09,700 Feldstein's popularity then, I think, must be related to the fact that he is unapologetic and unrepentant. 291 00:31:09,700 --> 00:31:15,740 And I think this does tell us something important about the anti moralistic energies of the stage in this period. 292 00:31:15,740 --> 00:31:21,620 The stage is not moral in this period. I don't think plays are moral and it isn't as what people want to go and see. 293 00:31:21,620 --> 00:31:25,910 The popularity of Falstaff might give us a way into thinking about that. 294 00:31:25,910 --> 00:31:34,960 Of course, the fact that Falstaff neither apologises nor repents allows, perhaps makes inevitable the possibility of a sequel. 295 00:31:34,960 --> 00:31:41,600 But let's look a bit at how repentance and apology do work in Henry. 296 00:31:41,600 --> 00:31:42,100 So, Henry, 297 00:31:42,100 --> 00:31:53,590 the fourth is structured like a number of dramatic and particularly a number of prose texts from the 15 nineties around the theme of the prodigal son. 298 00:31:53,590 --> 00:32:03,970 As Richard Helgason pointed out more than 30 years ago in a book called Elizabethan Prodigals, writing by figures like Gascoine, George Gascoine, 299 00:32:03,970 --> 00:32:11,890 Robert Greene, Thomas Lodge and Philip Sydney, amongst others, use the theme of the prodigal to characterise the narrative voice. 300 00:32:11,890 --> 00:32:21,610 Writers think of themselves as prodigals, whose creative freedom requires them to rebel against paternal or paternalistic authority. 301 00:32:21,610 --> 00:32:26,670 The theme of the protocol comes, of course, from Luke's gospel. You'll remember the parable. 302 00:32:26,670 --> 00:32:33,700 It tells how the youngest son of a rich man decides to claim his share of inheritance before his father's death and then goes 303 00:32:33,700 --> 00:32:43,930 on to spend it in a profligate way in the city brought to absolute penury by his reckless spending and working as a swineherd. 304 00:32:43,930 --> 00:32:52,480 The son realises that his father's servants have a better time than he and vows to return to throw himself on his father's mercy not as his son, 305 00:32:52,480 --> 00:32:59,830 but as his servant. But on his arrival home, the father is so overjoyed to see him that he orders a great feast. 306 00:32:59,830 --> 00:33:02,620 The killing of the fatted calf. 307 00:33:02,620 --> 00:33:12,370 Much to the chagrin of the older brother, who has had no such reward for living loyally and consistently all the time in his father's house. 308 00:33:12,370 --> 00:33:14,710 The theme is a prominent one in Henry the Fourth. 309 00:33:14,710 --> 00:33:21,460 The prince's dedication to access and riot rather than obedience to his father makes the paradigm clear. 310 00:33:21,460 --> 00:33:27,040 Implicit in the theme of the prodigal son is the expectation of reformation. 311 00:33:27,040 --> 00:33:36,110 And in Henry the Fourth. The play makes it quite clear that how has this teleology firmly in mind? 312 00:33:36,110 --> 00:33:40,610 At the end of Act one, scene two, how delivers an unexpected soliloquy. 313 00:33:40,610 --> 00:33:48,890 He's been on stage in a kind of prose back and forth, pleading with foul Falstaff, but with without the other tavern companions, 314 00:33:48,890 --> 00:33:57,590 laughing and joking, setting up a trick where they're going to rob some travellers. 315 00:33:57,590 --> 00:34:10,040 That's been going on for quite some time, and it's it's a scene which is really effectively contrasted with a very sort of gloomy, serious, 316 00:34:10,040 --> 00:34:15,230 controlled environment of the court, which we get it act one scene, one side, 317 00:34:15,230 --> 00:34:19,490 once in two, seems to work to contrast with that in every way that the subject matter. 