Falstaff and Mr. Dover Wilson Author(s) : William Empson Source: The Kenyon Review, Spring, 1953, Vol. 15, No. 2 (Spring, 1953), Pp. 213-262 Published By: Kenyon College

Falstaff and Mr.
Dover Wilson
Author(s): William Empson
Source: The Kenyon Review , Spring, 1953, Vol. 15, No. 2 (Spring, 1953), pp. 213-262
Published by: Kenyon College
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William Empson
FALSTAFF
AND MR. DOVER WILSON
THE THEORY that Shakespeare made Falstaff appear in his

first draft of Henry V, so that our present text of that play
is much revised and thereby gravely confused, seems to be ac-
cepted now by most of the competent authorities; indeed to be
regarded as the most positive result of Mr. Dover Wilson's very
detailed work on the Falstaff trilogy, and therefore as the main
support for a narrow view of Falstaff in general. I want in this
essay to ask the reader to look at the whole position again.
Whether Shakespeare changed his mind about Henry V is per-
haps not very important, but it gives a definite point to start
from; also I think it is time someone pointed out how very weak
the evidence for this theory is.
To be sure, the evidence offered is imposingly various; from
the Epilogue of II Hen. IV, from some historical possibilities
about censorship, and from the text of Henry V itself; but I
think it breaks down all round. The relevant part of the Epilogue
says:
One word more, I beseech you. If you be not too much cloyed
with fat meat, our humble author will continue the story, with Sir
John in it, and make you merry with fair Catherine of France; where
(for anything I know) Falstaff shall die of a sweat, unless 'a be already
killed with your hard opinions; for Oldcastle died a martyr, and this
is not the man.
"For anything I know" and "if you want it" are a good deal more
doubtful than what we are accustomed to nowadays in the way
of advance publicity, and I haven't noticed anyone listing parallel
Elizabethan examples. It seems to me that the speaker disclaims

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214 FALSTAFF
knowing what the a

next part of the fam
the Company migh
next production, ev
Dover Wilson make
for the text of thi
together; the Folio
combination speakab
sible for the perform
and the second by a
the second tlherefor
the second includes
says he cannot beli
was "spoken on the
but I cannot see wh
matter of months r
Falstaff is quite pr
cast, and indeed I
Falstaff does die of
is no inconsistency
point" if anyone ga
kind of thing the
whole trick of this
ostentatiously refus
have let it be spok
it is as likely that
would expect he da
either way it is no
Mr. Dover Wilson's argument in his edition of Henry V
(I947) was that there was nobody to act Falstaff because Kemp
had suddenly left the Company. I gather that this line of effort
has now been abandoned. There was a Court performance of
I Hen. IV in i6oo (described as a private one, for the Flemish
Ambassador), after Kemp is supposed to have gone, and the

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WILLIAM EMPSON 215
recent attempts to decide which actor took which part do not

give it to him anyway. Kemp was a low comedian (a fine chap
too), whereas one of the points you needed to make clear about
Falstaff was that he was a scandalous gentleman; it doesn't seem
Kemp's part at all. Besides, they would have to have some kind
of understudy system. The argument has now moved to a more
aristocratic ground, and we are told that Falstaff was removed
from Agincourt because the descendants of "Fastolfe" influenced
the censor. He was not suppressed altogether; the Ambassador
could hardly be shown a play recently banned for libel, and Part
II was printed in i6oo, and indeed The Merry Wives (on this
view) was brought out as an alternative to showing him at Agin-
court. Mr. Dover Wilson suggests that the Company hid its em-
barrassment by inventing a story that the Queen asked to see
him in love, and that Shakespeare could gratify her in three
weeks. This was "convenient" for them, he thinks. I do not
believe it could be done. Falstaff was a very prominent object,
much the most successful Shakespeare character before Hamlet;
some of this would be likely to leak out. The legend that the
Queen commissioned The Merry Wives is recorded late and not
worth much; it is evidence that the terrifying old woman had
laughed at Falstaff, and that her moods were watched and re-
membered, but not much more. As negative evidence, however,
it seems to me very strong; if she had allowed her underlings to
suppress Falstaff, even in part, no "publicity" arrangement would
be likely to get away with the opposite story. Besides, the "em-
barrassed" Company would just as soon have the truth leak out.
And what about the treatment of a much more real Fastolfe in
Hen. VI? And why not deal with the new name firmly, as had
been done to the previous name Oldcastle? All the same, peculiar
things do happen, and the descendants of Fastolfe might have
b-een just strong enough to keep him out of Agincourt, and to
hush the suppression up, though not strong enough to suppress
him elsewhere. If we found confusions in the text of Henry V

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2 16 FALSTAFF
which needed a very special explanation this theory might be

plausible. But surely it is very gratuitous if we find none.
The textual arguments for revision, in Mr. Dover Wilson's
edition, are as follows.
I. Pistol says at V, i, 8o that he hears his doll is dead of
syphilis, so he has lost his rendezvous. I agree that the author
ought to have put "Nell," and the actor had better say it, because
the other word confuses us with another character. But the
modern Damon Runyan slang happens to have been Elizabethan
slang too; the slip was an easy one for the author to make. And
I think there was an extra reason for making it here. The ladies
were last mentioned in Act II; we learned that Pistol had married
Mrs. Quickly (Nell) and heard him express contempt for Tear-
sheet (Doll) as in hospital for syphilis; he had always skirmished
with Doll (when on the stage with her) and had now become
keen to stand by Nell, whose position was clearly more hopeful.
There can be no point in assuming he has changed over without
warning the audience. But we need not be surprised that Mrs.
Quickly got the disease too, and there is a deserved irony if Pistol,
who talked brutally about Doll's trouble at the beginning of the
play, finds at the end that the same applies to his Nell. Now, if
Shakespeare meant this, both women were in his mind, and that
is the kind of case where a hurried writer puts down the wrong
word. It comes in the Quarto, supposed to be pirated by actors,
not only in the Folio, but that need only be another of the de-
pressing bits of evidence that Shakespeare never corrected the
acting text.
Such is what I would make of it, but Mr. Dover Wilson
deduces that the whole speech, and much else of the part of
Pistol, was written for Falstaff, to whom Doll was last seen
attached. Before erecting this mountain of conjecture I think he
might have answered the note here in the Arden edition, which
points out four other places where the text goes wrong over
proper names; one of them calls the King of England "brother

207.62.77.131 on Wed, 24 Jun 2020 06:00:30 UTC
WILLIAM EMPSON 217
Ireland" (V, ii, io), and compared to that (which Mr. Dover
Wilson positively claims as a mistake in writing by Shakespeare,
who must have been thinking about Essex, he says) I do not
think a reasonable man need feel very solemn about these two
dolls.
I also feel that, even if Shakespeare did first write this flabby
blank verse for Falstaff and not for the now miserably deflated
Pistol, we need not call in the machinery of censorship to explain
why he changed his mind; if his first thoughts were so bad we
had better keep to his second ones and be thankful. Maybe he
did toy with the idea of taking Falstaff to Agincourt-he would
feel the natural strength of any easy temptation-but we have no
proof here that he wrote a whole draft of it.
II. The prologue to the second Act ends:
. . .the scene
Is now transported, gentles, to Southampton;
There is the playhouse now, there must you sit:
And thence to France must we convey you safe
And bring you back, charming the narrow seas
To give you gentle pass; for if we may
We'll not offend one stomach with our play.
But, till the King come forth and not till then,
Unto Southampton do we switch our scene.
The next four scenes are in London, Southampton, London, and

France, with the London ones describing first the illness and then
the death of Falstaff. The final rhymed couplet, which follows
another, whereas the prologues to the other four Acts all end with
one rhymed couplet, seems a rather slack attempt to clear up a
muddle and only succeeds in adding a contradiction (the Arden
edition remarks, with psychological but perhaps not literal ac-
curacy, that "the negative notion, being uppermost in his mind,
thrusts itself in prematurely"). Mr. Dover Wilson deduces that
the scenes about the death of Falstaff were added later, But he

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218 FALSTAFF
and the other peo

scenes about Falsta
somewhere, howev
been. To prove tha
to prove that their
I think, that this
You might perhaps
London, whereas t
Southampton; but
in London, if only
just under four hu
four Acts, all a go
technique of five
obviously difficult
all the Acts contai
might have tried t
that the balance h
corrected the seco
equally possible tha
as anything to do
a short banging fir
the prologue to A
Company objected
III. The first two
the third (for wh
only marks a lack
IV, i, they say, mu
he wants a council
"anon," but first
then he has three successive conversations with "other ranks";
then a long soliloquy about how they don't understand his diffi-
culties; then Erpingham, who took the message before, returns
and says the lords are searching him throughout the camp; the
king says that they must be called back, and adds graciously that

207.62.77.131 on Wed, 24 Jun 2020 06:00:30 UTC
WILLIAM EMPSON 219
he will be there before the m

the exchange with Erpingham
does is to start straight off o
ready for his solitary prayer
critics find this "awkward," a
the audience. Surely the whol
very neatly onto the repeated
king by his experience of low l
keeping the lords waiting wh
tothe troops would even keep
to experts on strategy never wo
strong dramatic effect was an
vision; TI should be more inclin
and wnen Mr. Dover Wilson c
under serious suspicion, as an i
King Hal, because he is missi'
the king he claims to rehabilita
Some other arguments for re
in his article "With Sir John
perhaps be recognized here, b
Fluellen doesn't use "p" for "
does so to Gower just afterwa
was added later (but he is on
we are promised "a little touch
get any of the fighting we e
seems to me an absurd objecti
excitement in getting a stray c
lovely bully," and the morale
than any skirmishing could b
capture by Pistol is impossibly
(but if put later it breaks the
beginning of Act V "relates t
for his annoyance; it has no
III, vi" (Shakespeare always m

