Falstaff in Gloucestershire

  Half-way through the play, just after Shakespeare has brought on the ill King for the first time (3.1), the action shifts unexpectedly from the city to the country, where life moves to the rhythms of the agricultural year. The back-biting worlds of court and tavern yield to a world of rural foison and good fellowship; political self-interest, to hospitality and community. This depiction of rural values deepens the play’s investigation of English society at a moment of radical social and economic change, the 1590s, when agrarian culture was falling victim to bad crops, enclosures and the prospect of employment in towns and cities. To this world Falstaff comes, stopping at the estate of Robert Shallow, Esquire, to recruit soldiers for the war. The play never returns to the tavern: Shakespeare’s inspiration was to replace it with what looks, at first glance, to be a more Edenic way of life – with characters whose apparent innocence sets them apart from their more dissolute London counterparts, and through whom he reinforces themes of remembrance, self-deception and human folly, but in a new key. It is as if, having allowed Falstaff to play out the comedy of the tavern world even without the catalyst of the Prince in the first two acts, Shakespeare decided to move him to a world where his eminence (‘now Sir John’, says Shallow, 3.2.25) will be honoured and allow him to exploit his wit and greed without fear of retribution, as was the risk in a London where the Lord Chief Justice held sway.

  At the centre of this world are two country justices, Shallow and his cousin Silence, who, with their appropriate charactonyms, provincial speech patterns and idiosyncratic memories are among the most indelible portraits Shakespeare ever painted. Shallow is an old man who vainly reminisces about his days as a student at Clement’s Inn, one of London’s Inns of Chancery, where, he imagines, ‘they will talk of mad Shallow yet’ (14 –15). He names his friends there as if they were present, ‘swinge-bucklers’ all (22); he recounts their rowdy escapades and visits to the ‘bona robas’ (23); and with a memory for detail as keen as the Hostess’s, he brags about ‘a merry night’ he spent ‘in the Windmill in Saint George’s Field’ (195 –7) and about an epic fight he once had with one ‘Samson Stockfish, a fruiterer, behind Gray’s Inn’ (32–3). He also recalls that ‘Jack Falstaff’ was then just ‘a boy, and page to Thomas Mowbray’ (25 – 6), a detail which fixes the age of Falstaff, who in Part One admits to being already ‘threescore’ (2.4.413), at seventy or near, since Shallow was at Clement’s Inn ‘fifty-five year ago’ (Part Two, 3.2.210).62 Shallow’s anecdotal self-invention reveals a longing for a past that is irrecoverable because it is not the stuff of history, but a ‘private or collective mythology’ (Boym, xv) born of imagination and shared only with others of a sympathetic mind. Shallow’s ‘Ha, cousin Silence, that thou hadst seen that that this knight and I have seen’ is indulgently confirmed by Falstaff’s ‘We have heard the chimes at midnight, Master Shallow’ (3.2.211–15), yet Falstaff consents to this mythology with an eye to his own advantage: he recognizes it for what it is, an old man’s foolish fantasy.63

  Shallow’s yokefellow of equity, Justice Silence, is, unlike Shallow, a man of few words. He is presumably meant to be somewhat younger than Shallow, since he speaks of still having a son at Oxford ‘to [his] cost’ (12), though he is often played for comic effect as a man in extreme dotage, even older than Shallow. Nevertheless, Silence is familiar with Shallow’s history at Clement’s Inn, no doubt from having been regaled with his exploits repeatedly: ‘You were called lusty Shallow then, cousin’ (16) he comments, feeding him the line like a straight man to a comic. What characterizes their conversation most vividly, however, is the fine equipoise of Shallow’s memory of a past he has embellished and his blunt acknowledgement of the present reality –‘Jesu, Jesu, the mad days that I have spent! And to see how many of my old acquaintance are dead’ (33– 4) – and, in the next breath, the juxtaposition of that acknowledgement with his vital interest in animal husbandry: ‘Death, as the psalmist saith, is certain to all; all shall die. How a good yoke of bullocks at Stamford fair?’ (37–8). The delicate humour and pathos with which an old man’s recognition of mortality is poised against his undimmed will to live are unmatched in Shakespeare’s canon.

