Abstract
Falstaff has recently been read through the history of Puritan politics and the Marprelate Controversy. Kietzman contributes to an understanding of Falstaff as Puritan by showing how the biblical role of prophet as social critic informs his part in the Henry plays. Falstaff’s “job,” like that of the prophets, is to educate kings by deploying the communitarian values of fellowship and love. Shakespeare plots the Lancastrian succession through the history of the first two biblical kings, Saul and David. As Henry (Saul) sickens and dies, Hal rises through the lessons in covenant ethics learned from Falstaff. The test is whether he will be a truly covenantal monarch by wrangling with his men and repenting, like David, for the sin of “killing” his friend, Falstaff.
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- 1.
Peter Womack, “Imagining Communities: Theatres and the English Nation in the Sixteenth Century,” in Culture and History 1350–1600: Essays on English Communities, Identities and Writing, ed. David Aers (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 1992), 137, 136.
- 2.
Richard Helgerson, Forms of Nationhood: The Elizabethan Writing of England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 2. James Holstun, “Damned Commotion: Riot and Rebellion in Shakespeare’s Histories,” in A Companion to Shakespeare’s Works, Vol. 11, The Histories, eds. Richard Dutton and Jean Howard (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003), 206–207.
- 3.
Collinson notes that the nation is bound to God through covenant in the same way the individual was bound. Patrick Collinson, “Biblical Rhetoric: The English Nation and National Sentiment in the Prophetic Mode,” in Religion and Culture in Renaissance England, ed. Claire McEachern and Debora Shuger (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 20, 27.
- 4.
John Milton, “Areopagitica,” Selected Prose, ed. C. A. Patrides (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1985), 237–238.
- 5.
Michael Walzer, In God’s Shadow: Politics in the Hebrew Bible (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2012), 67.
- 6.
Robert Hornback, “Staging Puritanism in the Early 1590s: The Carnivalesque, Rebellious Clown as Anti-Puritan Stereotype,” Renaissance and Reformation 24.3 (2000): 45. Persistent reference to God served as shorthand stereotyping for Puritanism on stage.
- 7.
The first definition in the Oxford English Dictionary denotes fellowship as “partnership; membership of a society, alliance.” Other definitions point to the skills that facilitate alliance, like “communication, intercourse” and “intimate personal converse.” Joseph Blenkinsopp identifies community and protest as fundamental to prophetic preaching. Blenkinsopp, A History of Prophecy in Israel (Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1983), 15. Kristen Poole takes seriously the possibility of a Puritan identity for Falstaff. Poole, “Saints Alive! Falstaff, Martin Marprelate, and the Staging of Puritanism,” Shakespeare Quarterly, 46 (Spring 1995): 64–65.
- 8.
Jesse Lander focuses on the language of coinage to track the way 1 Henry IV deals with the crisis in value Elizabethans experienced. He believes Shakespeare resolves the crisis by a return to aristocratic chivalry. Lander, “‘Crack’d Crowns’ and Counterfeit Sovereigns: The Crisis of Value in I Henry IV,” Shakespeare Studies 30 (2002): 137–161 . Jeffrey Knapp documents that fellowship was widely held to be a spiritual virtue that connected theater to both the tavern and church. Knapp, Shakespeare’s Tribe: Church, Nation, and Theater in Renaissance England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 27. My work on the biblical subtext of the Henriad and Falstaff’s prophetic role transforms the ostensibly casual fellowships of Eastcheap into bonds with religious and political significance. Shakespeare had already experimented with representing the Puritan rebel, Jack Cade, in 2 Henry VI, whose goal is that “all the realm shall be in common”; however, he would be king, rather like Gonzalo’s utopian fantasy in The Tempest. Falstaff’s “fellowship” is less overtly challenging and more appealing than Cade’s hyperbolic leveling project.
- 9.
Poole, “Saints Alive!” 47–75.
- 10.
Grace Tiffany, “Puritanism in Comic History: Exposing Royalty in the Henry Plays,” Shakespeare Studies 26 (1998): 256–287.
- 11.
Poole, “Saints Alive!” 71; Tiffany, “Puritanism in Comic History,” 258.
- 12.
