The Anatomy of Folly in Shakespeare's ``Henriad''

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The anatomy of folly in Shakespeare's ``Henriad''

ROBERT H. BELL

Abstract

Humor 14±2 (2001), 181±201 0933±1719/01/0014±0181 # Walter de Gruyter 182 R. H. Bell resurrection seems the de®nitive triumph, ``the true and perfect image of life indeed.'' This ``great fool'' not only arms life but outrageously redeems it with ``counterfeit'' or bogus scriptural idiom. Falsta robustly embodies the power of folly and dimly, occasionally perceives its limits. In 2Henry IV, Falsta, obviously enfeebled, becomes more the object than the source of humor. The banishment of Falsta is not humorous and it hurts. As a seemingly imperishable fool, exuberantly enacting folly, Falsta liberates life from fact, in de®ance of reason and pursuit of joy. Falsta's force draws us all into the ®eld of folly, so that the great fool is our double whose loss we deplore.

folly: ``want of understanding; weakness of intellect; criminal weakness; depravity of mind; act of negligence or passion unbecoming gravity or deep wisdom'' (Samuel Johnson's Dictionary) ``The fool doth think he is wise, but the wise man doth know himself to be a fool.'' (Touchstone, As You Like It, V.1.30±31). ``to be noble might then come to mean: to entertain follies.'' (Nietzsche, The Gay Science, 92).

``to punish my missed readings _'' (student's recitation of King Henry IV's line, ``To punish my mistreadings _'')

Folly, as Johnson said of comedy, has been ``particularly unpropitious to de®ners,'' struggling to conceive a notoriously indeterminate term. ``Folly'' is usually derogatory, pinned on any disbeliever or adversary, telling us as much about the judge as the judged, or ironically laudatory, as used by Touchstone or Nietzsche. While ``folly'' ¯aunts its maddening elusiveness, fools will rush in where wise men fear to tread. This essay tries nobly and probably foolishly to explore the concept of folly in general and to consider in particular Shakespeare's anatomy of folly in ``The Henriad,'' especially in the ®gures of Falsta and Prince Hal. Traditionally, especially in literature, fools are a potential source of wisdom or insight: foolish nonsense may be Foolosophy or somehow ``jocoserious'' (Joyce, Ulysses 1986: 553). As though to oer an alternate or competing ``gospel,'' fools regularly cite scripture. Sometimes the fool's gospel is explicitly promulgated, as when Erasmus's Folly mounts her podium or when Tristram Shandy brazenly proselytizes: ``True Shandeism, think what you will against it, opens the heart and Anatomy of folly in Shakespeare 183 lungs, and like all those aections which partake of its nature, it forces the blood and other vital ¯uids to run freely thro' its channels, and makes the wheel of life run long and cheerfully round'' (Sterne 1940: 338±339). The fool's cross-eyed vision always threatens to become a revelation; what starts as impish play may end as The New Jerusalem or as Joyce's New Bloomusalem. Strong fools, like Erasmus's Folly, Panurge, Falsta, Lear's Fool, Tristram Shandy, Dostoevsky's Idiot, Joyce's Bloom or Shem, make assets of their defects, and convert clowning into commentary. Yet even such simple receptivity to folly risks taking Foolosophy too seriously, for the fool like a child in dress-up loves to impersonate and mock the grownups. Sorting out the tomfoolery from the moral is sometimes a fool's errand, but an unavoidable challenge of folly; a basic problem in contemplating clowns and fools is that they may say anything for the sake of a joke. Fools divide and confuse us, so that we either scant or privilege folly by reducing it to diverting babble or magnifying it into encoded prophecy. Sifting the jocose from the serious keeps readers busy and leaves little hope, or danger, that anybody will ever settle the issue, for here the border between fooling and meaning is always open. Compounding the diculty of interpretation is that fools may be not merely bumptious, inspired clowns like Bottom but natural fools, disturbed or downright crazy. Natural or arti®cial, the Fool abides our questions but will not stay for an answer. Generalizations about folly must be heavily hedged or expressed paradoxically because the fool by de®nition eludes de®nition: he exists topsy-turvy, willy-nilly, to defy categories of understanding. A great fool has amazing powers of disorientation: he is an avatar of disequilibrium, a spanner in the works, a local lord of misrule, yet he usually lands on his feet. To accompany a fool is thus to experience vicariously both exhilarating freedom and titillating fear, the pleasure and peril of exploring no-man's land, a shifting, evanescent, murky world of will-o'-the-wisps and fool's gold. It is not simply that we are tricked and illuminated by the fool's license to kid; more likely, we recapitulate time and again the movement of folly, discovering signi®cance only to see it slip from revelation to mirage, or vice versa. Fools multiply vertigo, or create a hall of mirrors designed to amuse and calculated to discombobulate. Like Feste moving between the courts of Orsino and Olivia, fools in the medieval and early modern era ``led an easy wandering existence'' 184 R. H. Bell