  In soliloquy, however, Falstaff casts a cold eye on the vanity of Shallow’s reminiscences – ‘Lord, how subject we old men are to this vice of lying!’ (301–2) – witheringly exposing the self-delusion of a man who remembers himself as a lothario but who, in Falstaff’s scathing corrective, ‘was the very genius of famine, yet lecherous as a monkey, and the whores called him mandrake’ (312–14). A mandrake was an herb whose root, according to Gerard’s Herball, resembled ‘the legs of a man, with other parts of his body, adioining thereto as the priuie parts’, and was thought since ancient times to be an aphrodisiac (Gerard, 2.280). If the whores thus mocked Shallow’s insatiable lust, Falstaff’s wordplay calls his taste into question as well: ‘’A came ever in the rearward of the fashion’ (314 –15), he asserts, suggesting that Shallow was rustic in his habits and dress but also implying that he may have practised buggery – a common prejudice about sexual preferences in the country (Partridge, 145).

  Having thoroughly exposed Shallow as a fantasist, Falstaff vows to ‘make him a philosopher’s two stones to me’ (328). Alchemists believed that one of these stones would confer eternal youth and the other would transmute base metals into gold. Since Falstaff intends to grow rich by Shallow and is presumably interested in only one of the stones, his mention of two stones increases the likelihood that he is playing on stones as slang for a man’s testicles. In other words, Falstaff swears to have Shallow by the balls – a situation in which Shallow, eager to buy a friend at court, is a willing accomplice.

  Yet Falstaff’s cynical appraisal does not erase the fact that through characters such as Shallow, Silence and the Hostess, Shakespeare gives greater prominence than in any other history play to the idiosyncratic accounts of ‘old folk, Time’s doting chronicles’ (4.3.126), whose nostalgic ramblings preserve a popular history that has nothing to do with weighty concerns of state. Personal anecdotes and reminiscences such as theirs were kept alive by an oral tradition that made their stories more ephemeral and less regulated than the stories recorded by chroniclers. As Adam Fox observes, ‘In many of the reminiscences of elder inhabitants is a nostalgia for the old days [when] … hospitality was greater and life was simpler… . To this extent there could be something inherently subversive about popular perceptions of the past’ (221–2).64 Though perhaps not subversive, the oral memory-histories of older characters in Part Two, in their disorderly accumulation of details and local topological references, nevertheless resist incorporation into the play’s dramatization of dynastic struggle in England’s Plantagenet past. ‘What might be construed as an irrelevant detour from the linear syntax of political history,’ writes Alison Thorne, ‘reveals itself, from a different standpoint, as a door opening briefly to areas of social history that were largely occluded by the state-centred focus of most Tudor historiography’ (58–9). In doing so, it allows the histories of commoners to stand independent of, and rival in importance, the chronicle history by which the Tudors tried to forge a coherent narrative of English identity.65

  To the idyllic prosperity of Shallow’s farm Falstaff brings the predatory ethos of an ‘old pike’ (3.2.329). Where in Part One he admits in soliloquy to having recruited ‘slaves as ragged as Lazarus in the painted cloth’ (4.2.21–2) because other more able-bodied recruits have ‘bought out their services’ (28), in Part Two Shakespeare dramatizes that process.66 Falstaff carries the values of greed and self-interest with him from London to the country. His recruitment of foot soldiers is tainted by a scheme to make money in which he seeks to conscript men who will be able to bribe their way out of service; and it is unsurprising that they should wish to do so, because, as Will Sharpe observes (‘Geography’), these men live far from the centres of power, are ignorant of what is going on in Westminster, have no investment in ideological conflict, and thus are mere pawns in a war waged by selfish nobles. When the ablest among them – the yeomen farmers Bullcalf and Mouldy, who have no appetite for fighting – bribe Bardolph to let them go, Falstaff proves guilty of the same corrupt practices that brought shame to Elizabethan commanders whose abuses were catalogued in military conduct books.67

  Indeed, a letter written by Justices of the Peace in Gloucestershire, recorded on 25 May 1593, inveighed against frauds in recruitment perpetrated by ‘inferior officers … who for their own private gain have … sold, freed and exchaunged the most part of al such as were men of anie sufficienye and habillitie before suxh time as they were delivered over to their captaines to be imbarqued and sent over [to Normandy and Brittany]’.68 Although levying men for service had become so difficult by the late sixteenth century that soldiers were being recruited from prisons or by means of the press-gang, corruption among recruiters was never condoned, and Falstaff’s behaviour, however comic, is morally censurable. Even worse than taking bribes, Falstaff is guilty of taking ‘dead pay’, that is, entering in his muster book the names of dead or non-existent men (called ‘shadows’) whose earnings he would then pocket for himself. His punning confession at the expense of the recruit named Shadow – ‘Shadow will serve for summer. Prick him, for we have a number of shadows fill up the muster book’ (3.2.134 – 6) – reveals just how brazenly he abuses the King’s press. As a result of such fraudulence, Falstaff winds up selecting, over Shallow’s protest, only the least physically able recruits for service: the emaciated Wart, the ‘half-faced fellow’ Shadow (265 – 6), and the women’s tailor Feeble. Although his justification for doing so – ‘Care I for the limb, the thews, the stature, bulk and big assemblance of a man? Give me the spirit, Master Shallow!’ (259 – 61) – draws perversely on an argument made by Elizabethan theorists that ‘courage & minde is as much to bee respected as the bodye’,69 Falstaff’s recruitment practices are nonetheless reprehensible; for in effect, he betrays a lack of concern for the war effort and is willing to sacrifice anyone to it but himself.

