THE FAT KNIGHT AND POST-MODERN VALUES

A grand new production of Henry IV parts 1 and 2 has come to New York. Condensed into one four-hour performance, it has been received with favorable reviews, and Kevin Kline’s performance as Sir John Falstaff is itself worth the price of admission.

(On the battlefield of Shrewsbury)

Prince Hal: Why, thou owest God a death. (exits)

Falstaff: ‘Tis not due yet, I would be loath to pay him before his day –what need I be so forward with him that calls not on me? Well, ‘tis no matter, honour pricks me on. Yea, but how if honour prick me off when I come on, how then? Can honour set to a leg? No. Or an arm? No. Or take away the grief of a wound? No. Honour hath no skill in surgery then? No. What is honour? A word. What is in that word honour? What is that honour? Air. A trim reckoning! Who hath it? He that died a-Wednesday. Doth he feel it? No. Doth he hear it? No. ‘Tis insensible, then? Yea, to the dead. But will it not live with the living? No. Why? Detraction will not suffer it. Therefore I’ll none of it. Honour is a mere scutcheon—and so ends my catechism.

At the performance of Henry IV I attended there was a spontaneous spasm of applause at the conclusion of the above soliloquy, and I took it to reflect current attitudes on war, honor, and courage, about which much of Henry IV is concerned. This little outburst may have been unusual but was not surprising at a Lincoln Center theater on the upper West Side of Manhattan—the capitol of post-modern values.

Of all of Shakespeare’s great characters, Sir John—Fat Jack, “that trunk of humours, that bolting hutch of beastliness, that swollen parcel of dropsies, that huge bombard of sack, that stuffed cloak-bag of guts…that grey iniquity…that vanity in years….Wherein is he good, but to taste sack and drink it…wherein crafty but in villainy? wherein villainous, but in all things? wherein worthy, but in nothing.”—is one of the most appealing, lovable, complex, and some say his greatest invention. Some would even go so far as to say that Henry IV does not belong to Prince Hal, but to Falstaff.

Although he is depicted as a vast glutton and drunkard, a liar, a thief, a coward, a dishonorable soldier, completely irresponsible, a wastrel, and still worse, a corrupter of the young—the adult behind the youthful Prince’s dissolute life—audiences have cherished Falstaff and embraced him for four hundred years.

What is the secret of his appeal? Without a doubt his wit takes first place. He is one of Shakespeare’s wittiest creations and is a continuous torrent of exuberant verbiage. Then, there is his fun-loving nature, irresponsible and childlike, but without a mean bone in his fat body.

But what trumps everything in his favor and what has held audiences in a state of endless fascination since the sixteenth century is his charismatic, his iconic shamelessness. His constant, easy, serio-comic self-acceptance.

Shakespeare’s audiences lived in a world of hardball morality. Salvation and redemption really meant something then and even up to pre-modern times. Henry IV is a morality play—the story of a madcap prince who grows up into an ideal king: Henry V.

To watch Falstaff, tempter of the young prince, go through his repertoire of irreverence without guilt or shame gave much pleasure and anxiety to the groundlings. In fact his role is derived from the medieval tradition which was well known to Shakespeare and his audiences—the Lord of Misrule.

The Lord of Misrule is one of the lost characters of the riotous medieval Christmas celebration. Sometime in November, it was customary among the European peasantry to draw lots for the title of Lord of Misrule. Wearing a paper crown and motley garments, the Lord of Misrule turned the ordinary rules on their head for his appointed time. He was given full licence to enjoy whatever pleasures he desired, and to lead the others down the path of dalliance and pleasure.

This tradition of revelry and misrule by and for the peasants and children on certain holidays—Christmas, Carnival, Halloween—is a social acknowledgement of the power of impossible yearnings that begin in childhood and are cherished secretly throughout life. From the time we are children we harbor fantasies of dethroning our parents, making them impotent and of turning things topsy-turvy. And in ancient times the authorities allowed the acting out of these fantasies within the context of institutionalized traditions. In modern times these wishes get gratified in the theatre, films, circuses, parades, and children’s holidays.

When the groundlings watched with pleasure Falstaff’s shameless behavior onstage, they shared in his misrule without worrying about being punished. But the essence of Falstaff is not gluttony or fornication or drunkenness. These are merely symbols that stand for his refusal to serve the values and rules of everyday life. In the play Falstaff’s contempt and derision stops at nothing—truth, honor, courage, law, patriotism, duty, religion, fear of death. He stands against anything that is serious, respectable, and moral, in fact anything that imposes limitations on him. He is a man without conscience in the sense that he recognizes no obligation that society is likely to place on him. His wit and humor have made him a free man—free of all social anchors.

Falstaff is a great comic invention because he embodies the Satanic defiance NON SERVIAM. He is one of the great rebels in literature. He refuses to accept the strictures of God, the limitations of age and death, the power of law, or the obligations of morality. Topsy-turviness, misrule, and the dream of all children—absolute and total freedom—are what he stands for even though deep down he knows he will be defeated, rejected, and crushed by the King, by God, by death.

And while we watch him dissociate himself, transcendent, from the reverences required by everyday life, we share in his temporary defiance and power, not giving a fig for the king, the lords, or the Lord Chief Justice. He plays out the illusion of omnipotence and we gather strength through him.

The Shakespearean Falstaff will no doubt live forever in our cultural history because the issues which he embodies are universal issues that are rooted in human nature. But the burst of applause mentioned above at the end of Falstaff’s soliloquy disavowing courage and honor suggests that Falstaff’s image has become degraded and corrupted over time from great art into small art, and from small art into life and childishness.