207.62.77.131 on Wed, 24 Jun 2020 06:00:30 UTC
220 FALSTAFF
be trusted to do the same; besides, Fluellen might not care to

repeat the insults); at the end of this scene, in the "My Doll"
speech, "Pistol's characteristic verse is completely absent" (of
course it is; he is deflated and in soliloquy; is this Falstaff's char-
acteristic verse, then?) and says he is old though, unlike Falstaff,
he is not (he feels old); the Dauphin comes to the battle against
his father's express orders (another detail to make his father look
weak); there seems an intention to bring Henry and the Dauphin
into opposition, but as it comes to nothing the Master of the
Revels may have cut a degrading representation of royalty (then
Shakespeare may have avoided going to such lengths as might
have induced the Master of the Revels to make a cut); Fluellen
was present when Williams told Henry about the glove, so ought
to have recognized Williams later (but he is too excitable; the
plot is not meant to be deep), and there is no reason why Henry
should tell both separately to go and look for Gower (but it is
only to make sure they meet and have an absurd quarrel; this
bit of rough fooling, ending with tossing away some gold, is
entirely "in character" with the Henry of the Falstaff scenes, and
was very much needed to show him as the same man in his stern
grandeur). I don't much like the play, and do not mean to praise
it by defending the text; but the fashion for finding "joins" in
the text has I think been carried to absurd lengths, though by
people who agree with Mr. Dover Wilson rather than by him-
self, and I hope this tedious paragraph has proved it.
There is of course a reason why we find a struggle made to
prove that Falstaff was originally in Henry V. Mr. Dover Wilson,
largely out of a patriotic impulse as I understand, feels that igth
Century romantic critics went badly wrong about Falstaff, and
that the main source of their error was the pathetic description
of his death. If it can be shown that this description was only
thrown in as a "job," to cheat the audience and hide a bit of
truckling to high officials, then we need no longer smear false
sentiment over him and (what is more) the modern royalist is

207.62.77.131 on Wed, 24 Jun 2020 06:00:30 UTC
WILLIAM EMPSON 221
safe in revering Hal as the idea

has been some false sentiment
Dover Wilson's remarks about
but this feeling of distaste sho
to the opposite extreme; the m
that it is hard to get one's mi
weaken the story of his death
such arguments as that "neith
to do with a broken heart," w
critic is eager to explain that
over-eating but sometimes (as
the bad language in which Ny
acters one would think, echo th
"the king has killed his heart,
sure, their language is funny, a
cription of his death they on
But they understand what h
made by Nym, "The king is a
may; he passes some humours a
obvious coarse sentiment about
Mr. Dover Wilson's mind. The
in fact it proves that the tutor
duce a hero; we are to be rem
killed his friend. It is no use
down" the death of Falstaff, be
up," and indeed he is in a logi
passage do what he supposes, s
at being cheated, if they would
all imagine them taking it rath
who needs to argue that they d
His attitude to the death, I
mean, which is very surprisin
that this comes from a convict
ence; that any idea of Shakesp

207.62.77.131 on Wed, 24 Jun 2020 06:00:30 UTC
222 FALSTAFF
staff" should be m
Shakespeare plays no tricks with his public; he did not, like

Euripides, dramatize the stories of his race and religion in order to
subvert the traditional ideals those stories were first framed to set
forth. Prince Hal is the prodigal, and his repentance is to be taken
seriously; it is to be admired and commended....
and so forth. It seems to me that, in this generous impulse of

defence, he is rather under-rating the traditional ideals of his
race and religion. They do not force you to ascribe every grace
and virtue to this rather calculating type of prodigal, merely be-
cause he defeated the French. So far from that, if you take the
series as a whole (and here we are greatly indebted to Dr. Till-
yard, another of these rather royalist critics), the main point of
the story is that he was doomed because he was a usurper; France
had to be lost again, and much worse civil wars had to break out,
till at last the legitimate line was restored. The insistence on this
is fierce in Richard II and both parts of Henry IV. Henry V has
a very inspiriting kind of merit, and I think Shakespeare meant
us to love him, though in an open-eyed manner; but the idea that
Shakespeare presents him as an ideal king seems to me to show
a certain lack of moral delicacy, which need not be described as
a recall to the higher morality of an earlier world. And then
again, it may be said that the audience were not thinking of such
things; the intention of the series was a simple and patriotic one,
whether "high" or not. But I should say that the popular story
about the prodigal was itself complex (and by the way "Renais-
sance" not "medieval"), so that the whole of this defence for Hal
is off the point-he did not need it. Of course I don't deny that
there was plenty of patriotism about the thing, and that Shakes-
peare took that seriously, but it left room for other sentiments.
I think indeed that the whole Falstaff series needs to be
looked at in terms of Dramatic Ambiguity, before one can under-
stand what was happening in the contemporary audience; and

207.62.77.131 on Wed, 24 Jun 2020 06:00:30 UTC
WILLIAM EMPSON 223
I think that if this is done th

and Prince Hal, so long discussed, are in essence solved. Nor
would this approach seem strange to Mr. Dover Wilson, who has
done much the most interesting recent work on the subject. Most
of this essay has the air of an attack on him, but my complaints
are supposed to show cases where he has slipped back into taking
sides between two viewpoints instead of letting both be real.
Slipped back, because on at least one occasion he uses explicitly
and firmly the principle I want to recommend; and perhaps I
will look more plausible if I begin with that illustration of it.
The question whether Falstaff is a coward may be said to
have started the whole snowball of modern Shakespearean criti-
cism; it was the chief topic of Morgann's essay nearly two hun-
dred years ago, the first time a psychological paradox was dug
out of a Shakespeare text. Mr. Dover Wilson, discussing the plot
about the robbery in the first three scenes where we meet Falstaff,
says that the question whether Falstaff sees through the plot
against him, and if so at what point he sees through it-for
instance, whether he runs away from the Prince on purpose or
only tells increasingly grotesque lies to him afterwards on pur-
pose-is meant to be a puzzle, one that the audience are chal-
lenged to exercise their wits over; and that this had an important
practical effect (it is not a matter of deep intellectual subtlety of
course) because you would pay to see the play again with your
curiosity undiminished. The whole joke of the great rogue is
that you can't see through him, any more than the Prince could.
I think that Mr. Dover Wilson's analysis of the text here is the
final word about the question, because he shows that you aren't
meant to find anything more; the dramatic effect simply is the
doubt, and very satisfying too. Mr. Dover Wilson is a rich mine
of interesting points, and it seems rather parasitic of me to keep
on repeating them as weapons against him; but it seems im-
portant to urge that the method he has established here should
be tried out on adjoining cases.

207.62.77.131 on Wed, 24 Jun 2020 06:00:30 UTC
224 FALSTAFF
However, I recognize that this approach is liable to become

tiresomely intellectualistic; a man who takes it into his head
that he is too smart to look for the answer, on one of these points,
because he knows the author means to cheat him, is liable to miss
getting any real experience from the play. Besides, the actor and
producer have to work out their own "conception" of Falstaff,
in each case, and are sometimes felt to have produced an interest-
ing or "original" one; it would be fatuous for the theoretical
critic to say that they are merely deluding themselves, because
there isn't any such thing. I do not mean that; the dramatic
ambiguity is the source of these new interpretations, the reason
why you can go on finding new ones, the reason why the effect
is so rich. And of course there must be a basic theme which the
contradictions of the play are dramatizing, which some inter-
pretations handle better than others; after planting my citadel
on the high ground of the Absolute Void, I still feel at liberty to
fight in the plains against Mr. Dover Wilson at various points
of his detailed interpretation. But this way of putting it is still
too glib. The basic argument of Mr. Dover Wilson is that the
plays ought to be taken to mean what the first audiences made
of them (and they took not merely a moral but a very practical
view of the importance of social order and a good king). I agree
with all of that, and merely answer that the reaction of an audi-
ence is not such a simple object as he presumed. No doubt he
succeeds in isolating what the first audiences would find obvious;
but we may still believe that other forces had to be at work behind
Falstaff, both in the author and the audiences which he under-
stood, to make this figure as Titanic as we agree to find him;
nor need we plunge for them deep into the Unconsciousness.
The plays were an enormous hit, appealing to a great variety of
people, not all of them very high-minded, one would think.
Obviously a certain amount of "tact" was needed, of a straight-
forward kind, to swing the whole of this audience into accepting
the different stages of the plot. To bring out examples of this

207.62.77.131 on Wed, 24 Jun 2020 06:00:30 UTC
WILLIAM EMPSON 225
tact as evidence of the author's single intention, or of a single

judgment which he wanted to impose on the audience, seems to
me naive. So far from that, I think that on several occasions he
was riding remarkably near the edge; a bit breathtaking it may
have been, to certain members of the first audiences.
One cannot help feeling some doubt when Mr. Dover Wilson
insists that Hal was never a "sinner," only a bit wild; especially
when it becomes rather doubtful, as he goes on, what even the
wildness may have consisted in. Not sex, we gather; it seems
only old men like Falstaff go wrong like that. The same applies
to drunkenness. Even the bishops in Henry V, Mr. Dover Wilson
maintains, do not say that he has been converted, only that he
has begun working hard (actually they say more); and even
his father in reproaching him only speaks of sins in others which
his wildness might encourage. Robbery, the reader is now to
decide, he could not possibly have committed; to suppose that he
even envisaged such a thing is to misread the whole play.
It is true that the early scenes of I Hen. IV can be read as
Mr. Dover Wilson does. I ought to admit this the more prom-
inently because I said in my book Pastoral that "we hear no
more" about the Prince's claim that he will repay the stolen
money, which we do (III, iv, I77). But after admitting this mis-
take I claim all the more that the dramatic effect is inherently
ambiguous. Mr. Dover Wilson points out that we ought to con-
sider the order of events on the stage, how the thing is planned
to impress you; I warmly agree, but he only uses this rule for his
own purpose. It is plain, surely, that we are put in doubt whether
the Prince is a thief or not, at any rate in the early scenes; if you
got a strong enough impression from those scenes that he was
one, you would only regard the later return of the money as a
last-minute escape from a major scandal. No doubt, if you felt
sure from the start that he couldn't really be one, the return of
the money would act as laughing the whole thing off; but even
so, the dramatist has put you through a bit of uncertainty about