Abraham Heschel, The Prophets (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1962), 2: 104–105. Heschel reminds us that prophets were entertainers who used buffoonery in the service of piety. Roy Battenhouse, “Falstaff as Parodist and Perhaps Holy Fool,” PMLA 90 (Jan. 1975): 35. Battenhouse describes the religious tradition of the Lord of Misrule and the Feast of Fools as important historical religious contexts for understanding Falstaff.
- 13.
Bancroft would rise to the position of Archbishop of Canterbury in James I’s reign and was the chief overseer of the production of the King James Bible. For a discussion of his Paul’s Cross sermon, see William Pierce, An Historical Introduction to the Marprelate Tracts: A Chapter in the Evolution of Religious and Civil Liberty in England (London: Archibald Constable & Co., Ltd., 1908), 173–174.
- 14.
Thomas Nashe, “The Return of Pasquille,” in Works of Thomas Nashe,, ed. Ronald B. McKerrow (London: A. H. Bullen, 1904), 1: 85, cited in Tiffany, “Puritanism in Comic History,” 265.
- 15.
Robert Hornback argues that carnivalesque clowns in plays from the 1590s would have been read as code for the Puritan threat of social leveling. Hornback, “Staging Puritanism in the Early 1590s,” 41.
- 16.
Hannibal Hamlin, The Bible in Shakespeare (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 234. Hamlin reads Falstaff as alluding to the Bible with “boldly revisionary misapplication.”
- 17.
The prophet or vates was a primary inspiration for the Protestant poetics that Philip Sidney theorized in his Defense of Poetry; and, as Elliot Simon has shown, biblical exegesis was thought to be a kind of prophecy. Elliott Simon, “Prophetic Voices: Joachim de Fiore, Moses Maimonides, Philip Sidney, Mary Herbert, and the Psalms,” in Religious Diversity and Early Modern English Texts, eds. Arthur Marotti and Chanita Goodblatt (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 2013), 195–229.
- 18.
Hornback, “Staging Puritanism in the Early 1590s,” 46. Hornback’s analyzes Shakespeare’s depiction of Jack Cade in 2 Henry VI as working the same way.
- 19.
John Foxe, Foxe’s Book of Martyrs, Select Narratives, ed. John N. King (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 66.
- 20.
I borrow the phrase from Jennifer Waldron, who uses it to speak of Calvin’s theology, but it is a perfect description of Oldcastle’s theology as well. Waldron, Reformations of the Body: Idolatry, Sacrifice, and Early Modern Theater (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 14.
- 21.
Foxe, Foxe’s Book of Martyrs, 66.
- 22.
Knapp, Shakespeare’s Tribe, 86–87.
- 23.
In Act 3, scene 1, while the “indentures tripartite are drawn,” Hotspur challenges the course of the River Trent, which “wind[s] with … a deep indent” and “cuts me from the best of all my land” (3.1.79, 103, 98). An indenture is a deed that bonds two or more partners in a covenantal relationship, and, according to the OED, such deeds were indented or serrated. With the River Trent’s indent, Shakespeare creates a physical emblem of the incommensurability of covenant and honor politics.
- 24.
Frederick Turner, Shakespeare’s Twenty-First-Century Economics: The Morality of Love and Money (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 110.
- 25.
Walzer, In God’s Shadow, 67.
- 26.
Anne Lake Prescott, “Exploiting King Saul in Early Modern England: Good Uses for a Bad King,” in Religious Diversity and Early Modern English Texts: Catholic, Judaic, Feminist, and Secular Dimensions, eds., Arthur Marotti and Chanita Goodblatt (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2013): 181–182.
- 27.
Heschel, Prophets, 2: 2–3.
- 28.
Noam Finkler, “Biblical and Rabbinic Intertextuality in George Herbert’s “The Collar” and “The Pearl,” in Religious Diversity and Early Modern English Texts, eds. Marotti and Goodblatt , 230–250, 233–234. Finkler, quoting from George Herbert’s The Countrey Parson, notes that the parson’s role after the sermon and the service is to provoke reflection with Nathan ’s words to David, “Thou art the man.”
- 29.