(Foucault 1988: 8) and were not ordinarily segregated, banished, or incarcerated. Shakespeare's ``primitive'' genius confoundingly mingles clowns and kings to query our conception of separate realms of discourse, court and tavern, civilization and its discontents, reason and madness. By the eighteenth-century, as if in keeping with neo-classical decorum, the need to keep cultural categories distinct, clowns or fools were ``normally'' segregated or distinctly separated from society, except in places sanctioned for play like the circus where the nimble trapeze artists may be interrupted by clowns aping their betters and threatening to drag the spectators into the arena. Foolosophers may be surprisingly erudite, allusive, obscure. They gaily pilfer material, and sometimes ¯aunt their thefts. Both Robert Burton and his closest follower in English literature, Laurence Sterne, make word-stealing a frequent theme and a running joke. Tristram Shandy castigates such nefarious practices in a denunciation largely cribbed from The Anatomy of Melancholy. For this eminent folly Finnegans Wake coins the term ``stolentelling'' (Joyce, Wake 1968: 424). Mimicry of authority is a favorite foolish enterprise: allusiveness which in other discourse enables meaning furthers folly's infuriating handy-dandy: just as folly's central beliefs or values are expressed jocoseriously, so its sources or references are treated willy-nilly: the most basic questions, what to think and feel about the text, remain vexingly problematic. In many of his metamorphoses, the fool is traditionally construed as innocent, sometimes literally insane (``a natural fool'') or preternaturally child-like, saying whatever pops into his head without troubling about decorum, decency, propriety, or privilege. The fool never stops asking those annoying, persistent, children's questions: don't you want to play? why do I have to do that? who says? To the fool life is a ``fond pageant'' (MND, III.2.114) seen vividly, in sharp outline, but without depth, oddly focused on some fantastic realm invisible or irrelevant to others. We naturally ®nd the fool's vision fetching and dubious, for like the child he perceives everything as bright, new, ever changing, and reacts to events with provisional passion, all a®re with excitement only until something else moves into view. Innocent and heartless and gay, the fool rarely fathoms anyone else's perspective, least of all another's suering, and even direct confrontation with woe is unlikely to move the fool except to make fun of feelings. Like the little tyrant in Auden's ``Mundus et Infans,'' the fool's infantile whims dominate his world: his immediate well-being is his top priority, to the exclusion of any Anatomy of folly in Shakespeare 185 competing consideration. What makes such behavior especially dis- com®ting is that we have all been just such tiny tyrants, taught or forced to do better whether we like it or not. Unremitting self-interest or sel®sh appropriations seem spontaneous and charming only in the very foolish or very young. But foolish innocence is rarely pure and simple: if the fool is more innocent than others he is conversely more corrupt or tainted by evil. Childlike obliviousness shades into callousness or something even more horri®c: the fool often appears not just disreputable but disgusting, monstrous, a ``noxious pervert'' (Joyce, Wake 1968: 174). He sports with devils, plays with ®re, mocks death itself, as in King Richard's image of monarchy and folly: ``Keeps Death his court, and there the antic sits,/Scong his state and grinning at his pomp'' (Richard II, 3.2.162±163). On the Elizabethan stage, Vice was often another name for the Fool, as we are reminded when Hal speci®cally denounces Falsta as ``that reverend vice, that gray iniquity'' (Shakespeare 1HIV, II.4.431±432). Enid Welsford notes that the terms ``fool'' and ``knave'' were often coupled, ``but not