Throughout the play Falstaff tries to deny the world of historical reality
and moral obligation through his wit, verbal exuberance and childlike playfulness, and while the audience remains in his thrall he is forgiven, but Shakespeare himself takes no sides in the human struggle between man’s wish for total freedom from any kind of compulsion and the necessity of order in the world, and he plays no tricks on his public. In the end he is content to accept the eternal struggle with the imperfect world. Shakespeare’s audience enjoyed their fascination with Sir John, but they knew from the beginning that the reign of this marvelous Lord of Misrule must have an end and that Falstaff must at last be rejected.

The cultural, technological, and psycho-social changes of the twentieth century have distorted the views of reality and human nature to such an extent that there is little or no difference between the groundlings and the players in the minds of a large number of people; no difference between illusion and reality, between philosophy and pathology, between men and women, between dreaming and waking, between ignorance and knowledge, between wisdom and folly, and between right and wrong. The post-modern epoch has begun.

Of course post-modernism began in the early part of the twentieth century in Paris in the antinomian attitudes of the Modernist Movement led by the Fauves, Joyce, Stein. For good or ill this group of rebels confined their revolution largely to art and literature, but revolutionary change is cumulative and culturally contagious.

Subsequently, the most important outbreaks of misrule occurred in the “Twenties” and the “Sixties,” both epochs deeply influenced by unpopular wars. The Jazz Age propelled negro culture and jazz, Freudianism, Communism, and sexual freedom for women into international importance. All of these phenomena contained large components of anti-authoritarian and revolutionary attitudes in them.

The Sixties, along with the huge rise in the young wealthy middle-class population, gave us the civil-rights movement, Rock and Roll, the leftist Peace and Anarchy movements, the rise of Gay activism, and the antinomian feeling of profound national cynicism.

The final outcome of this century-old accumulation of events and influences is what Horsefeathers has come to call the Therapeutic-Utopian-Antinomian outlook, which is the essence of what others have called euphemistically “post-modernism.”

The puny rebels of the post-modern era are pathetic seen in the penumbra of old Falstaff. They are fragmented into ideological interest groups that throw stink-bombs, break windows, carry crude signs of protest, and get themselves carried off to the police station every time there is an international governmental conference of some kind. They are the Lilliputians of denial and defiance. Some want to deny the difference between the sexes, some want to deny man’s inhumanity to man, some want to deny that we live in an imperfect world, but the two most relevant to Falstaffian rebellion are the deniers of time and the deniers of war.

Since J.M. Barrie, a man who had some trouble growing up himself, wrote Peter Pan in 1904 and was able to articulate so beautifully and sentimentally the universal childhood wish to stay a child forever, there have been hundreds of artistic variations on the same theme. In the Thirties it was Holiday by Philip Barry and You Can’t Take it with You by Kaufman and Hart. Today it is Michael Jackson, who literally takes boys to Neverland, his ranch, where they are seduced by the pure pleasure world of childhood that Jackson has created there.

The problem is that, increasingly, our post-modern culture encourages an already powerful infantile fantasy. And given the country’s enormous wealth it is possible for our young people to postpone growing up indefinitely. This phenomenon is most obvious in those who cannot accept imperfection or struggle or compromise in life. These are the women who can’t find “Mr. Right,” or men who cannot find the “perfect girl,” or both men and women who can’t give up their singleness because they would have to compromise in order to marry and have children.

The issue is, of course, more complicated. But the point is that our post-modern culture rationalizes these attitudes. “You see, there’s nothing wrong with my narcissistic perfectionism, it’s good to be true to your inner desires, isn’t it?”

Such people, who have become enthralled to the siren songs of Neverland, do not even know that they have fallen into the first of Falstaff’s great fallacies—that there is nothing worth living for but perfect narcissistic gratification.

The second great post-modern denial is the denial of the reality that mankind lives in a constant state of war—more or less. Since the beginning of human life on earth, there has never been a moment where some group of people somewhere wasn’t attacking another group of people. And the likelihood that that will ever change appears to be very remote indeed.

The deniers—the antiwar activists and the protesters against the psychological derivatives of war—are led to believe that it is possible to change human nature by education or entitlement programs, as though, in modern times, war is caused by hunger and poverty. In fact the reverse is true. If it were possible to feed adequately every man, woman, and child on the planet indefinitely, there would still be wars.

If the applauders of Falstaff’s soliloquy thought that his disavowal of honor was an antiwar statement, they missed the point. Sir John is not against war, he is only against being inconvenienced and being killed. He throws away the lives 147 of the 150 men he commands with not so much as a nod in their direction.

Falstaff believes that there is nothing really worth fighting or dying for and Shakespeare’s audience laughed and agreed with him but they knew he was wrong and that he would be punished, in the end, for his views.

The protagonist Yossarian in Joseph Heller’s brilliant satire of war and the military, Catch 22, is Falstaff writ small. He is funny and right in his wish to desert a corrupt and incompetent army. The trouble is that satire is not the whole of reality and those that believe that war is the ultimate evil tend to deny the complex reality that war is not about politics but human nature. And people like Heller and such antiwar critics as Paul Fussell fall into Falstaff’s other great fallacy—that there is nothing worth fighting and dying for.

But we know that there are many things worth fighting and dying for; among them are the works of Shakespeare and our imperfect way of life.

November 26, 2003