207.62.77.131 on Wed, 24 Jun 2020 06:00:30 UTC
226 FALSTAFF
what he will ask you to believe. So to speak, an escape from a

scandal is what happens to the audience, whether it happened
to the Prince or not; and a dramatic structure of this kind as-
sumes that at least some of the audience do not know the answer
beforehand. It is therefore ridiculous, I submit, for a critic to
argue heatedly that he has discovered the answer by a subtle
analysis of the text. Such a critic, however, could of course, turn
round on me and say I am wrong to suppose it is "this kind of
dramatic structure"; so far from that, he would say, he has showin
the modern actor and producer how to make the play intelligible
and coherent even to a fresh audience from the beginning. I
therefore need to join in his labors, instead of calling them ridicu-
lous; I need to show that the text is so arranged that the uncer-
tainty can still not be dispelled even after the most careful study.
Among the first words of Falstaff, who is then alone with
the Prince, he says "when thou art King, let not us that are squires
of the night's body be called thieves of the day's beauty" and so
on, and us is quite positively accepted by the Prince in his reply
(whether for a joke or not) as including himself: "the fortune
of us that are the moon's men doth ebb and flow like the sea"
and so on. Of course I am not pretending that this proves he is
a thief; I give it as an example of the way the dramatist starts
by making us think he may be a thief. The next point, as the
jokes turn over, is a grave appeal from Falstaff: "Do not thou,
when thou art King, hang a thief." Falstaff gets much of his fun
out of a parody of moral advice, especially in these earlier scenes,
and the point here must be that the Prince has no right to hang
a thief because he is one himself. His reply (a very sufficient one)
is that Falstaff will do it. Falstaff then inverts the obvious by
upbraiding the Prince for leading him astray; he threatens to re-
form, and the Prince's answer is, "\Vhere shall we take a purse
tomorrow, Jack?" Falstaff accepts this as if they are old partners
in robbery, and is only concerned to defend his courage-
"Zounds, where thou wilt, lad, I'll make one, an I do not, call

207.62.77.131 on Wed, 24 Jun 2020 06:00:30 UTC
WILLIAM EMPSON 227
me a villain and baffle me." Poins now enters and announces a

scheme for robbery, and when the Prince is asked if he will join
he speaks as if the idea was absurdly outside his way of life-
"Who, I? rob? I a thief? Not I, by my faith." Falstaff has already
assumed that the Prince knows this plan is being prepared
("Poins! Now we shall know if Gadshill hath set a match"),
and Poins is the Prince's own gentleman-in-waiting; however,
Mr. Dover Wilson naturally makes the most of this brief retort:
The proposal that the Prince is to take part in the highway rob-
bery is received at first witlh something like indignation, even with a
touch of haughtiness, and only consented to when Poins intimates, by
nods and winks behind Falstaff's back, that he is planning to make
a practical joke of it.
The nods and winks are invented by the critic, of course (and
printed in his text of the play), but they seem plausible enough;
indeed the line, "Well, then, once in my days I'll be a madcap,"
reads like a rather coarse attempt to keep the respectable part of
the audience from being too shocked. They are welcome to decide
that the Prince is not really a thief after all. The point I want to
make is that another part of the audience is still quite free to
think he is one; indeed, this pretence of innocence followed im-
mediately by acceptance (followed by further riddles) is just the
way Falstaff talks himself. Poins then arranges the plot against
Falstaff with the Prince, and finally the Prince makes his famous
soliloquy, claiming that his present behavior is the best way to
get himself admired later on. I do not think that the words
suggest he is doing nothing worse than play practical jokes on
low characters. To be sure, the "base contagious clouds," the "foul
and ugly mists," only seem to strangle the sun; you can still think
the Prince innocent here; and he only describes his own behavior
as "loose." But then we hear about a reformation of a fault, and
about an offence which must apparently be redeemed (though
literally it is only time which must be redeemed). It seems to me

207.62.77.131 on Wed, 24 Jun 2020 06:00:30 UTC
228 FALSTAFF
that the balance is

surely after this he
he has practically a
The more usual question about this soliloquy is whether it
shows the Prince as "callous and hypocritical," determined to
betray his friends. Naturally Mr. Dover Wilson argues that it
does not, because "it w-as a convention to convey information to
the audience about the general drift of the play, muclh as a pro-
logue did," and in any case at this stage of the play "we ought
not to be feeling that Falstaff deserves any consideration what-
ever." I think this carries the "sequence" principle rather too far,
and most people would know the "general drift" before they
came; but I don't deny, of course, that the placing of tlhis solilo-
quy is meant to establish Hal as tlhe future hero as firmly as pos-
sible. Even so, I do not see that it does anything (whether re-
garded as a "convention" or not) to evade the obvious moral
reflection, obvious not only to the more moralizing part of the
audience but to all of it, that this kind of man made a very un-
reliable friend. Surely the Elizabethans could follow this simple
duality of feeling witnout getting mixed; it is inevitable that if
you enjoy Falstaff you feel a arudge against the eventual swing-
over of Hal, even though you agTree that the broad plot couldn't
be different. The real problems about the rejection do not arise
here; we have no reason to presume it will come as a painful
shock to his present friends (though "falsify men's hopes" may
be a secret mark of the author's plan). I think a fair amount can
be deduced about Shakespeare's own feelings for this kind of
condescending patron, but in any case it was a commonplace of
his period that the friendships of great men very often were un-
reliable. The whole thing seems to me in the sunlight, and for
that matter the fundamental machinery seems rather crude, and
perhaps it had to be to carry such a powerful conflict of judgment.
There does not seem much for later critics to disagree about.
Mr. Dover Wilson, however, feels that there is, because he

207.62.77.131 on Wed, 24 Jun 2020 06:00:30 UTC
WILLIAM EMPSON 229
wants to build up Hal as a high-minded creature of delicate

sensibility. A brief scene with Poins (II Hen. IV, II, ii) is made
important for this purpose. We are told about Hal that:
The kind of reserve that springs from absence of self-regard is

in point of fact one of his principal characteristics, and such a feature
is difficult to represent in dialogue. . . . We have no right to assume
that Hal is heartless because he does not, like Richard II, wear his
heart on his sleeve. . . . Why not . . . give him a friend like Horatio
to reveal himself? . . . Shakespeare gives him Poins, and the dis-
covery of the worthlessness of this friend is the subject of one of the
most moving and revealing srenes in which the Prince figures. In
view of all this, to assert as Bradley does that Hal is incapable of
tenderness or affection except towards members of his own family is
surely a quite unwarranted assumption.
Hal begins this scene by treating Poins with insolence, as one of

the butts for his habit of contempt, and Poins answers (they
have just got back from Wales as part of the civil war):
How ill it follows, after you have laboured so hard, you should talk
so idly! Tell me, how many good young princes would do so, their
fathers being so sick as yours at this time is?
I can't see that this is an offensive retort; he is expected to keep

his end up, and there is not even an obvious insinuation that the
Prince wants his father dead-he may be being advised to recover
favor. No doubt it could be acted with an offensive leer, but the
usual tone in these scenes is merely a rough jeering. The Prince,
however, becomes offended and says that his heart bleeds in-
wardly at his father's illness, but that he can't show it because
he keeps bad company such as Poins. It seems a fair answer to
this challenge when Poins says he would indeed think the Prince
a hypocrite to show sorrow at the prospect of inheriting, "because
you have been so lewd, and so much engrossed to Falstaff." "And
to thee," says the gay Prince with his usual brutality. Now of

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230 FALSTAFF
course I agree that the scene is meant to tell the audience that
Hal is starting to repent of his bad habits; it could not be more
straightforward. It could be acted with a moody sorrow, but I
don't think it need be; the main fact is that he is physically tired.
But why are we supposed to think that he is "failed" by his
friend in a pathetic manner, or shows affection to anyone inot a
member of his own family? The whole truth to life of this little
scene, in its surly way, is to be so bare; it does inothing to put
Poins in the wrong, and indeed lets him show a fair amount of
dignity and good-humor; the Prince's feelings are dragging hlimn
away from his old companions, and no new fault of theirs needs
to be shown. Surely Poins has much more difficulty than Hal in
expressing delicate sentiments here; if he tried to condole with
the Prince he would be rebuffed more harshly than ever. A pro-
duction which made the Prince disillusioned at not getting
sympathy would have to cut most of the words.
A more important claim of Mr. Dover Wilson for Hal is
that it is extremely generous of him to let Falstaff get all the
credit for killing Hotspur, especially because if Hal claimed his
due he might become more acceptable to his father. We are also
told that the sudden fame thus acquired by the previously un-
known Falstaff goes to his head and is the cause of the gradual
nemesis which gathers throughout Part II. This seems to me a
valuable idea, unlike the special pleading about the Poins sCene,
which would mislead an actor. The trouble about the death of
Hotspur, it seems to mre, is that the story is deliberately left
ambiguous, and we should not allow a learned argument to
impose a one-sided answer. The lyrical language of Mr. Dover
Wilson about the native magnanimity and high courtesy of the
Prince, "which would seem of the very essence of nobility to the
Elizabethans," really does I think bring out part of the intended
stage effect at the end of Part I, though the text is silent. The
question is whether it is meant to go on reverberating all through
Part II. To do the right thing at a dramatic moment is very dif-

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WILLIAM EMPSON 231
ferent from going on telling an absurd and inconvenient lie

indefinitely. Mr. Dover Wilson's view of the matter, I think, really
would be picked on by spectators who preferred it that way, but
other spectators could find quite different pointers. I do not want,
therefore, to refute his view but to show that it is only one alterna-
tive, and I thus give myself an easy task.
The claim of Falstaff to have killed Hotspur is made to
Prince Henry in the presence of Prince John, who says, "This is
the strangest tale that e'er I heard." Prince Henry says:
This is the strangest fellow, brother John.

Come, bring your luggage nobly on your back.
For my part, if a lie may do thee grace,
I'll gild it with the happiest terms I have.
In Mr. Dover Wilson's edition, of course, "aside to Falstaff" has

to introduce the last two lines. But I don't see Hal nipping about
the stage to avoid being overheard by John, whom he despises;
his business here is to stand midcenter and utter fine sentiments
loud and bold. Just what lie was told, and what John made of it,
we don't hear. It seems to me that the Second Part begins by
throwing a lot of confusion into the matter, and that Mr. Dover
Wilson merely selects points that suit him. At the start of the
play three messengers come to the rebel Northumberland; the
first with good news-the Prince has been killed outright and
"(his) brawn,1 the hulk Sir John" taken prisoner by Hotspur.
Five other people are mentioned, but it is assumed that Falstaff
was worth attention before he was believed to have killed Hot-
spur, and even that Hotspur had done well to capture him. The
second messenger says that Hotspur is dead, the third that he was
1. Brawn suggests the wild boar, a strong and savage creature, honorable to hunt,
though the fatted hog is not quite out of view. A similar ambivalence can be felt I
think in the incessant metaphors of heavy meat-eating around Falstaff compared to "one
halfpennyworth of bread to this intolerable deal of sack," where it is asaumevd (already
in Part I) that the drunkard has no appetite.