  14 Second part of King Henry the Fourth, act iii, scene ii. Justice Shallow’s seat in Gloucestershire. Falstaff to Wart: ‘Come, manage me your caliver’ [3.2.273]. Painted by J. Durno; engraved by T. Ryder; published by J. & J. Boydell in 1798

  The tissue of bawdy wordplay that served as social critique in the tavern world also underscores the immorality of the recruiting scene. The most common verb for recruiting was ‘prick’, and Falstaff’s repeated command for Bardolph to ‘Prick him’ – that is, to mark down a recruit’s name in the impressment log – fills yeomen and householders such as Mouldy and Bullcalf with dread. But ‘prick’ is also a word on whose bawdy potential Shakespeare plays relentlessly. Mouldy, for example, employs it in the interest of self-preservation: ‘I was pricked well enough before, and you could have let me alone,’ he protests (112–13); and while ‘pricked’ here could simply mean henpecked, it more suggestively refers to his sexual endowment. As a ribald pun, it alerts the listener to continued wordplay in the next line, when he complains that his ‘old dame will be undone now for one to do her husbandry and her drudgery’ (113–14). For a yeoman, husbandry and drudgery signify farm work; but they had bawdy double meanings as well. Husbandry referred to fulfilling a man’s conjugal role, and drudgery was a comic term for the sexual labour involved in cuckolding another man, as Shakespeare would use it in All’s Well: ‘He that ears my land spares my team, and gives me leave to in the crop. If I be his cuckold, he’s my drudge’ (1.3.44 – 6). Without such labour, Mouldy argues, his ‘old lady’ will be, like the Hostess at 2.1.22, ‘undone,’ the now-unearthed pun on ‘do’ intimating that she will go without sex in his absence.70 Although Mouldy’s second mention of his ‘old dame’ later in the scene indicates that he is referring to his mother (3.2.229 –32), his first use of it encourages the listener to infer that he means his wife, making his wordplay on husbandry and drudgery, in retrospect, look deceptively opportunistic. Despite the apparent innocence of the rural society on view, then, Mouldy betrays the same selfishness and duplicity as his counterparts in the city. Indeed, the vein of wordplay that runs through the recruitment scene creates a subtext of cultural debasement at odds with the nostalgic ideals of a virtuous country life – hard work, honesty and loyalty – which the scene ostensibly depicts.

  For his part, Falstaff employs wordplay with a ‘callous and unimaginative cratylism’ (A. Barton, 109) to deride the recruits as mercilessly as he has done the Hostess and Doll: Wart is of ‘ragged appearance’ (262); Shadow is likely to be ‘a cold soldier’ (124); and it is time for Mouldy to be ‘used’ (107). His mockery of Feeble the women’s tailor is particularly demeaning. The term ‘tailor’ itself was a sexual pun signifying a fornicator, a man who used his tail or penis to penetrate a customer. Falstaff thus makes Feeble the butt of an easy sexual joke when he warns Shallow about the danger of pricking him, for ‘if he had been a man’s tailor, he’d a’ pricked you’ (153– 4). Yet Feeble is the one recruit to express a sense of patriotic duty as he rejects the option to buy out his service: ‘We owe God a death. I’ll ne’er bear a base mind … No man’s too good to serve ’s prince’ (236 –8), a proverbial sentiment that echoes the Prince’s admonition to Falstaff at Shrewsbury, ‘Why, thou owest God a death’ (Part One 5.1.126). With a fine Shakespearean irony, Feeble, the least likely of the recruits, embodies the moral integrity which one is hard pressed to find among characters elsewhere in the play.