318 00:34:19,490 --> 00:34:25,160 The tone of prose versus verse and so on. 319 00:34:25,160 --> 00:34:35,330 But at the end of the scene, all the time, companions leave the stage and house stays behind to deliver a long speech about his intentions. 320 00:34:35,330 --> 00:34:45,230 This is an important speech. I'm going to read the whole thing. I know you all and will a while uphold the honour, yolked, humour of your idleness. 321 00:34:45,230 --> 00:34:52,610 Yet here in will imitate the son who doth permit the base contagious clouds to smother up his beauty from the world. 322 00:34:52,610 --> 00:34:56,690 That one he plays again to be himself being wanted. 323 00:34:56,690 --> 00:35:04,060 He may be more wandered out by breaking through the foul and ugly mists of vapours that did seem to strangle him. 324 00:35:04,060 --> 00:35:10,320 If all the year were playing, holidays to sport would be as tedious as to work. 325 00:35:10,320 --> 00:35:15,590 But when they seldom come, they wished for. And nothing pleases but rare accidents. 326 00:35:15,590 --> 00:35:20,570 So when this loose behaviour I throw off and pay the debt I never promised said. 327 00:35:20,570 --> 00:35:24,770 By how much better than my word I am by so much. 328 00:35:24,770 --> 00:35:33,680 Shall I falsify men's hopes and like bright metal on a sullen ground, my reformation glittering all my fault. 329 00:35:33,680 --> 00:35:39,890 She'll show more goodly and attract more eyes than that which hath no foil to set it off. 330 00:35:39,890 --> 00:35:48,740 I also offend to make offence a skill redeeming time when men think least I will. 331 00:35:48,740 --> 00:35:54,140 Now the language of reform is interesting here, but so too is the language of manipulation. 332 00:35:54,140 --> 00:35:59,120 How is stage managing his reformation for maximum effect? 333 00:35:59,120 --> 00:36:01,220 He's a self-conscious protocol. 334 00:36:01,220 --> 00:36:10,010 Who knows that the worse his behaviour, the greater the sense of welcome relief at his reformation and the language of this revelation. 335 00:36:10,010 --> 00:36:17,000 The end of act runs into his distinctive set aside from the short, informal prose of the foregoing scene. 336 00:36:17,000 --> 00:36:22,200 Whole speech immediately echoes the blank verse world of the court. 337 00:36:22,200 --> 00:36:27,480 That's that's been an act one, scene one, and it's going to be in the scene immediately following Act one, scene three. 338 00:36:27,480 --> 00:36:36,360 There's a kind of chilling reassurance in the ease with which how slips into the blank verse of political control and expediency. 339 00:36:36,360 --> 00:36:40,710 I'm only slumming it in the tavern. I know my place in time. 340 00:36:40,710 --> 00:36:45,030 I will emerge to claim it in part, of course. 341 00:36:45,030 --> 00:36:52,770 This is the expected teleology of the prodigal son narrative that the prodigal son goes home and repents and in moral and structural terms. 342 00:36:52,770 --> 00:36:59,820 The play needs to end. The play needs to end with howls, repentance and reconciliation with his father. 343 00:36:59,820 --> 00:37:01,020 To some extent the play does. 344 00:37:01,020 --> 00:37:11,640 And in that way, how assumes the proper role of the Prince of Wales fighting alongside his father and protecting him from attack by the Scot Douglas. 345 00:37:11,640 --> 00:37:18,150 His father's gratitude at being saved from Douglas. Thou hast redeemed thy lost opinion. 346 00:37:18,150 --> 00:37:25,440 Thou hast redeemed thy lost opinion directly linked to the language of House speech forat previously. 347 00:37:25,440 --> 00:37:32,190 But what also happens in this scene is that the play brings its two father figures into a kind of juxtaposition. 348 00:37:32,190 --> 00:37:37,280 And that's where Falstaff comes back into our story. 