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232 FALSTAFF
killed by the Prince. Mr. Dover Wilson admits this shows that
the facts of his death "had been observed by at least one man,"
but adds that no other witness is quoted. But nobody at all, in
the Second Part, says that Falstaff killed Hotspur. The King
himself appears not to know that the Prince did it, says Mr.
Dover Wilson; but the King has other things to talk about when-
ever we see him, and never implies that Hal can't fight. "The
Lord Chief Justice grudgingly praises Falstaff's day's service at
Shrewsbury," says Mr. Dover Wilson, so he must think Falstaff
killed Hotspur. He says that day's service "hath a little gilded
o'er your night's exploit at Gadshill," which hardly fits a personal
triumph over the chief enemy hero. Certainly people think he
fought well somehow (perhaps because he got lis troop killed
to keep their pay); the joke of this is driven home in Part II
when Coleville surrenders to him on merely hearing his name.
But even Coleville does not say, what would be so natural an
excuse, that he is surrendering to the man who killed Hotspur.
What is more, Falstaff himself does not once say it, and he is not
prone to hide his claims. Surely the solution of this puzzle is
clear; Shakespeare is deliberately not telling us the answer, so
that an ingenious argument which forces an answer out of the
text only misrepresents his intention.
Consider how difficult it is for a dramatist, especially with a
mass audience, to run a second play on the mere assumption that
everybody in the audience knows the first one. On Mr. Dover
Wilson's view, they are assumed to know that all the characters
in the Second Part hold a wrong belief derived from the First
Part, although the Second Part begins by letting a man express
the right belief and never once lets anybody express the wrong
belief. This is incredible. But if some of the audience are expected
to wonder how the Prince's bit of chivalry worked out, their
interest is not rebuffed; they may observe like Mr. Dover Wilson
that Falstaff is getting above himself. In the main the theme is
simply dropped; perhaps because some of the audience would

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WILLIAM EMPSON 233
not like the Prince to be so dee

haps because Shakespeare did not care to make the Prince so
generous, but chiefly because it would only clutter up the new
play, which had other material. The puzzle is not beyond resolu-
tion; it is natural to guess (if you worry about it) that the Prince
waited till the truth came out and then said that Falstaff had
been useful to him at the time-thus the claim of Falstaff did
not appear a mere lie after the Prince had gilded it in his happiest
terms, but had to be modified. This would have been the only
sensible lie for the Prince to tell, and indeed Mr. Dover Wilson
hints at it when he says people thought Falstaff had "slain, or
helped to slay" Hotspur, which has no source in the text. You
may now feel that I have made a lot of unnecessary fuss, when it
turns out that I agree with Mr. Dover Wilson; but I think that
his treatment ignores the dramatic set-up and the variety of views
possible in the audience.
The next step in his argument is that Falstaff only becomes
"a person of consideration in the army" because of the Prince's
lies (whatever they were) about the Battle of Shrewsbury; "in
Part I he is Jack Falstaff with his familiars; in Part II he is Sir
John with all Europe." This is why he over-reaches himself; the
final effect of the Prince's generosity at the end of Part I is that
he is forced to reject Falstaff at the end of Part II. Now, on the
general principle that one should accept all theories, however
contradictory, which add to the total effect, this must certainly
be accepted; it pulls the whole sequence together. But it must
not be carried so far as to make Falstaff "nobody" at the begin-
ning, because that would spoil another effect, equally important
for many of the audience. Falstaff is the first major joke by the
English against their class system; he is a picture of how badly
you can behave, and still get away with it, if you are a gentle-
man-a mere common rogue would not have been nearly so
funny. As to the question of fact, of course, we are told he is a
knight the first time he appears, and it is natural to presume he

207.62.77.131 on Wed, 24 Jun 2020 06:00:30 UTC
234 FALSTAFF
got knighted throu

he started his care
History section of
ing hints, from bo
he has always been expected to be a gentleman; the dissentient
voice is from a igth Century American actor, who wrote a
pamphlet claiming that he was right not to make the old brute
a gentleman. Rather in the samne way, I remember some Amer-
ican critic complaining that Evelyn Waugh shows an offensive
snobbery about Captain Grimes, since he despises him merely for
not being a real gentleman. So far from that, the whole joke
about Grimes is that he is an undeniable public school man, and
therefore his invariably appalling behavior must always be re-
trieved, though it always comes as a great shock to the other
characters. This English family joke, as from inside an accepted
class system, may well not appeal to Americans, but in the case
of Falstaff I think English critics have rather tended to wince
away from it too.
Maintaining that he was nobody till after the Battle of
Shrewsbury, Mr. Dover Wilson has to explain his presence at the
council of commanders just before it, and says it was simply
because Shakespeare needed him on the stage. This lame argu-
ment would not apply to the Elizabethan stage. At the actual
council he only makes one unneeded joke; he is needed for talk
with the Prince afterwards, in what our texts call the same scene,
but the back curtain will already have closed on the royal coat-
of-arms and so forth; Falstaff could simply walk onto the apron.
He is at the council because that adds to the joke about him, or
rather because some of the audience will think so. However, it is
clear anyhow that the Prince brought him; the battle itself gives
a more striking case of this line of argument from Mr. Dover
Wilson. A. C. Bradley had argued that Falstaff shows courage
by hanging around in the battle till the Prince kills Hotspur,
and the reply has to be: "To establish his false claim to the slay-

207.62.77.131 on Wed, 24 Jun 2020 06:00:30 UTC
WILLIAM EMPSON 235
ing of Hotspur he must be bro

Surely this makes Shakespeare
than he is; even I could think o
coward into his great opportun
found a safe place. Shakespear
impressions; and what we do
regards a battle as a major occ
tion (e.g. "God be thanked fo
but the virtuous"). I don't deny
resent the give social satire are
take him as the "cowardly sw
but they aren't given very m
Part II, I think, the indignant
Wilson reaches actual absurdi
The special mention of [Falstaf

the battle that first reaches the
accounted for by the indecent sta
of Hotspur as it lies stricken on t
To be sure, Falstaff "goes a bi

his role. (By the way, the rea
that the rebels have been ma
royal family.) But really, how
of Falstaff stabbing a recumbe
a messenger report that Hotspu
No doubt almost any confusio
but how can a dramatist expect
the extraordinary subtle conf
surely, that these pointers rep
inent figure, though an emb
could easily be ignored by me
using a different line of assum
assurance to members who star
The interesting thing here, I

207.62.77.131 on Wed, 24 Jun 2020 06:00:30 UTC
236 FALSTAFF
is partly right; bu
Nobody, whichever
him too abject a coward even to be able to bluster. Mr. Dover
Wilson refuses to let him drive Pistol out of the inn; chiefly, I
suppose, because his theory needs Falstaff to be degenerating in
Part II. At II, iv, I85 Doll wants Pistol thrown out, so Falstaff
says "Quoit him down, Bardolph," and Bardolph says "Come,
get you downstairs," but Pistol makes a threatening harangue;
Falstaff then asks for his rapier (I96) and himself says "Get you
downstairs," while Doll says "I pray thee, Jack, do not draw";
then the Hostess makes a fuss about "(naked weapons," then Doll
says "Jack, be quiet, the rascal's gone. Ah, you whoreson little
valiant villain, you," then the Hostess says "Are you not hurt i'
the groin? Methought a' mnade a shrewd thrust at your belly";
Falstaff says to Bardolph, who must return, "Have you thrust
him out of doors??" and Bardolph says "Yea, sir, The rascal's
drunk, you have hurt him, sir, in the shoulder"; Falstaff says
"A rascal! To brave me!" and Doll in the course of a fond speech
says he is as valorous as Hector of Troy. It is unusual to have to
copy out so much text to answer a commentator. This is the
textual evidence on which Mr. Dover Wilson decides that Fal-
staff dared not fight Pistol at all, and he actually prints as part
of the play two stage directions saying that Bardolph has got to
do all the work. It must be about the most farcical struggle
against the obvious intentions of an author that a modern
scholarly editor has ever put up.
This view of Falstaff is supported by a theory about Doll,
rather obscure to me: "We have, I think, to look forward to igth
Century French literature to find a match for this study of
mingled sentimentality and brutal insentience, characteristic of
the prostitute class." I thought at first, not going further afield
than The Beggar's Opera, that this meant some criminal plot for
gain; but the audience could not know of it (this is the first we
hear of Pistol), and I suppose it means that she likes watching

207.62.77.131 on Wed, 24 Jun 2020 06:00:30 UTC
WILLIAM EMPSON 237
fighting. The argument, theref

shirking the fight she had enc
fight. After Pistol has gone he boasts, "the rogue fled from
me like quicksilver" and she answers (on his knee) "I'faith, and
thou followedst him like a church." Mr. Dover Wilson has to
push "aside" into the text before this remark and "sits on his
knee" afterwards, before he can let it go on with her praise of
his courage. She does not hide her remarks from him anywhere
else. I take it she means that he followed like a massive worthy
object, though too fat to do it fast; to find sadism here seems
to me wilful. The same trick is used against Mrs. Quickly in
Henry V, II, i, 36, over the textual crux "if he be not hewn
now," which Mr. Dover Wilson refuses to change to "drawn"-
"as Nym draws, Q screams to her bridegroom to cut the villain
down, lest the worst befall." But this frank blood-thirst is not
at all in her style, and if it was she could hardly keep her house
open. It seems that this picture of the ladies is drawn from the
sombre vignette at the end of Part II, just before the rejection,
when they are dragged across the front stage by beadles because
"the man is dead that you and Pistol beat among you." He is
breaking his own rules about the order of scenes, if he makes
this imply that they were in a plot with Pistol at his first appear-
ance. What we do gather before his entry is that they are afraid
he may kill somebody in the house, and know they will get into
trouble if he does. He starts threatening death as soon as he
comes, whether as a bawdy joke or not ("I will discharge upon
her, sir, with two bullets"). Also Doll had just begun a pathetic
farewell to Falstaff, who is going to the wars; she is cross at their
being interrupted. Also she came on for this scene already ele-
gantly unwell from too much drink. I need to list the reasons
for her anger, because Mr. Dover Wilson comments on the line
"Sweet knight, I kiss thy neaf" that Pistol "is ready to go quietly,
but Doll will have him thrown out"-that is, she insists on having
a fight. It is hard for Mrs. Quickly to turn her own customers