always in quite the same way: for sometimes they were treated as synonyms, sometimes emphasis was laid on the distinction between them'' (Welsford 1935: 259). Folly thus implies both innocence, particularly childish inexperience, and sin, especially lewdness. In his el®sh duality, Harpo Marx epitomizes the fool's two bodiesÐnow all wide-eyed beguilement, now all predatory intent, like a demonic Shirley Temple. There is a suspicious intimacy between folly and evil, for the fool's heart may be a concealed weapon. Anity with evil includes intense focus upon the human body and its corporeal functions, rendered as obscene or repulsive. To highlight their vulgarity or fascination with what Bakhtin terms ``the lower bodily element,'' fools get names like Bottom, Belch, and Falsta. Since ``folly,'' ``love,'' and ``desire'' are so inevitably enmeshed, it almost goes without saying that folly will be enacted in sexuality (Bakhtin 1984). Erasmus's Folly, noting that ``the human race is propagated by the part which is so foolish and funny that it cannot even be mentioned without a snicker'' (Erasmus 1979: 18), knows that sex is invariably an amusing subject. Erasmus's Elizabethan translator rendered ``that part'' as ``that selie member,'' a felicitous phrase, for selie connotes both folly and innocence, and the fool's sexuality is a peculiar mixture of instinct and insouciance. Sex preoccupies professional fools yet their obsessive interest is surprisingly distant from erotic activity. 186 R. H. Bell

The fool's fate is often sexual frustration. Here again Falsta is epitomal, his very name suggesting a superannuated phallus. `Ìs it not strange,'' ponders Poins, as he and the Prince spy on Falsta and Doll Tearsheet, ``that desire should so many years outlive performance?'' (Shakespeare 2HIV, II.4.242±243). In this regard, the dierence between the fool and the comic hero is decisive; for ®gures like Odysseus, Tom Jones, or Zorba the Greek, life is a series of consummations. Unlike the comic hero, the fool rarely enjoys unproblematic sexuality, for folly focuses quite dierently upon the body as a site of contestation between the ideal and the actual: folly precludes ideal ful®llment and stresses degrading descents.1 (As the chronicler of folly, I have the sad duty to investigate these sordid depths in dismaying detail.) So sexuality like folly itself is both ¯amboyant and insubstantial, too much with us and strangely absent. Instead of making love, fools make discourse: `À fool also is full of words'' (Ecclesiastes, 10.14), and fools like Falsta, Don Quixote, Tristram Shandy, and Shem tend to channel libido into language.2 Instead of consummating desire, these great fools are forever wantoning with words, disseminating meanings, proliferating puns. Foolish yearning has other objects. Fools like Bottom, Tristram Shandy and Falsta are constantly reaching out to the audience, ®guratively in our faces, testing their continued signi®cance through our reassuring concern and amusement. Don Quixote's staging of love- sick despair becomes a ritual of certi®cation, rather than the cartwheels of a half-naked madman, only if Sancho is there to bear witness to Dulcinea. In this way too the fool is a liminal ®gure confounding our sense of what is and is not real; the border between real and imaginary is more wide-open than virtually anywhere, partly because the fool is always playing to two audiences, within and without the ®ction. Often a choral ®gure, or privileged liaison with the audience, the fool may also highlight the make-believe nature of the show. The dichotomy between ``play'' and ``real'' breaks down under the pressure of folly. Disabled yet enabled, invincible yet particularly vulnerable, the fool is always double, both lightning bolt and lightning rod: his bad luck might bring me good luck, so we make room for fools but keep our distance: there with/but for the grace of God go I. The Fool has a strange duality, like the medieval monarch, two separate ``bodies,'' one enduring, potent, capable of revival, personifying survival and adaptability; the other marginal, susceptible, provisional, easily hurt. Indeed, closer to death: Shakespeare's single most enduring image of folly is one sublime Anatomy of folly in Shakespeare 187 fool, Hamlet, contemplating the skull of another, Yorick. Folly is always a high-wire performanceÐpotentially ingratiating and alienating. That we all play out the con¯ict between ``civilization and its discontents'' helps account for both the profound sympathy and the massive antipathy aroused by fools. What any civilized