Paul Ricoeur, Figuring the Sacred: Religion, Narrative, and Imagination (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 1995), 222. Ricoeur notes that this nonreferential quality is the revelatory essence of poetic discourse that also approximates what revelation in the biblical sense may signify.
- 30.
Walter Brueggemann, Texts That Linger, Words That Explode: Listening to Prophetic Voices (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2000), 37.
- 31.
St. Paul, in I Corinthians 14, stresses that prophecy also involves speaking to a congregation in words that convey understanding and are pitched so that the auditors will understand. The Church, says Paul, “speaketh languages,” and, therefore, there is no place for speaking in strange tongues. Every congregant may prophesy but he should aim to produce the “fruit” of understanding.
- 32.
Franz Rosenzweig notes that in the Bible, language is represented as a divine gift—the “something which is the companion of everything”—“a bridge between man and God as well as man and his fellows.” Rosenzweig, Understanding the Sick and the Healthy: A View of World, Man, and God (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 71.
- 33.
Tessa Watt, Cheap Print and Popular Piety 1550–1640 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 194.
- 34.
Jon D. Levenson, The Love of God: Divine Gift, Human Gratitude, and Mutual Faithfulness in Judaism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016), 93.
- 35.
Rosenzweig, Sick and Healthy, 83, 81.
- 36.
Joan Rees, “Falstaff, St. Paul, and the Hangman,” The Review of English Studies 38 (Feb. 1987): 17. Rees believes that Falstaff has a “developed religious sense,” fears the hangman, and by the time he dies “has been thinking about God for a long time.”
- 37.
Vocational labor in the fallen world may always demand compromises with moral absolutes. In Measure for Measure, Angelo disqualifies himself from the right to judge others, using the metaphor of theft: “Thieves for their robbery have authority / When judges steal themselves.”
- 38.
Grace Tiffany notes that plays of the period champion Robin Hood as an egalitarian Puritan hero. Tiffany, “Puritanism in Comic History,” 264. Frederick Turner notes that Gad’s Hill actually means God’s Hill. Turner, Shakespeare’s Twenty-first-century Economics, 110.
- 39.
Walzer notes that the clash between prophet and king in the Bible produce “some of the most interesting dialogues” which, because they are public, more subversive in the way they must have produced deliberation, hence, politics. Walzer, In God’s Shadow, 24.
- 40.
Battenhouse, “Falstaff as Parodist,” 38. Ecclesiasticus is sometimes called “The Wisdom of Sirach,” and Falstaff alludes to xiii.i.
- 41.
Paraphrase of Battenhouse’s reading.
- 42.
Ibid., 36.
- 43.
Joan Pong Linton, “The Passing of Falstaff: Rethinking History, Refiguring the Sacred,” in Shakespeare and Religion, eds. Ken Jackson and Arthur Marotti (Notre Dame, IN: Notre Dame University Press, 2011), 209.
- 44.
Julia Reinhard Lupton, “Creature Caliban,” Shakespeare Quarterly 51 (Spring 2000): 1.
- 45.
Robert Bell, “The Anatomy of Folly in Shakespeare’s Henriad,” International Journal of Humor Research 14 (2008): 187.
- 46.
Paul Ricoeur, “Listening to the Parables of Jesus,” The Philosophy of Paul Ricoeur, eds. Charles Reagan and David Stewart (Boston: Beacon Press, 1978), 241.
- 47.
Roger Scruton, The Face of God (London: Continuum, 2012), 77–78.
- 48.
Falstaff does what Jennifer Waldron argues John Calvin does—realign the supernatural with the natural in a kind of “enchanted empiricism.” Waldron, Reformation of the Body, 64.
- 49.
Muster rolls were, according to Cahill, “quintessential Elizabethan documents that proliferated in the 1580s and 90s” when “English common men underwent inspection as never before.” See Patricia A. Cahill, “Nation Formation and the English History Plays,” A Companion to Shakespeare’s Works, Vol. II The Histories, eds. Richard Dutton and Jean Howard (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003), 85, 87.
- 50.