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238 FALSTAFF
out, and Doll will be helping her to avoid serious danger if she
can scare the bully away permanently; this, if anything, is what
is underlined by the beadle scene, though by the time of Henry V,
as we needn't be surprised, he has become a valuable protector.
Such is what I would call her motive, if I looked for one, but
she may well simply be too drunk and cross to realize that he
is already going quietly. Either way there is no need to drag
in sadism.
Mr. Dover Wilson has still another argument from this scene
to prove Falstaff's increasing degeneration. After Pistol has been
thrown out the Prince arrives and eavesdrops on Falstaff, who
is making some rather justified remarks against him, so that
Falstaff again has to find a quick excuse; he says he dispraised
the Prince before the wicked, that the wicked might not fall in
love with him. "He now whines and cringes on a new note,
while he is forced to have recourse to defaming Doll in turn, a
shift which is neither witty nor attractive." To be sure, the words
"(corrupt blood" may imply that she has syphilis; it is only the
editor's stage direction which makes him point at her, but the
idea does give her a professional reason for displaying anger. He
has long been saying he has it himself, so there doesn't seem any
great betrayal in saying that she has it too (as he does soon after,
1. 335). I imagine that the point of the joke is to insinuate that
the Prince has it; thus it is too late to save him from the wicked,
and too late for him to think he can cure himself by saying he
has reformed-to forestall being laughed at for being found
making love, Falstaff welcomes the Prince among his fellow-
sufferers. The badinage in these circles is always a bit rough, and
I don't deny that it is hard to know how you are expected to
take it. But in this case we have an immediate pointer from an
"aside" by Poins, who as usual is in a plot with the Prince against
Falstaff. (By the way, this shows what nonsense it is to suppose
that the Prince made a sudden pathetic discovery of the worth-
lessness of Poins only two scenes before, a decisive step in his life,

207.62.77.131 on Wed, 24 Jun 2020 06:00:30 UTC
WILLIAM EMPSON 239
we are to believe; they are on just the same footing as ever.)

Poins says, "My lord, he will drive you out of your revenge, and
turn all to a merriment, if you take not the heat." How could
this be said if Falstaff was only whining and cringing, or even
if he were picking a serious quarrel with the ladies? At the end
of the scene, when he is called off to the war as an important
officer (a dozen captains are knocking at every tavern door for
Sir John Falstaff, sweating with eagerness-so says Peto, and
Bardolph corroborates about the dozen; and however much the
editor insists that this is only "a summons for neglect of duty"
it still treats Falstaff as worth a lot of trouble in an emergency),
both the women speak with heartbreaking pathos about how
much they love him, and the text requires Doll to shed tears.
If we critics are to call this a "calculated degradation," I do not
know what we expect our own old age to be like. The truth is,
surely, that we never see the old brute more triumphant; doomed
you might already feel him, but not degraded.
II.
However, I do not want simply to defend Falstaff against the
reproaches of the virtuous, represented by Mr. Dover Wilson;
it was always an unrewarding occupation, and even the most
patient treatment of detail, in such a case, has often failed to
convince a jury. I think, indeed, that Mr. Dover Wilson's points
are well worth examining, being of great interest in themselves;
but, what is more, I think many of them are thrown in with
a broadminded indifference as to whether they fit his thesis or
not. Some of them seem to me rather too hot on my side of the
question, and this may serve to remind us of what is so easily
forgotten in a controversy, that the final truth may be complex.
For example, he has a fine remark on Mrs. Quickly's description
of Falstaff's death. She says she felt his feet, and then his knees,
and so upward and upward, and all as cold as any stone. The
only comment that would occur to me is that this dramatist can

207.62.77.131 on Wed, 24 Jun 2020 06:00:30 UTC
240 FALSTAFF
continue unflinchingly to insert bawdy jokes while both the

speaker and the audience are meant to be almost in tears. Mr.
Dover Wilson, taking a more scholarly view, remarks that the
detail is drawn from the death of Socrates; the symptoms are
those of the gradual death from hemlock. But whatever can he
have intended by this parallel? Surely it has to imply that Falstaff
like Socrates was a wise teacher killed by a false accusation of
corrupting young men; his patient heroism under injustice, and
how right the young men were to love him, are what we have to
reflect on. I hope that somebody pointed out this parallel to
Shakespeare; he did, I believe, feel enough magic about Falstaff
for it to have given him a mixed but keen pleasure; but that
seems as far as speculation can reasonably go. To make it an
intentional irony really would be like Verrall on Euripides, and
it would blow Mr. Dover Wilson's picture of Falstaff into smith-
ereens. And yet, though it seems natural to talk like tlhis, I am
not certain; the idea that Falstaff was a good tutor somehow was
a quite public part of the play, and might conceivably have been
fitted out with a learned reference. He has a similar eerie flash of
imagination about a stage direction in Henry V, where the heroes
of Agincourt are described as "poor troops." He rightly explains
that modern editions omit the epithet, an important guide to the
producer; the story would be mere boasting if it did not empha-
size that their victory was a hairbreadth escape after being gruel-
led. But then he goes on, "Did the 'scarecrows' that Falstaff led
to Shrewsbury return to the stage?" It seems rather likely, for
the convenience of a repertory company, that they did; but what
can it mean, if we suppose it means anything? What is recalled
is the most unbeatable of all Falstaff's retorts to Henry-"they'll
fit a pit as well as better; tush, man, mortal men, mortal men."
Falstaff has just boasted that he took bribes to accept such bad
recruits ("I have abused the King's press damnably"), and boasts
later that he got them killed to keep their pay (by the way, it is
before his success has "degraded" him) but this makes his reply

207.62.77.131 on Wed, 24 Jun 2020 06:00:30 UTC
WILLIAM EMPSON 241
all the more crashing, as from one murderer to another: "that

is all you Norman lords want, in your squabbles between cousins
over your loot, which you make an exCuse to murder the English
people." This very strong joke could be implied in Hen. 1IV, as
part of a vague protest against civil war, but to recall it over
Henry's hereditary claim to France would surely be reckless;
besides, the mere return of those stage figures could not carry
so much weight. But I believe that thoughts of that kind were
somewhere in the ambience of the play, however firmly they
were being rebutted; it is conceivable that Mr. Dover Wilson
here is being wiser than either of us know.
One gets rather the same effect, I think, from his remarks
about killing the prisoners at Agincourt, though here he is
making a sturdy defence, not a bold conjecture. The position is
that the King comes out in IV, vi, "with prisoners," and says his
side has done well but must be careful; a pathetic anecdote is
told; then an alarum sounds, and the King immediately (with-
out inquiry) says:
The French have reinforced their scattered men:

Then every soldier kill his prisoners,
Give the word through.
Mr. Dover Wilson insists that this has been misunderstood be-
cause the stage direction "with prisoners" has regularly been
omitted-it should be made clear on the stage that there are
more prisoners than captors. But this needed to be said, not
shown; the chief effect of bringing the prisoners onto the stage
could only be to make the audience in cold blood see the de-
fenceless men killed-indeed, that is clearly the reason why the
editors left it out. He goes on to argue, convincingly I think, that
this incident was used in the chronicles Shakespeare drew from
as an example of Henry's power to recognize a necessity at once,
and that the French chroniclers do not blame him for it, though
Holinshed is apologetic. But we are concerned with the effect on

207.62.77.131 on Wed, 24 Jun 2020 06:00:30 UTC
242 FALSTAFF
an audience, and here the very next words, which are from
Fluellen to Gower, say:
Kill the boys and the luggage! tis expressly against the law of arms,
tis as arrant a piece of knavery, look you, as can be offert.
Gower remarks that because the Frenchmen escaping from the

battle have killed unarmed boys in the King's tent therefore the
King "most worthily hath caused every soldier to cut his prison-
er's throat. 0, tis a gallant king." These experts of course have
just walked on for a new scene, and do not know, as we do, that
it was Henry who started killing unarmed men, not the French.
"Shakespeare, who might have omitted it," says Mr. Dover Wil-
son, "offers no apologies, but sets the device in a framework of
circumstance which makes it seem natural and inevitable." This
seems to me comic; the framework not only does nothing to
make us think the killing of helpless people necessary but con-
demns it fiercely. (Even Mr. Dover Wilson reflects that it might
be rather a waste of time, under a sudden counter-attack, if one
hadn't got machine-guns). Fluellen goes on to compare Henry
in detail to Alexander the Big, mispronouncing it as PIG, and
the final parallel is that "as Alexander killed his friend Cleitus
in his ales and his cups" so Henry-well, he only turned Falstaff
away, and wasn't drunk at the time. We have already seen Nym
taking the same view-one must expect a hero to be ungrateful
and violent; but this is a remarkable time to recall it. Henry
soon comes back saying he is angry and again demanding that
prisoners be killed; and even Dr. Johnson, the patron saint of
Mr. Dover Wilson's criticism, found it absurd that a man who
had just killed all his prisoners should express anger by trying
to kill them again. The Quarto of i6oo, described by Mr. Dover
Wilson as "a 'reported' version, probably supplied by traitor-
actors, of performances-perhaps in a shortened form for pro-
vincial audiences-of the play as acted by Shakespeare's com-

207.62.77.131 on Wed, 24 Jun 2020 06:00:30 UTC
WILLIAM EMPSON 243
pany," not only gives the whole prisoner sequence but adds a
delighted "coupla gorge" from the coward Pistol, as he prepares
to join in this really safe and agreeable form of warfare. He was
already practising the phrase (almost his only acquirement in
the French language) before he left London, so that it is firmly
associated with his particularly sordid point of view; and if we
are to believe that he is shown starting the massacre the play
does everything it can to make the audience nauseated by such
actions, even before it has them denounced by Fluellen. I do not
see that Mr. Dover Wilson makes out his case at all (the ques-
tion of course is not about the historical behavior of the Prince,
for whom the opinion of the French chroniclers is a weighty
support, but about an effect on the Elizabethan stage). If we
accept the text we must think (i) that Shakespeare's disgust
against Henry explodes here, (2) that Henry's treatment of Fal-
staff is recalled as part of a denunciation of his brutality and
deceitfulness in general, and (3) that Shakespeare, in his con-
tempt for his brutal audience, assumes that nobody will realize
what he is doing. I agree with Mr. Dover Wilson that this
vehement picture is improbable; I want the conflict of forces in
the play to be real, but not secret and explosive in this way.
Surely there is an easy escape from the dilemma, which
must have been suggested before. Shakespeare first followed the
chroniclers about Henry's decision, without making any accusa-
tions against the French; then he felt this made Henry look too
brutal and "got round it," just as he contradicted the statement
of Holinshed that Henry sacked Harfleur. Instead of saying that
Henry started killing unarmed men he said the French did; this
propaganda device is familiar nowadays-you do not simply
ignore the story against your side, in case it is floating in the
minds of your hearers, but contrive to plant it on the other side.
This required adding both Fluellen's remarks and Henry's speech
about being angry, but cutting only the single line "Then every
soldier kill his prisoners." We have then to suppose that the