or socialized soul has had to suppress ®nds a surreptitious surrogate, or its opposite, the humiliated scapegoat, in the fool. Depending on what kind of bal- ance between id and super-ego or Dionysian and Apollonian or Misrule and Government we strike or acknowledge, we haveÐare bound to haveÐradically dierent attitudes toward folly. Nowhere is folly more richly dramatized or subtly interrogated than in Shakespeare's ``Henriad.'' The prudent student of folly, if one can imagine such a freak of nature, might begin with the notable absence of a jester or clown at Bolingbroke's Windsor Castle. For the very good reason that the usurper King Henry cannot risk considering himself or being regarded as a ``foolish-compounded clay, man'' (Shakespeare 2HIV, 1.2.7). When the King lectures his son Hal on Richard's unkingly failings, he characterizes his predecessor as a veritable fool: ``The skip- ping King, he ambled up and down,/ With shallow jesters, and rash bavin wits'' who ``Mingled his royalty with cap'ring fools'' (Shakespeare 1HIV, 3.2.60±61, 63). Richard's mirror, the fool's favorite prop, re¯ects the shattered image of the clown who would be king. No wonder Richard's successor does his regal best to banish folly. Like Philip Sidney, Henry Bolingbroke regards the mingling of royalty and folly as a violation of decorum, and a threat to ``my sceptre, and my soul to boot'' (3.2.97). To the King, what he terms ``my person'' (l. 55) and ``my state'' (l. 57) are, or had better be, entirely separate categories. Most of all he dreads signs of Hal's folly. In castigating Hal's ``vile participation'' (l. 87), Henry conveys not only his horror of unprincely behavior but a disgust with and probably a fear of folly. If folly in Henry IV, parts 1 & 2 has a formidable royal adversary, its banner is carried by a paradoxically majestic fool. Falsta ¯aunts and articulates folly's powers. The plays may be named after the ruling king, and they feature the prince, but does anyone doubt that the shows star Falsta? Immersed in the ``lower bodily element,'' Falsta imag- ines himself somehow freed from natural law; simultaneously Caliban and Ariel, he is enmired yet aloft, immanent yet transcendent, that quality wonderfully characterized as Falsta's `ìnexplicable touch of in®nity'' (Bradley 1909: 273). When ``Falsta riseth up'' (Shakespeare 1HIV, 188 R. H. Bell s.d. after 5.4.110) from playing possum, his comic resurrection seems the de®nitive triumph, ``the true and perfect image of life indeed'' (Shakespeare 1HIV, 5.4.117±119). This ``great fool'' (Shakespeare 2HIV, 2.1.195) not only arms life but outrageously redeems it with ``counterfeit'' or bogus scriptural idiom. His denial notwithstanding, he is always the ``double man'' (Shakespeare 1HIV, 5.4.138), for one of Falsta's favorite routines is a form of doubling he terms ``damnable iteration'' (Shakespeare 1HIV, I.2.90), or the Devil Citing Scripture: `` 'Tis no sin for a man to labor in his vocation'' (1.2.184±185), ``By this ®re, that's God's angel'' (3.3.35), etc. Preposterous3 or blasphemous as his `ìterations'' are, they are also consistent in that Falsta, at least throughout Henry IV, Part 1, does have a vocation: that of Sublime Fool. Falsta constantly harps on redemption, metaphorically linking folly with divinity, or identifying sacred and profane. Though Falsta cites scripture to spoof piety and make fun, for a long time he con®dently and ecaciously pronounces the enabling power of folly: `À good wit will make use of any thing. I will turn diseases to commodity'' (Shakespeare 2HIV, 1.2.234±235). He terms his annihilation of honor ``my catechism'' (Shakespeare 1HIV, 5.1.141) and de®nes addiction to sack as ``the ®rst humane principle I would teach'' (Shakespeare 2HIV, 4.3.123). Falsta seems graced with god-like powers, as when he joyously boasts what we may readily believe, that ``The brain of this foolish-compounded clay, man, is not able to invent anything that intends to laughter more than I invent or is invented on me'' (Shakespeare 2HIV, 1.2.7±9). Falsta sees himself and is widely regarded as a Foolosopher King or clown prince. But Falsta does not and cannot reign supreme, and ``The Henriad'' is not a celebration of folly, despite Falsta's potent powers. Shakespeare conducts a complex, amusing, and probing anatomy of folly, not merely (as one might expect) pitting Falsta against King Henry, but pairing Falsta with Prince Hal, who plays the fool, enjoys and employs folly, and repudiates folly. Hal knows ®rst hand and fondly appreciates folly, but he puts it on arti®cially; he can