  Yet the sublime comedy of the final two Gloucestershire scenes, in which Falstaff has returned to ‘fetch off’ (3.2.300) the two country justices, offsets to a degree the cynicism of the recruitment scene with a celebration of rural plenty and unfeigned friendship. They offer an autumnal depiction of an after-supper gathering to enjoy pippins of Shallow‘s ‘own graffing’ (5.3.2–3), to mellow in the effects of drinking too much sack, and to listen to Silence, a man of few words until now, sing irrepressibly about the joys of wine and women. In these scenes, Part Two recaptures to a degree the festive energy that characterized the tavern scenes in Part One. Insisting that Falstaff stay to dinner, Shallow sputters a welcome with repetitions characteristic of old people’s speech: ‘I will not excuse you. You shall not be excused. Excuses shall not be admitted. There is no excuse shall serve. You shall not be excused’ (5.1.4 – 6). He tempts Falstaff with the abundance of a prosperous farm, instructing his man Davy to have the cook prepare his choicest viands – ‘Some pigeons, Davy, a couple of short-legged hens, a joint of mutton and any pretty little tiny kickshaws’ (24 – 6).

  15 Silence (Adrian Scarborough), Falstaff (Michael Gambon), Davy (Ian Gelder) and Shallow (John Wood) at table enjoying a rural repast (5.3) in a production directed by Nicholas Hytner on the Olivier stage at the National Theatre, 2005

  Life’s pleasures are celebrated most unexpectedly by Silence, however, who in performance often steals the limelight from the other comic characters, his loquaciousness all the funnier because so unexpected. Happily drunk, he sings snatches of old songs that recall a time of festive indulgence:

  Do nothing but eat and make good cheer,

  And praise God for the merry year,

  When flesh is cheap and females dear,

  And lusty lads roam here and there

  So merrily,

  And ever among so merrily.

  (5.3.17–22)

  Silence is a man at peace with himself and the world. ‘I have been merry twice and once ere now’ (39 – 40), he reminisces before being carried to bed, and that reminiscence – for once, probably unembellished – is both sad and endearing. In Silence’s inebriation the play’s nostalgia for a bygone England is most humorously portrayed: he repeatedly sings the refrain ‘Be merry, be merry’ (36), and the merriment of the scene attests that festive practices associated with Catholicism persisted most strongly among the rural laity, those ‘merry reprobates’ who, in Part Two, ‘are more precisely associated with calendrical celebrations’ of ‘the old church’ than any characters in Part One.71 The longing for holiday unfettered by the restraints associated with the Reformation was a subversive feature of England’s religious landscape in the late sixteenth century, and such longing is most palpable in the Gloucestershire scenes when the guests at the feast not only recall a merrier time, but anticipate that England may once again be merry when Harry is crowned king.

  Even these mellow scenes of festivity, however, are not without complication. Shallow does not exercise the authority over his servants that he should, and, as a minor official of the crown, his dispensation of justice is far from unimpeachable. His man Davy, who undertakes the proper management of the farm and alone has the perspicacity to recognize the lousy condition of Falstaff’s men, solicits Shallow to fix a lawsuit on behalf of his friend Visor. Although Davy grants that Visor is a ‘knave’ (5.1.39) whose cause is unjust, he assumes that his loyal service to Shallow entitles him to request a legal favour ‘once or twice in a quarter’ (42– 6); and Shallow assures him that Visor shall ‘have no wrong’ (50). This evidence of moral laxity and judicial corruption may seem incongruous in an idyllic England whose values seem to contrast those of the court, but as Falstaff points out in his soliloquy, proportion and degree are not kept in Shallow’s household: servants bear themselves with authority and justice obliges them (63– 6). This topsy-turvy world stands ironically at odds with the myth of England’s golden age and with the court of King Henry, where, by the end of the play, hierarchy will be affirmed, legitimate succession upheld and the Lord Chief Justice asked to maintain the rule of law. Moreover, when Falstaff bilks Shallow of a thousand pounds, one need not view Shallow as an innocent victim, for with that money he hopes to ensure favour at court when Falstaff’s minion comes to power. Indeed, Shallow’s determination to ‘use [Falstaff] well’, for ‘A friend i’th’ court is better than a penny in purse’ (28–9), attests to an ulterior motive for Shallow’s hospitality, as does his flattery of Bardolph by calling him ‘Master’ (5.3.58, 63) in anticipation of his preferment under the new King.72 Shallow’s aspirations are as self-serving as Falstaff’s, his bribery as bald as Mouldy’s or Bullcalf’s. The dishonour of the country justice stands in marked contrast to the integrity of the Lord Chief Justice, who acts on his belief that true justice is blind to self-interest, bribes and threats.