349 00:37:37,280 --> 00:37:44,000 I've already suggested that Falstaff own repentance is cued by the play's thematic and generic structure, 350 00:37:44,000 --> 00:37:48,290 but that this expectation is decisively subverted by false. 351 00:37:48,290 --> 00:38:00,240 Confident selfishness. Unlike how that's to say, Falstaff does not bend himself to normative political, ethical or familial values. 352 00:38:00,240 --> 00:38:07,300 Related to this, I think, is his role as an alternative father to how? 353 00:38:07,300 --> 00:38:08,690 In the play, its opening scene. 354 00:38:08,690 --> 00:38:18,560 The king wishes that the brave Hotspur, also called Harry were revealed to be his own lost son, changed with the wastrel prince. 355 00:38:18,560 --> 00:38:21,680 How by fairies in the cradle. 356 00:38:21,680 --> 00:38:32,720 So if King Henry wishes for an alternative son, so how himself wishes for an alternative father in absenting himself from court. 357 00:38:32,720 --> 00:38:42,590 He establishes himself in the alternative locus of East cheap, disreputable location associated largely with prostitution in the Elizabethan period. 358 00:38:42,590 --> 00:38:53,870 Hence the irony of Middletons titled A Chaste Made in Cheapside and how establishes himself in that alternative locus with an alternative monarch, 359 00:38:53,870 --> 00:39:04,320 Falstaff. How is choice as a protocol, then, is in fact a choice between father figures, which father does he returned to at the end? 360 00:39:04,320 --> 00:39:09,730 Douglas the Scot fights both Henry the fourth unfold staff in Act five, scene four, 361 00:39:09,730 --> 00:39:15,820 bringing them together in a way which is perhaps inevitable for the moral and ethical choices of the plots. 362 00:39:15,820 --> 00:39:25,570 Final resolution two adjacent stage directions can give us a sense of the difference between these adjacent encounters. 363 00:39:25,570 --> 00:39:29,530 So the first is Douglas and Henry, the fourth fighting. 364 00:39:29,530 --> 00:39:37,450 They fight the king being in danger. Enter the Prince of Wales and then the other one. 365 00:39:37,450 --> 00:39:42,190 Enter Douglas. He fights with Falstaff. He falls down as if he were dead. 366 00:39:42,190 --> 00:39:51,140 He Falstaff the prince kill. Percy. Both Douglass's triumphs are taken from him, that's to say in the first. 367 00:39:51,140 --> 00:39:57,360 How comes in to save his father? And in the second, Falstaff drops down, pretending to be dead. 368 00:39:57,360 --> 00:40:04,890 Fathers multiply in this sequence just as Henry the forth battle strategy involves sending numerous doppelgangers out into the field. 369 00:40:04,890 --> 00:40:08,700 Douglas has already lost another time by killing a fake king. 370 00:40:08,700 --> 00:40:19,290 So Walter Blunt dressed in the king's armour. So fathers and father figures are echoed in this scene and none of them can quite be killed. 371 00:40:19,290 --> 00:40:23,070 What's striking is that how aligns himself with his royal father. 372 00:40:23,070 --> 00:40:31,950 But he does not quite take the corollary, the step of distancing himself entirely from Falstaff at the end of the play. 373 00:40:31,950 --> 00:40:36,240 He has the opportunity to reveal Falstaff as a shameless and dishonourable coward. 374 00:40:36,240 --> 00:40:43,710 Falstaff is claiming Hotspur as his own victim, stabbing his call his corpse callously and dragging it off to claim reward. 375 00:40:43,710 --> 00:40:47,500 How knows that he himself killed Falstaff and that this is untrue. 376 00:40:47,500 --> 00:40:53,210 But he does not take the opportunity to reveal a full staff, nor to punish him at the end of the play. 377 00:40:53,210 --> 00:40:59,590 Then he is still caught between the two alternative fathers. 378 00:40:59,590 --> 00:41:02,860 That haoles own reformation is compromised by this ambivalence, 379 00:41:02,860 --> 00:41:12,100 I think is made clear by the existence of the sequel in part to how reunites with Falstaff and his behaviour continues to disappoint his royal father. 