207.62.77.131 on Wed, 24 Jun 2020 06:00:30 UTC
244 FALSTAFF
Company ignored th
and that the actor
them pretty stupid,
control over what t
had made a strong
control. Now, after
way, I still think t
frame of mind wh
part of a plan to m
Henry's face was ge
mean that Shakesp
less that he was try
wiser few; I think
for the thing, and
himself, and go ba
done propaganda kn
what I would make
Mr. Dover Wilson,
not the true one.
Where the possibi
needs to hold on to
Wilson advises. But
prodigal who becam
peare took it over
part of the History
all the more becaus
trilogy on the basis
what Mr. Dover W
it odd of him to cl
makes him treat Falstaff as medieval rather than Renaissance.
Of course this does not make me deny that the medieval ele-
ments are still tlhere. Falstaff is in part simply a "Vice," that is,
an energetic symbol of impulses which most people have to re-
press, who gives pleasure by at once releasing and externalizing

207.62.77.131 on Wed, 24 Jun 2020 06:00:30 UTC
WILLIAM EMPSON 245
them. His plausibility is amus

the world can be accepted as tru
nized as wrong, and he must be punished in the end. Also (as a
minor version of this type) he is in part the "cowardly swash-
buckler," of the Latin play rather than the Miracle Play, whose
absurdity and eventual exposure are to comfort the audience for
their frequent anxiety and humiliation from "swashbucklers."
As part of the historical series, he stands for the social disorder
which is sure to be produced by a line of usurpers, therefore he
is a parallel to the rebel leaders though very unlike them; the
good king must shake him off in the end as part of his work of
re-uniting the country. Also I think there is a more timeless ele-
ment about him, neither tied to his period in the story nor easily
called Renaissance or medieval, though it seems to start with
Shakespeare; he is the scandalous upper-class man whose behavior
embarrasses his class and thereby pleases the lower class in the
audience, as an "exposure"; the faint echoes of upper-class com-
plaints about him, as in the change of his name, are I think
evidence that this was felt. For these last two functions, cowardice
is not the vice chiefly required of him. But surely we have no
reason to doubt that there were other forces at work behind the
popularity of the myth, which can more directly be called Renais-
sance; something to do with greater trust in the natural man or
pleasure in contemplating him, which would join on to what so
many critics have said about "the comic idealization of freedom."
I think it needs putting in more specific terms, but I don't see
that Mr. Dover Wilson can be plausible in denying it altogether.
The most important "Renaissance" aspects of Falstaff, I
think, can be most quickly described as nationalism and Machia-
vellianism; both of them make him a positively good tutor for
a prince, as he regularly claims to be, so that it is not surprising
that he produced a good King or that his rejection, though neces-
sary, could be presented as somehow tragic. The Machiavellian
view (no more tied to that author then than it is now, but more

207.62.77.131 on Wed, 24 Jun 2020 06:00:30 UTC
246 FALSTAFF
novel and shocking

that a young man is
if he is being train
can trust, you bein
stand his people, ca
the world by exper
knows the tricks, he
between the two he
The idea is not sim
though that in itse
any price was too hi
he had the breadth
the Magnanimous M
ratlher than upper-cl
anti-puritan, as we
and Falstaff can be r
acceptance of it by S
indeed I imagine tha
to be worth writin
Wilson began preac
Ideal King. After rej
popular touch and
Henry V limits itsel
of this training, for
of the Princess (we
actually won the bat
as a sickeningly obv
son thought it imp
good young million
"foreign aristocrat"
proach; and the idea
could have taught

207.62.77.131 on Wed, 24 Jun 2020 06:00:30 UTC
WILLIAM EMPSON 247
could have taught him that way

The wooing scene also bring
the thing in a sharp form. It is almost farcical to suppose that
Henry, as a Norman Prince, could not talk his own language to
his Norman bride; but it was much wanted by the play. We tend
to forget that the rising power of England, in Shakespeare's time,
was a little embarrassed to have been so long ruled by an invader
dynasty who spoke French; but the Tudors made it an important
plank in their propaganda that they were the first really "Eng-
lish" line. As a forerunner they had only Henry V, who had
learned English by hanging about the taverns when young, and
had very rightly refused to learn anything else. No wonder he
can re-unite the country (though only for a time because his
house is cursed); no wonder that the tedious line of joke about
Englishman-Scotchman-Welshman-Irishman appears for the first
time among the heroes of Agincourt. Nor was this myth entirely
false; I noticed Mr. A. L. Rouse asserting recently that Henry V
was the first King of England to use the English language for
his official correspondence. (The only dates one seems to need
are that Agincourt was 14I5 and that Chaucer died in 1400). This
of course made a much more serious defence of Falstaff, in the
mind of a realistic spectator, than any romantic idea that he had
improved the Prince by showing him low life; to have made the
monarchy national was a decisively big thing, however absurdly
bad Falstaff was otherwise, however much he needed to be re-
jected. Some critics have suggested that Shakespeare privately
loved Falstaff but, like the Prince, betrayed him in public or
when taking an official view of affairs; no doubt that feeling was
present too, for some of the audience as well as for Shakespeare;
but even from the coldly political angle Falstaff could stand for
something valuable-it would seem absurd to say so, but one
2. The Hal legend invented this rather than Shakespeare; it comes in a milder form
into The Famous Victories of Heniry V, the pre-Shakespearean stage version, which does
give credit to the longbow-men and doesn't to the Scotch, Welsh and Irish.

207.62.77.131 on Wed, 24 Jun 2020 06:00:30 UTC
248 FALSTAFF
would feel there was "something in it." To put him back in his
contemporary politics is perhaps a bit remote from the needs of
a modern producer, being so hard to get across to his audience,
but does I think remove the suggestion of false sentiment against
which Mr. Dover Wilson understandably revolted.
I want now to recommend this point of view by looking at
one or two memories of the Norman Conquest in Henry V which
have been neglected; I only noticed them myself when looking
over the text after seeing the British wartime film version of the
play, to find where the cuts stood out. One would expect that
the rougher propaganda of earlier days had left in some dam-
aging admissions, but that the national hero had at any rate been
patriotic all right. But when Henry is answering the French
Ambassador who brought the insulting tennis balls something
much odder turns up. He boasts that he will conquer and rule
France, his proper heritage as a Norman, and in answering the
Dauphin's jeer at his life he says he naturally lived like a beast
when he had only England to live in:
We never valued this poor seat of England,
but he will live in an entirely different way when he has got hold
of the much more valuable bit of property called France. Critics,
so far as they attend to this, placidly call it irony; and no doubt
a contemporary of Shakespeare could take it that way too. Nor
is it then flat, because a patriot should always regard his country
as weak but heroic, certain to win but only certain because of its
virtues. But surely it would be a natural reflection to many in
the first audiences that a feudal lord really did think of a country
like this, without any irony. Surely it is odd, when the dramatist
clearly wants to make the hero patriotic, that he gives the audi-
ence such a very strong and plausible case where he isn't. It seems
to me riding very near the edge, in that audience, to make the
ever-popular Hal say (may I repeat what Mr. Dover Wilson's
Ideal King said),

207.62.77.131 on Wed, 24 Jun 2020 06:00:30 UTC
WILLIAM EMPSON 249
We never valued this poor seat of England.
Of course I willingly agree that the answer is merely the

familiar one of dramatic suspense; this remark comes early in
the play, and by the end of it we have got Hal being almost
shamingly homey. But I am sure it was meant to be a real sus-
pense, not a thing to be thrown away at once by the nods and
winks at the audience which Mr. Dover Wilson is so fond of
inserting in his stage directions. That Hal turned out to be the
first "English" king, unlike his ancestors, was to be presented
with drama, and the dramatist gives it a certain violence (though
not too frankly) by recalling the doubt which would have
appeared real to a I5th Century audience, and perhaps did not
appear very unreal to a i6th Century one either.
I hope this idea that the English were conscious of being
ruled by the French does not strike a modern reader as far-
fetched; it only seems so now, I think, because the English are
good at forgetting things, and the Dauphin says it very firmly
about the English lords in Henry V:
Shall a few sprays of us,

The emptying of our fathers' luxury,
Sprit up so suddenly into the clouds
And overlook their grafters?
The English feudal lords are rather like French Canadians, in

fact, but also half-castes. I am sure it is important to realize that
this is presented as an intelligible point of view, though of course
refuted with triumph.
However, it was to be refuted by displaying English superior-
ity in general, rather than by asserting that the English could
and should enslave the French; this "jingo" aspect of a super-
ficially rather coarse play (rightly described by the Germans
around 1914 as "good war reading") is a bit embarrassing, and
I think it is mostly removed if you remember a political back-
ground which is not part of the text. The English had been in

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250 FALSTAFF
doubt during the i

tures in Europe or
worlds. Elizabeth's
which could not be said publicly, but Elizabeth herself had
quietly and penuriously shown a preference for new worlds; it
would not appear recklessly unpatriotic, even in Henry V, to
insinuate that there was something to be said for her policy.
Indeed, this was the only possible line of expansion; if the English
had kept France, a modern reader is likely to reflect, they would
soon have been ruled from Paris; and for that matter if they had
kept America (later) they would soon have been ruled from
Washington-the two great losses secured national independence.
I am not saying that Shakespeare was wise about this controversy,
or even right (he seems remarkably little interested in new
worlds, apart from some good jokes against them in The
Tempest; however, in the MercIhant of Venice he can see the
romance of making London a world trading centre like Venice
all right); only that this was the context of political controversy
in which he was building up his enormously popular stage
machine. After all, the only claim of Hal to France is that he is
a Norman not an Englishman, and almost the only thing he is
praised for is learning to be an Englishman not a Norman.
Shakespeare, I think, felt that one ought to be patriotic and yet
that one needn't pull a long face about not ruling France; the
international angle was all right somehow, though one had
better keep on the fence a bit, whereas the danger of civil war
at- home wasn't. In the middle of his play of conquest, therefore,
he can cheerfully let Hal admit to God that he has no right to
conquest, and only beg for the escape of these particular devoted
troops (who by the way have been questioning the rights of
the war):
Not today, 0 Lord,
No, not today, think not upon the fault
My father made in compassing this crown,