The description of Falstaff’s band of tottered prodigals echoes the earlier derogatory description of Jack Cade’s army as “a ragged multitude / Of hinds and peasants, rude and merciless” (2 Henry VI 4.4.32–33). The difference being, of course, that Falstaff is not leading insurrection but issuing an intellectual challenge. Grace Tiffany suggests that Falstaff’s troop evokes the peasant revolt led by Thomas Munzer, a sixteenth-century German religious reformer. See Tiffany, “Puritanism in Comic History,” 260.
- 51.
William Tyndale, “Obedience of a Christian Man, 1527–8,” in William Tyndale, Doctrinal Treatises and Introductions to Different Portions of the Holy Scriptures, ed. Henry Walter (Reprint, New York: Johnson Reprint Corporation, 1968; Cambridge: at the University Press, 1848), 136.
- 52.
David Evett, “Types of King David in Shakespeare’s Lancastrian Tetralogy,” Shakespeare Studies (1981): 148–149.
- 53.
Evett, “Types of King David,” 143.
- 54.
Alice Goodman, “Falstaff and Socrates,” English 34 (Summer 1985): 99. Goodman argues that Hal’s training in rhetoric and dialectic came from his Socratic teacher, Falstaff. She also suggests that the friendship between Falstaff and Hal is patterned, in part, on Plutarch’s representation of the one between Socrates and Alcibiades. What the prophet/king or Nathan /David model helps explain is the strong theme of repentance and fidelity to fellowship or covenant which are biblical concepts.
- 55.
That 2.2 is a scene of bond breaking is supported by its juxtaposition to 2.3, where Lady Percy reminds Northumberland that he “broke [his] word” in failing to add manpower to Hotspur’s venture.
- 56.
Hamlin, Bible in Shakespeare, 258–259.
- 57.
This allusion, unconsciously made by King Henry, may refer to either Samson ’s story when Samson kills a lion and later returns to find honeycomb in its carcass, or, more likely, it refers to a moment when Saul ’s son Jonathan unknowingly tastes a flow of honey in the forest (not having heard that Saul forbade the soldiers to eat). The connection could remind the audience that Hal’s indulgences provide him with nourishing sweetness (akin to the properties of sack that Falstaff praises) and, at the same time, give his character its appealing sweetness (like that of the famous friends Jonathan and David).
- 58.
The opening of Henry’s speech, in which he forgives Hal for taking the crown—“O my son”—recalls the stunning moment when David, who could have killed Saul , preaches him momentarily out of madness and into an acknowledgment of their bond: “Is this your voice, my son, David?” (I Samuel 24:17).
- 59.
Harold Fisch, Hamlet and the Word: The Covenant Pattern in Shakespeare (New York: Frederick Ungar, 1971), 116.
- 60.
This is a perfect illustration of what Jeffrey Knapp refers to as the “counter-crusading plot,” in which characters “turn [the Crusades] around,” to search for a new Holy Land in the English isle.” Knapp suggest that the holy is found in images of rogue fellowship, but his observations about the Henry plays become much more meaningful when we grasp that the ethic of Eastcheap is covenant, which Falstaff teaches to Hal, who, in turn, bonds with his father, enabling him to die peacefully in Jerusalem. See Jeffrey Knapp, Shakespeare’s Tribe, 86.
- 61.
Battenhouse, “Falstaff as Parodist and Perhaps Holy Fool,” 32. Battenhouse makes the very important point that Falstaff addresses King Harry as “an earthly god but not God.”
- 62.
Evett, “Types of King David,” 195, citing John Stow, Chronicles (1580), 542.
- 63.
Jesse Lander, “Crack’d Crowns,” and Counterfeit Sovereigns,” 142. Lander notes that Henry VII introduced the profile coin which, as he says, “presents the king’s face as something to be recognized and worshipped: the monarch does not return the subject’s gaze.” According to Lander, this is emblematic of the shift from feudal kingship with its “emphasis on reciprocity between king and subject.” What Lander misses is that Shakespeare invokes this language of value to stress that countenancing—covenantal face-to-face exchange—is more valuable than the “half-fac’d fellowship” that characterizes relationships at court and in the rebel camp .
- 64.
Simon Palfrey, Doing Shakespeare (London: Bloomsbury, 2011), 46–49, discusses Shakespeare’s pairs of words as “a prototypically dramatic sort of space, its content up for grabs.”