380 00:41:12,100 --> 00:41:17,560 So he he falls back from the decision he seems to have made at the end of this play, 381 00:41:17,560 --> 00:41:22,420 perhaps Falstaff physical size and the difficulty of denying him come together here. 382 00:41:22,420 --> 00:41:29,500 Falstaff is fat, and that makes it more difficult for how to turn away from him, as he, as he says himself, 383 00:41:29,500 --> 00:41:36,070 is a kind of vise figure who represents the appeal and the allure of the way Falstaff should not behave. 384 00:41:36,070 --> 00:41:41,770 And the bigger he is, the more compelling and convincing that representation is. 385 00:41:41,770 --> 00:41:46,210 But the moral thrust of Henry the Fourth and its dramatic energies are in a conflict. 386 00:41:46,210 --> 00:41:51,070 And it's similar to the conflict we saw in the lecture about Antony and Cleopatra. 387 00:41:51,070 --> 00:41:57,640 You remember in that play the sort of historical logic. In some ways, the rational logic is that Caesar has got to win at the end. 388 00:41:57,640 --> 00:42:01,450 But the dramatic logic is that we don't we're not interested in Rome. 389 00:42:01,450 --> 00:42:06,340 We're interested in Egypt. Something. So there's something similar here. 390 00:42:06,340 --> 00:42:15,640 A morally conclusive ending requires the rejection or defeat of Falstaff, but a dramatically satisfying one does not want to let him go. 391 00:42:15,640 --> 00:42:19,210 It may be that Shakespeare has actually been too successful in this play. 392 00:42:19,210 --> 00:42:28,190 He's allowed the play's antagonist, Falstaff, to take over the world and take over Falstaff certainly did. 393 00:42:28,190 --> 00:42:32,150 A collection called the Shakespeare Illusion Book made in the 1930s, 394 00:42:32,150 --> 00:42:38,700 which is a collection of allusions to Shakespeare and to Shakespeare's works during his lifetime and in the immediate aftermath, 395 00:42:38,700 --> 00:42:46,640 is completely dominated by references to Falstaff. Indeed, at the top of the index to the book, this book of Allusions to Shakespeare. 396 00:42:46,640 --> 00:42:51,010 It says, For the purposes of this index, Falstaff is treated as a work. 397 00:42:51,010 --> 00:42:53,810 So for the purposes of this index, Falstaff is treated as a work. 398 00:42:53,810 --> 00:42:59,660 There are more direct references to Falstaff than to all the other plays put together. 399 00:42:59,660 --> 00:43:04,460 Amongst the entries are comments in plays by Messenger, Middleton and Suckling. 400 00:43:04,460 --> 00:43:10,880 But there's also more kind of private correspondence and references, 401 00:43:10,880 --> 00:43:16,340 including the Countess of Southhampton gossipy postscript in a letter to her husband. 402 00:43:16,340 --> 00:43:17,090 This is what she says. 403 00:43:17,090 --> 00:43:25,070 All I can, all the news I can send you that I think will make you marry is that Sir John Falstaff is by his Mrs. Dame Paint Pot maid, 404 00:43:25,070 --> 00:43:27,170 father of a goodly Miller's thumb. 405 00:43:27,170 --> 00:43:34,940 Does using John Falstaff begin with talk about a fat person may know who has become who has had a child or made someone pregnant. 406 00:43:34,940 --> 00:43:41,930 Then maybe they maybe talking about the figure who of the family, the old castle family. 407 00:43:41,930 --> 00:43:50,490 But it may just be talking about a sort of fat person for whom Sir John Falstaff has become a kind of nickname. 408 00:43:50,490 --> 00:43:59,570 So Falstaff self-interest then and his unorthodox pragmatism made him an unlikely but an undelete deniable Elizabethan heroes. 