207.62.77.131 on Wed, 24 Jun 2020 06:00:30 UTC
WILLIAM EMPSON 25 1
This is the most genuine thing

argues that even now he was t
if you look into the facts about
off the point I think); and we a
therefore successful in saving
course, remove the doom from
lineage, or even perhaps from t
France, and he never prays for
not want to sentimentalize the
really is a noble prayer when yo
knows it to be; he is hardly pra
dividual troops he has just been
from the war-time film produc
(as I understand the feeling) he
a magical extra gift, never kn
brating for ever, as he says the
quest of France but the gradu
They still had to go through a
grinds down small; the Wars of
his early death; but Hal deserved
he had showvn the right way or
right proportions, before his
"patriotic" feeling about Hal (
I feel it myself; it is a real eno
need not be made for it. On th
interested in conquering Franc
getting troops from different pa
in a tight corner and a foreign
an absurd amount of whitewas
don't deny that the obvious a
trumpet one; what I maintain
about these questions of foreign
the less simple-minded spectat
speare had made Henry's father

207.62.77.131 on Wed, 24 Jun 2020 06:00:30 UTC
252 FALSTAFF
about how he woul

something, to avoid
Shakespeare really
imputing to him a
head.
I ought now to say something about the introductory scenes
of the play which give the reasons for the war, though I can say
little. The clergy first make clear that the war is to their own
interest and then recite Henry's technical claim to the French
throne at great length. (Modern historians, as I understand, con-
sider that Henry had no decent reason for attacking France,
except possibly the one that Shakespeare made his father give.)
The war-time film handled this, rather ingeniously, by keeping
us in the play-house at the beginning and turning this recitation
into farce, guying old-world techniques rather than anything
else. It is hard to imagine how the first audiences took it; one
must remember they were well accustomed to hearing sermons.
Mr. Dover Wilson's attempts to save the face of the clergy do not
seem to me worth a reply, but he is right in insisting that the
recitation did not seem dull, as it does now; not, however, as he
thinks, because everybody took it for granted. I imagine that
Shakespeare was rather ostentatiously not making up anyone's
mind for them.
Assuming then that the legend about Hal and the value of
his tavern life had this rather massive background, I want now
to say something about the interior of Falstaff; that is, not any-
thing which was kept secret from the first audiences, but how
it was that Shakespeare's incarnation of the legend could be felt
intuitively as a very real character, whom one was curious to
know more about; as evidently happened. The i8th Century
Morgann, if I may avoid appearing too "modern" at this point,
has some piercing remarks about the interior of a stage character
in general, and how the impression of it is built up; but is mainly
concerned to say about Falstaff (after using this idea to explain

207.62.77.131 on Wed, 24 Jun 2020 06:00:30 UTC
WILLIAM EMPSON 253
how we feel he isn't a coward

deeper interior is more sordid
nize, though we still somehow
rather hard to get at for most
remarks of Dr. Johnson; and one could wish that Mr. Dover
Wilson, who is rightly fond of pointing out that later critics have
not had the firm good sense of Johnson, had profited by his
master here. It is not surprising that Johnson speaks with con-
fidence about this sort of life, because he had observed it; he
could say without absurdity that he regretted not having met
Falstaff. Also he himself was a man of startling appearance; a
pugnaciously and robustly amusing talker, who regularly con-
quered but never won anything that mattered, a hero of taverns,
fretted by remorse (which Falstaff makes much play with if
nothing more), starved of love, unwilling to be alone. He has
several comments such as that "a man feels in himself the pain
of deformity"; "however, like this merry knight, he may make
sport of it among those whom it is his interest to please." If we
compare this with the struggles of Mr. Dover Wilson to prove
that Falstaff was a Medieval Vice, with no interior at all, surely
the truth of Johnson stands out like a rock. The picture of him
as driven on by an obscure personal shame, of an amoral sort,
has several advantages, I think. Mr. Wyndham Lewis has written
well about his incessant trick of "charm," his insistence on pre-
senting himself as a deliciously lovable old bag of guts, helpless
but able to make a powerful appeal to the chivalry of the pro-
tector; one needs to add that this curious view of him made a
sharp contrast to his actual wickedness-that was the joke; but
both sides of it are really present. He clamors for love, and I do
not see why Mr. Dover Wilson should ignore it. I made a mistake
in my Pastoral from assuming that this line of talk was concen-
trated upon the Prince; in I Hen. IV, II, ii-"If the rascal have
not given me medicines to make me love him, I'll be hanged; it
could not be else-I have drunk medicines," it must be Poins,

207.62.77.131 on Wed, 24 Jun 2020 06:00:30 UTC
254 FALSTAFF
not the Prince, who is supposed to have administered the love-

philtre. Poins has just told the audience (though not Falstaff)
that he stole the horse whose loss creates all this amorous tumult
(because Falstaff is too fat to walk) and Falstaff was shouting
for Poins; to be sure, the Prince is the only person yet spoken to
by Falstaff in this scene, and the Prince's usual claim to innocence
has put him under suspicion--the actor could drag the words
round to apply to the Prince, as I first thought, and Falstaff can
hardly know which of them stole it. But even Falstaff could
hardly say of the Prince, "I have forsworn his company hourly
any day these two and twenty years, and yet I am bewitched by
the rogue's company." The historical 1-al was about i6 here; the
stage one might be regarded as 22, so that Falstaff has forsworn
his company since he was born, but this would be rather point-
lessly absurd, and the natural view is that it applies to his (pre-
sumably older and steadier) gentleman-in-waiting. It is a rather
startling cry, and comes early while the character of Falstaff is
being defined to the audience; I take it the idea is that he regu-
larly expresses love towards the young men who rob for him, and
that this is a powerful means of leading them astray-it is a proud
thing to become the favorite of such an expert teacher. For that
matter Fagin in Oliver Twist is always expressing love to flatter
the Artful Dodger and suchlike; even a member of the audience
who hated Falstaff from the beginning would recognize that this
bit of the machine had to be there, as a normal thing. It doesn't
make very much difference whether Falstaff said it about Hal or
Poins. The only thing that still puzzles me here is the recurrence
of the number 22, which probably means some private association
of Shakespeare's. When the Prince says he has repaid the money
gained by robbery he adds that he has procured Falstaff a charge
of foot (they can all get their faces straight, now that civil war
has loosened the purse-strings) and Falstaff says: "I would it had
been of horse. Where shall I find one that can steal well? 0 for
a fine thief, of the age of two and twenty or thereabouts. I am

207.62.77.131 on Wed, 24 Jun 2020 06:00:30 UTC
WILLIAM EMPSON 255
heinously unprovided." The numbers regularly have a magical

claim; consider the repeated thousand pounds; these twenty-two
years of the young thief seems to me like the laborious number-
magic in Hamlet, designed to prove (not, I think, anything about
Hamlet's age, which Shakespeare merely happened to think of
differently on different occasions, but) that the First Grave-Digger
was appointed on the day of Hamlet's birth and has been waiting
there ever since for an arrival never before seen but now due.
However, I don't suppose the number 22 was meant to tell the
audience anything.
Returning to Falstaff's heart, I think there is a quick answer
to the idea that the old brute had no heart, and therefore could
not have died of breaking it. If he had had no heart he would
have had no power, not even to get a drink, and he had a dan-
gerous amount of power. I am not anxious to present Falstaff's
heart as a very attractive object; you might say that it had better
be called his vanity, but we are none or us sure how we would
emerge from a thorough analysis on those lines; the point is that
everybody felt it obvious that he had got one-otherwise he
would not be plausible even in attracting his young thieves, let
alone his insanely devoted "hostess." I daresay that the wincing
away from the obvious (or from Mr. Wyndham Lewis' account)
which I seem to find in recent critics is due to distaste for homo-
sexuality, which is regarded nowadays in more practical terms
than the Victorian ones; the idea of Falstaff making love to the
Prince, they may feel, really has to be resisted. But surely John-
son gives us the right perspective here; Falstaff felt in himself
the pain of a deformity which the audience could always see;
no amount of expression of love from Falstaff to his young thieves
would excite suspicion on that topic from the audience, not be-
cause the audiences were innocent about it, but because they could
assume that any coming thief (let alone the Prince) would be
too vain to yield to such deformity. I agree that a doubt here
could not have been allowed, but there was no need to guard

207.62.77.131 on Wed, 24 Jun 2020 06:00:30 UTC
256 FALSTAFF
against it. A resist

that Falstaff is rat
him. It is as well t
where on Mr. Dove
nothing left in him
John (IV, ii, 82),
love me, nor a man cannot make him laugh," and goes on in a
fairly long speech to claim that he has taught Prince Hal better
humanity. This is easily thought ridiculous because it is almost
entirely a praise of drink, but the mere length presumes dramatic
effect; and drink was presumed to teach both sympathy and
courage (it is the combination of these two ideas in a "heart," of
course, which make it rather baffling to discuss what kind of
heart Falstaff has); and we have just seen Prince John perform
a disgusting act of cowardly treachery. This detail of structure,
I think, is enough to prove that at least the popular side of tlle
audience was assumed to agree with Falstaff. Indeed, if you
compare Hal to his brother and his father, whom the plays des-
cribe so very unflinchingly, it is surely obviouLs that to love Fal-
staff was a liberal education for him.
It is hard to defend this strange figure without doing it too
much. May I remind the patient reader that I am still doing
what this essay started to do, trying to show that Falstaff from
his first conception was not intended to arrive at Agincourt,
because the Prince was intended to reach that triumph over his
broken heart. The real case for rejecting Falstaff at the end of
Part II is that he was dangerously strong, indeed almost a rebel
leader; Mr. Dover Wilson makes many good points here, and he
need not throw the drama away by pretending that the bogey
was always ridiculous. He is quite right in insisting that the
Prince did not appear malicious in the rejection, and did only
what was necessary; because Falstaff's expectations were enorm-
ous (and were recklessly expressed, by the way, to persons who
could shame him afterwards); the terrible sentence "the laws

207.62.77.131 on Wed, 24 Jun 2020 06:00:30 UTC
WILLIAM EMPSON 257
of England are at my command