- 65.
Knapp, Shakespeare’s Tribe, 130, implies that Henry learned to “view anyone and anything, no matter how contemptible, as a possible source of edification” from his time spent in Eastcheap, but it is obvious and important that many of his attitudes, beliefs, and rhetorical strategies come directly from Falstaff.
- 66.
David Womersley, Divinity and State (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 337.
- 67.
Knapp, Shakespeare’s Tribe, 128–140, stresses the wartime egalitarianism of Henry’s army and the ways Henry steals communion from the church to offer it as a sacrifice of himself to men who must be willing to shed their blood to join his band of brothers. His analysis focuses on sacramentalism, specifically reformed ideas of participatory faith. Not only does my focus on covenantalism fit with his reading, but it clarifies the political implications of what Knapp sees as a religious communion.
- 68.
Charles Whitney, Early Responses to Renaissance Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 73; 105–110. According to Whitney only Tamburlaine and Falstaff became “effigies” that, like Elvis, “hold open a place in memory into which many different people may step,” 83. He also cites Middleton’s allusion to Falstaff’s tavern in The Meeting of Gallants at an Ordinary (1604) and Richard Ligon’s nostalgic recollection of “Sneak’s Noise” when hearing a galliard strummed on a lute in a tavern in Barbados in A True and Exact History of the Island of Barbados (1657).
- 69.
Ibid., 256–270. In John Milton’s epitaph on Shakespeare for the Second Folio in 1632, he likens Shakespeare to a prophet and auditors potentially transformed to “marble with too much conceiving.” But Milton refuses petrification and does not merely praise Shakespeare in sonnet form. He also applies understandings gleaned from the plays as when, in Eikonoklastes, he compares Charles to Shakespeare’s Richard III to highlight his tyrannous abuses of religion. Milton clearly believed that hearts directly impressed by Shakespeare’s prophetic lines must use the acquired wisdom to become prophets themselves. A conception of poetry as prophecy is the best answer because pleasure for its own sake was simply not understood, in the early modern period, to be the goal of aesthetic experience.
References
Articles
Battenhouse, Roy. “Falstaff as Parodist and Perhaps Holy Fool.” PMLA 90 (Jan. 1975): 32–52.
Bell, Robert. “The Anatomy of Folly in Shakespeare’s Henriad.” International Journal of Humor Research 14 (2008):181–201.
Evett, David. “Types of King David in Shakespeare’s Lancastrian Tetralogy.” Shakespeare Studies 14 (1981): 139–161.
Goodman, Alice. “Falstaff and Socrates.” English 34 (Summer 1985): 97–112.
Hornback, Robert, “Staging Puritanism in the Early 1590s: The Carnivalesque, Rebellious Clown as Anti-Puritan Stereotype.” Renaissance and Reformation 24, no. 3 (Summer 2000): 31–67.
Lander, Jesse M. “‘Crack’d Crowns’ and Counterfeit Sovereigns: The Crisis of Value in I Henry IV.” Shakespeare Studies 30 (2002): 137–161.
Lupton, Julia Reinhard. “Creature Caliban.” Shakespeare Quarterly 51 (Spring 2000): 1–23.
Poole, Kristen. “Saints Alive! Falstaff, Martin Marprelate, and the Staging of Puritanism.” Shakespeare Quarterly 46 (Spring 1995): 47–75.
Rees, Joan. “Falstaff, St. Paul, and the Hangman.” The Review of English Studies 38 (Feb. 1987): 14–22.
Tiffany, Grace. “Puritanism in Comic History: Exposing Royalty in the Henry Plays.” Shakespeare Studies 26 (1998): 256–287.
Books
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Fisch, Harold. Hamlet and the Word: The Covenant Pattern in Shakespeare. New York: Frederick Ungar, 1971
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Tyndale, William. Doctrinal Treatises and Introductions to Different Portions of the Holy Scriptures. Edited by Henry Walter. Cambridge: at the University Press, 1848. Reprint: New York: Johnson Reprint Corporation, 1968.
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Kietzman, M.J. (2018). Falstaff: Prophet of Covenant. In: The Biblical Covenant in Shakespeare. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-71843-9_5
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