409 00:43:59,570 --> 00:44:04,530 And that may suggest that those versions of these plays, Henry, the fourth part one and two, 410 00:44:04,530 --> 00:44:13,410 sometimes with bits of merry wives of Windsor that put him at the centre, are echoing the Elizabethan reception of these plays. 411 00:44:13,410 --> 00:44:23,970 OK, so so when critics like Cannon call the Henry Henry plays from Henry the fourth Henry Henry ad on the model of the Aeneid. 412 00:44:23,970 --> 00:44:30,180 They're suggesting that Henry is at the centre of that. But perhaps we need something which is more like a kind of full Staffy ad, 413 00:44:30,180 --> 00:44:39,360 rather like Welles's Chimes at Midnight, The Greats of lyrical tragicomic film by Orson Welles. 414 00:44:39,360 --> 00:44:46,020 Combining Henry the fourth Part one and two with Hal is a very marginal, boyish, puppyish kind, 415 00:44:46,020 --> 00:44:56,130 foolish figure and Falstaff as the central figure at the centre of our attention, played, of course, by Welles himself. 416 00:44:56,130 --> 00:45:02,970 Putting Falstaff at the heart of the play substitutes Shakespeare's conflicted moral Tell US of the Prodigal with 417 00:45:02,970 --> 00:45:11,670 the critical reception of the play that wants more Falstaff part of the problem for part two of Henry the Fourth. 418 00:45:11,670 --> 00:45:15,930 Aside from the intrinsic formal problem of being a sequel that we're familiar 419 00:45:15,930 --> 00:45:21,120 with from Hollywood is that it has to reconcile the prodigal son narrative. 420 00:45:21,120 --> 00:45:26,190 How has to separate himself from Falstaff with the ongoing popularity of Falstaff himself? 421 00:45:26,190 --> 00:45:34,740 So how has to separate himself from a figure that everybody loves? That's the that's the kind of conundrum of pop to the end of Henry. 422 00:45:34,740 --> 00:45:39,380 The fourth part one is no ending at all. How and his father have been reconciled. 423 00:45:39,380 --> 00:45:43,080 And contrary to the rumours that he wanted to kill his father and take away the throne, 424 00:45:43,080 --> 00:45:50,500 he had saved his father from death on the battlefield at Shrewsbury. But just as this battle is not the whole war, 425 00:45:50,500 --> 00:45:57,510 and just as the last lines of the play see the king reorganising his forces to continue the fight against the rebels. 426 00:45:57,510 --> 00:46:04,500 So to Falstaff is an unresolved and perhaps an unresolvable figure in the encounter with Douglas. 427 00:46:04,500 --> 00:46:15,600 We heard about before Falstaff falls down as if he were dead and he lies on the stage amongst the battle casualties for some moments, 428 00:46:15,600 --> 00:46:20,580 while Howe delivers his eulogy on the dead Hotspur and then on Falstaff himself. 429 00:46:20,580 --> 00:46:28,870 There's a last nod by How to Falstaff. Sighs Could not all this flash keep in a little life? 430 00:46:28,870 --> 00:46:33,580 How leaves the stage believing his old acquaintance to be dead. 431 00:46:33,580 --> 00:46:38,980 Which the stage direction reads Falstaff. Rise up. 432 00:46:38,980 --> 00:46:44,140 The word rises is just somehow much more than gets up or stands up. 433 00:46:44,140 --> 00:46:50,110 There is some sort of resurrecting of energy, some vitality in the idea of rising up. 434 00:46:50,110 --> 00:46:54,490 Falstaff seems to be unkillable, unlike the other figures in the play. 435 00:46:54,490 --> 00:46:58,690 Who who lie down and I mean, they're all die down on their pretending to be dead. 436 00:46:58,690 --> 00:47:03,700 But Falstaff knows he's pretending Hotspur. It is. 437 00:47:03,700 --> 00:47:07,930 We know Hotspurs pretending, but we have to pretend. We don't think he is pretending to pretend. 438 00:47:07,930 --> 00:47:14,260 We think he's really dead. But Falstaff becomes in a way, as Bloom might say, the spirit of life. 439 00:47:14,260 --> 00:47:18,490 It sells itself from amongst the dead of the battle. 