Justice" meant something so pr
may actually have stopped cra
next. A mob would enter the sm
and how much of it Falstaff could raise would be a reasonable
subject for doubt; he could become "protector" of the young
king; once you admit that he is both an aristocrat and a mob
leader he is a familiar very dangerous type. The "special plead-
ing" of Mr. Dover Wilson here, that the King only gave him
honor by sending him to the Fleet Prison, a place where lords
were put in temporary custody while waiting for inquiry before
the Privy Council and such like, instead of treating him as a
common criminal, seems to me off the point; he really was im-
portant enough for the Fleet Prison, both in the eyes of the
imaginary I5th Century and the real i6th Century audiences.
Mr. Dover Wilson argues, rightly I think, that Henry shows a
good deal of forbearance in his conditions to Falstaff, so far as
one can interpret them; but one must remember that the King
and the dramatist both had to show forbearance, for just about
the same reasons, and facing a similar mob. I do not mean that
either of them privately wanted to be hard on the old man, only
that they both had to get through a public event. As to why
Shakespeare's play had a casual Epilogue, for some performances,
saying "maybe Jack will bob up again some time," it is not hard
to imagine that he might sometime need to send his audience
away in a good temper by having that said. So much so, indeed,
that it is not evidence of his real intentions; maybe he had sud-
denly become so important that he had to lie like a Foreign
Office. In the same way, Henry had to get rid of Falstaff with
unquestionable firmness but without any suspicion that he had
behaved with malice, because a rising in favor of Falstaff was
just what he needed to avoid. A bit of political understanding,
I think, is enough to make this problem transparent.
However, to say that the rejection has to be done firmly if

207.62.77.131 on Wed, 24 Jun 2020 06:00:30 UTC
258 FALSTAFF
done in public does not say that it need be done so at all. The
real case against Hal, in the reasonable view of A. C. Bradley,
is that he was dishonest in not warning Falstaff beforehand that
he would have to reject him after coronation, and still more in
pretending on that occasion that Falstaff had misled him. Their
separation, says Bradley, might have been shown in a private
scene rich in humor and only touched with pathos; a remark
which shows how very different he would like the characters to
be. Mr. Dover Wilson answers that Falstafi makes a public re-
jection necessary; the Prince "first tries to avoid the encounter,
begging the Lord Chief Justice to say for him what must be said.
But Falstaff will not allow it. . . . Though under observation,
(the Prince) falters and finds it difficult to keep up," etc.; and
the Prince could not have warned Falstaff at a convenient time,
because "Shakespeare has been busy since Shrewsbury manoeuv-
ring the former friends into different universes between which
conversation is impossible." One is often baffled by a peculiar
circularity in the arguments of Mr. Dover Wilson. This may be
an adequate defence for Hal, though his claim that he was mis-
led still looks unnecessarily shifty; but it cannot also be a defense
for the dramatist; indeed I think it brings into a just prominence
the fact that Shakespeare wanted, and arranged, to end his play
with this rather unnerving bang. By the way, Dr. Johnson called
it, so far from a bang, "a lame and impotent conclusion," and
poor Mr. Dover Wilson has to argue that his master is only com-
plaining at the absence of a final heroic couplet. He argues against
a phrase of Bradley, that Hal was trying "to buy the praise of
the respectable at the cost of honor and truth," that the word
respectability had not been invented (but the thing is visible
enough here) and that the change in Hal is "an instance of the
phenomenon of conversation" (this does not join well onto the
previous arguments that Hal was never really a sinner). None of
this, I think, is adequate ground for doubting what seems obvious,
that Shakespeare was deliberately aiming at a rather peculiar

207.62.77.131 on Wed, 24 Jun 2020 06:00:30 UTC
WILLIAM EMPSON 259
dramatic effect, imposing consid

felt whether they accepted it or n
the characters is given its fulle
resolved; as G. K. Chesterton rem
play," whereas the plays so call
propaganda plays-a man might
importance of Henry V, and st
trying to decide for him, "wheth
when he was a thief." Of cours
problem, because it simply tells
so strongly brings out what is in
coarse may be profound or at lea
room for the suggestion of Mr. S
require before he arrived at A
from sacrificing the representat
of heroes.
After imposing decent enough conditions on Falstaff, Henry
sweeps out with the remark that the Lord Chief Justice must
"perform the tenor of his word," and this is at once interpreted
by the Chief Justice throwing Falstaff and all his company into
the Fleet Prison; perhaps only till the mobs have dispersed, as Mr.
Dover Wilson suggested. Neither he nor any other critic that I
have seen discusses what would happen to Falstaff when he got
there; a thing which would seem obvious to the audience but
cannot to us. Surely it is likely that he would be smashed by the
Fleet Prison. It assumed the prisoner to be a rich landowner who
could toss money away before he got out, and it examined his
sources of money and encouraged creditors to speak up. Lords at
Elizabeth's court were commonly ruined if they were sent to
the Fleet, living as they did on a speculator's market, and it is
hard to see how Falstaff would do better. As for his last words,
"Master Shallow, I owe you a thousand pounds," which Mr.
Dover Wilson calls "the last word," they are certainly a last boast,
and I warmly agree that Shakespeare did not want to send the

207.62.77.131 on Wed, 24 Jun 2020 06:00:30 UTC
260 FALSTAFF
old boy off the stage whining and appearing broken, or even
telling too much truth for that matter-nor did the King. But
I think a contemporary spectator would reflect that, though
ready money would be a great help to Falstaff "and his com-
pany" in the Fleet, it wouldn't take them at all far. And indeed,
when the next play shows Falstaff dying as a free man in the
tavern, I think this person might reflect that the King must have
bought him out, paying off Shallow as well as the others. I would
like to have a ruling from a historian on the point, but I suspect
that the last boast of Falstaff was only just enough to get him
off the stage.
I have next to argue that he was sure to die. Surely we have
all met these strong old men, fixed in their habits, who seem
unbreakable ("wonderful" as people say) till they get a shock,
and then collapse very suddenly. And the shock given to Falstaff
was very severe all round; it does not matter whether ambition
or love or his pleasures mattered most to him, he had lost them
all, and had also lost his mystique; his private war against shame
had been answered by public loathing of a kind which no tongue
could get round; even his "company" would be reproaching him
and jeering at him. As against this, which seems ordinary human
experience, we have Mr. Dover Wilson arguing both that he was
a study in increasing degeneration and that "the last thing
Shakespeare had in mind" when he wrote the Epilogue of Part II
"'was a sad death for his fat knight," who was needed as a comic
at Agincourt. Now, a certain amount of petty criminality can
reasonably be shown among the troops at Agincourt, where it
is punished, but does Mr. Dover Wilson mean that a searching
picture of the third degree of degeneration would have fitted
comfortably into the scene of national triumph? It seems rather
hard on the Prince; who would also, I think, prefer not to be
in danger of unbeatable comic criticisms from his old tutor at
such a time. The idea that the text has gone wrong, I submit,
comes from not seeing the story in the round; to have brought

207.62.77.131 on Wed, 24 Jun 2020 06:00:30 UTC
WILLIAM EMPSON 261
Falstaff to Agincourt would hav

gears of a rather delicate piece of
I want finally to consider wh
speare himself, as apart from the
nite conclusion to be expected,
an achievement on this scale ha
that Shakespeare, though of cou
Company much earlier, already
quence, odd as it appears now, m
Falstaff. Not merely as a matter
portant, but also as a matter o
triumph of Falstaff made possibl
it was not merely an incident t
the personal background to Fals
and want to remark that I stil
though this essay is concerned wi
Indeed I think that to understa
legend he was using makes it m
his own experience to be an illu
that the first soliloquy of the Pr
he was going to abandon his low
by line from the Sonnets trying
It seems inherently probable t
peare's dealings with his young pa
recently finished, would get th
the prince's friends had to be c
a secret come-back against arist
covery of nerve after a long atte
this was not done coarsely or w
umph of the thing, on its intima
humiliation into something very
taining. I have been arguing th
socially low, even when he first
his rank; whereas Shakespeare

207.62.77.131 on Wed, 24 Jun 2020 06:00:30 UTC
262 FALSTAFF
profession and a s
the Sonnets that friendship with Shakespeare is bad for the
patron's reputation, though we hardly ever get an actual admis-
sion of inferior social status (we do in the "dyer's hand"); he
would rather talk obscurely about his "guilt." Snobbery, I think,
had always seemed more real to him than self-righteousness, and
even in the Sonnets we can see the beginning of the process that
turned player Shakespeare into Falstaff, not a socially inferior
friend but (what is much less painful) a scandalous one. Nobody
would argue that the result is a life-like portrait of Shakespeare;
though he must have known how to amuse, and talks in the
Sonnets with a regret about his old age which was absurd even
for Elizabethan if he was then under thirty-five, and undoubt-
edly was what they called a "villainist" tutor, the type who could
give broad experience to a young prince. The point is not that
he was like Falstaff but that, once he could imagine he was,
once he could "identify" himself with a scandalous aristocrat,
the sufferings of that character could be endured with positive
glee. I am sure that is how he came to be liberated into putting
such tremendous force into every corner of the picture.

207.62.77.131 on Wed, 24 Jun 2020 06:00:30 UTC

Falstaff and Mr. Dover Wilson Author(s) : William Empson Source: The Kenyon Review, Spring, 1953, Vol. 15, No. 2 (Spring, 1953), Pp. 213-262 Published By: Kenyon College

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Falstaff and Mr. Dover Wilson Author(s) : William Empson Source: The Kenyon Review, Spring, 1953, Vol. 15, No. 2 (Spring, 1953), Pp. 213-262 Published By: Kenyon College

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Falstaff and Mr.

Stable URL: http://www.jstor.com/stable/4333399

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THE THEORY that Shakespeare made Falstaff appear in his

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knowing what the a

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recent attempts to decide which actor took which part do not

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which needed a very special explanation this theory might be

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The next four scenes are in London, Southampton, London, and

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and the other peo

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he will be there before the m

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be trusted to do the same; besides, Fluellen might not care to

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safe in revering Hal as the idea

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Shakespeare plays no tricks with his public; he did not, like

and so forth. It seems to me that, in this generous impulse of

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I think that if this is done th

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However, I recognize that this approach is liable to become

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tact as evidence of the author's single intention, or of a single

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what he will ask you to believe. So to speak, an escape from a

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me a villain and baffle me." Poins now enters and announces a

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that the balance is

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wants to build up Hal as a high-minded creature of delicate

The kind of reserve that springs from absence of self-regard is

Hal begins this scene by treating Poins with insolence, as one of

I can't see that this is an offensive retort; he is expected to keep

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ferent from going on telling an absurd and inconvenient lie

This is the strangest fellow, brother John.

In Mr. Dover Wilson's edition, of course, "aside to Falstaff" has

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not like the Prince to be so dee

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got knighted throu

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ing of Hotspur he must be bro

The special mention of [Falstaf

To be sure, Falstaff "goes a bi

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fighting. The argument, theref

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