440 00:47:18,490 --> 00:47:24,160 Falstaff resists the historical process that would kill him to. 441 00:47:24,160 --> 00:47:30,430 It kind of makes sense of of haoles opening remarks to Falstaff, Falstaff asks him what time it is. 442 00:47:30,430 --> 00:47:34,300 He says, Why on earth you need to know what time it is. And you never do anything. 443 00:47:34,300 --> 00:47:39,120 There is an idea that Falstaff is a kind of figure outside time or Amitay time 444 00:47:39,120 --> 00:47:43,780 at time is the is the act is the access to field in which history happens. 445 00:47:43,780 --> 00:47:51,520 And Falstaff is immune to that. He's not part of that world. So Falstaff is not really a historical figure. 446 00:47:51,520 --> 00:47:55,330 And that may be accidental, that maybe because Old Castle had to be changed into Falstaff. 447 00:47:55,330 --> 00:47:59,160 But the result of that is to have the most vital figure in the play. 448 00:47:59,160 --> 00:48:07,300 A figure who is not part of or constrained by history. It's almost as if he operates in a different world from the other characters. 449 00:48:07,300 --> 00:48:13,390 W.H. Auden argued that Falstaff could not fully inhabit the world of Chronical histories, his values, 450 00:48:13,390 --> 00:48:21,100 his language, and perhaps we might think, above all his fatness are all in excess of historical process. 451 00:48:21,100 --> 00:48:26,260 As David Kasdan puts it, Falstaff is never merely the servant of the historical plot. 452 00:48:26,260 --> 00:48:32,560 He is never merely the servant of the historical plot. And in that, I think, is a really interesting figure of a group of characters. 453 00:48:32,560 --> 00:48:38,860 I've become more conscious of writing these lectures, characters who won't play the part that's been set for them, 454 00:48:38,860 --> 00:48:46,240 or who resist the tyranny or the control of the plays or playwright or or directorial figures. 455 00:48:46,240 --> 00:48:51,490 We talked about those in relation to The Tempest last week. 456 00:48:51,490 --> 00:49:00,430 Bertram, who who has a kind of romantic plot written for him by the king and all's well that ends well but doesn't want to do it. 457 00:49:00,430 --> 00:49:07,370 Barney dying perhaps in measure for measure someone who is supposed to be killed in order to enable the plot to keep going and just says, no, I won't. 458 00:49:07,370 --> 00:49:14,910 Am I going to do so? Characters who Falstaff then becomes a character who resists the plot in which he finds himself. 459 00:49:14,910 --> 00:49:24,390 So false starts fatness is then a challenge to historical pragmatism, to the leanness of cause and effect, a kind of a. historical excess. 460 00:49:24,390 --> 00:49:32,520 Just as he as a character impedes the patterns of succession that structure historical progress. 461 00:49:32,520 --> 00:49:37,620 So false starts factness, I think is at the centre of a nexus of quite paradoxical associations. 462 00:49:37,620 --> 00:49:49,260 They make him up once more individualistic and more communal, more literally more of a person and less symbolically of one. 463 00:49:49,260 --> 00:49:56,910 His size registers something of his resistance to confinement moral, ethical, historical, generic. 464 00:49:56,910 --> 00:50:02,450 Hence perhaps his reappearance in accommodate merry wives of Windsor. 465 00:50:02,450 --> 00:50:04,980 So I've tried in this lecture, as in previous ones, 466 00:50:04,980 --> 00:50:13,260 to show how an apparently reductive question might take us into issues about the play structure, its sources and its analogues. 467 00:50:13,260 --> 00:50:19,290 And then briefly, it's reimagining on film. Next term, I'm going to lecture on comedy of errors. 468 00:50:19,290 --> 00:50:34,540 Richard the third. All's well that ends well. King John King Lear and parallelise.