behave foolishly but he cannot and will not be a fool. So while Falsta in many ways dominates the world of Henry IV, parts 1 & 2, he is always regarded in context, connected to his opposites. Hence we must consider Falsta's relationship with Prince Hal, for they are as inconceivable without each other as Don Quixote and Sancho Panza. Countering every vaunt of Falsta is Prince Hal, involved in folly yet wary of it and ultimately averse to it. ``Well,'' muses Hal, ``thus we play Anatomy of folly in Shakespeare 189 the fools with the time, and the spirits of the wise sit in the clouds and mock us'' (Shakespeare 2HIV, 2.2.142±143). The Prince, playing the fool yet heeding the wise, and implying that the fool's days are numbered, locates himself simultaneously in and out of time. Constructing his identity as dual, Hal is less complexly amphibious than Falsta: his antic self enacts folly, but behind it is the ``true prince'' (Shakespeare 1HIV, 2.4.270), biding his time. Con®dent that he himself has a true and essential identity (the words true and false are often heard in the play), Hal assumes that Falsta has a real self as well: ``How might we see Falsta bestow himself to-night in his true colors, and not ourselves be seen?'' he asks Poins (Shakespeare 2HIV, 2.2.169±170). The Prince is sure that Falsta's essential nature is `òpen, palpable'' (Shakespeare 1HIV, 2.4.226), but that he himself can remain securely disguised. Hal tellingly positions himself vis-a-vis folly: ``Well then, once in my days,'' Hal says, `Ì'll be a madcap'' (1.2.142±143). Dr. Johnson's de®nition of the word madcap, `èither taking the cap for the head, or alluding to the caps put upon distracted persons by way of distinction,'' underscores the provisional nature of Hal's folly: it is ``put upon'' and not intrinsic, a role rather than a raison d'eÃtre. So it is not altogether surprising that in soliloquy (Shakespeare 1HIV, 1.2.195±217), Hal envisions himself as folly's antithesis. The speech, beginning `Ì know'' and ending `Ì will,'' resounds with regal certitude, and subordinates Falsta's folly to its dread, disdained adversaries: authority, reality, time, truth. Hal's regal blank verse seems to con- tain and transmute much of his banter with Falsta. Their exchanges began with Falsta inquiring the time; now, alone, Hal makes time his themeÐindeed presents himself as the master of timing: `Ì know you all, and will a while uphold/ The unyok'd humor of your idleness _ That, when he please again to be himself _ I'll so oend, to make oense a skill,/ Redeeming time when men think least I will'' (my emphases). Hal's central self-image as ``the sun'' (1.2.197) recalls Falsta's inventive characterization of his gang as ``gentlemen of the shade, minions of the moon'' (1.2.26) and implies the true order: the moon, waxing and waning, depends for its luster on the sun. When this son becomes ``the sun,'' he will illuminate everything truly and brightly.4 Hal plays the fool but he makes very clear that he will not be the fool. If Hal's repertory is less dazzling than that of the old maestro, Hal's relative de®ciency as impresario is more than compensated by his magisterial sense of audience, timing, and reality. For Falsta the 190 R. H. Bell show must go on, for life is always and only a show; the Prince knows better, including when to play what parts. Even kingship, he already realizes, is spectacle, so that (in sustained theatrical metaphors) he will `ìmitate the sun'' and ``show more goodly and attract more eyes/ Than that which hath no foil to set it o'' (Shakespeare 1HIV, 1.2.197, 214±215). Hal has a fairly good idea of Falstaan folly but Falsta has no conception of royal reality or princely purpose. From Falsta and in his apprenticeship in folly Hal learns how to ``yoke'' folly and make it work. The Prince's play is both parti-colored and many-minded. Compared to the Prince, Falsta has no identity, only a series of roles. Falstaan folly has protean multiplicity and no essence. Falsta's incarnations are voluntary, delightful, and ephemeralÐin that sense, arti®cial, not natural. All the world's a stage for his witty invention, multiple metamorphoses, playful pluralism: ``Marry, then, sweet wag, when thou art king, let not us that are squires of the night's body be call'd thieves of the day's beauty'' (Shakespeare 1HIV, 1.2.23±25). Falsta typically transforms reality (literally, the body) into a more appealing illusion (®guratively, beauty), a magical mastery of meaning through the pun on the thieves' ``booty.'' Performing before the Prince who moments later swears to `ìmitate the sun'' (1.2.197), Falsta dubs himself one of ``Diana's foresters, gentlemen of the shade, minions of the moon, and let men say we be men of good government, being govern'd as the sea is, by our noble and chaste mistress the moon, under whose countenance we steal'' (Shakespeare 1HIV, 1.2.25±29). Puns (in which words come apart at the semes) proliferate like the phases of the moon, that ®tting emblem for the fool's ``self.'' Falsta invariably applies the fool's double standard. Juxtaposing words with similar sounds and disparate meanings, puns provide Falsta with opportunities for the Fool's Standard Reversal: `Ì would it were otherwise, I would my means were greater and my waist slenderer'' (Shakespeare 2HIV, 1.2.142±143), or `Ò give me the spare men, and spare me the great ones'' (Shakespeare 2HIV, 3.2.269±270). A variation on the reversal is the Old Switcheroo, as when Falsta claims that were it not for the corrupting in¯uence of the young Prince, he would be known for ``pure and immaculate valour'' (Shakespeare 2HIV, 4.3.36±37). At its best, Falsta's wit is ¯uently melodious and wondrously free, like his girth, `òut of all compass'' (Shakespeare 1HIV, 3.3.20). Logic and reason are mundane, con®ning categories Falsta invariably ignores or trammels: he is the epitome of contradiction, inconsistency, Anatomy of folly in Shakespeare 191 and incongruity. He is the master escape-artist: the Chief Justice notes that he is ``well acquainted with your manner of wrenching the true cause the false way'' (Shakespeare 2HIV, 2.1.109±111). Unable to imagine how far the fool lives from the strictures of conscience, the Chief Justice, HalÐand weÐregularly underestimate the fool's freedom from reality and identi®cation with folly. Falsta habitually outfoxes his adversaries by accepting and celebrating his foolish indignities. Invited to mock him, we laugh with him. Falsta revels in folly everywhere, especially in himself, in contrast to satirists like Thersites or Jaques, who rail at vice ex cathedra. Not only witty in himself, Falsta is ``the cause that wit is in other men'' (Shakespeare 2HIV, 1.2.10). Temporarily, Falsta has the capacity to make himself what he will and as he likes it. He tries out various honori®c titlesÐDiana's forester, gentleman of the shade, minion of the moonÐand sports several names and a host of epithets: Sir John, Falsta, Jack, ``that huge bombard of sack, that stu'd cloak-bag of guts _ that reverent Vice, that gray Iniquity'' (Shakespeare 1HIV, 2.4.428±433), etc. No Shakespeare play provides more ways to `ìdentify'' someone, for this great fool is no one thing and requires others to see him as many things at once. Capering, cavorting outrageously, fools like Falsta incessantly appeal to the audience, `ònly'' playing or fooling, yet gauging their worth in our responses. The Fool would have his way with us, to woo us or fool us. Pursuing the fool's quest for armation, Falsta regularly soliloquizes or directly addresses the audience; perhaps because he does not know what his feelings are or what he is, he strives for validation earnestly and perpetually. With a single exception we never see Falsta asleep or supine; he is almost always up and about, at work and play, directly in our faces, his eyes moving in anticipation of the response he might elicit, perspiring with the ardent eort of performance and craven longing. Asserting his privileged reality yet underscoring the made-up make-believe, the fool is always playing to two audiences, within and without the ®ction. Falsta's toy-like ``dagger of lathe'' (Shakespeare 1HIV, 2.4.137) is thus emblematic: never ``really'' used, it is hacked to simulate strenuous activity in the Gadshill caper. Anywhere and everywhere he fashions props for that long-running show, ``Falsta's Follies.'' Falsta, Rex Ludens, makes all the world his stage, and presides over the kingdom of Never-land. Descriptions of Falsta as a ``stued cloak-bag'' and `à creature of bombast'' (Shakespeare 1HIV, 2.4.451±452, 327) buttress the disorienting 192 R. H. Bell sense that this ®gure on the stage is really an actor in costume and greasepaint, enacting lines in the playbook (Wiles 1987: 126±127). When ``Falsta riseth up,'' the resurrection of the fool reminds us that the ``really'' dead Hotspur and Blunt will also rise up, wash o their makeup, hang up their costumes, and mull their performances over an ale. In his great set pieces, annihilating honor or celebrating sack, Falsta is an actor playing an actor, yet a ®gure somehow capable of stepping out of the play to assert independent life. Even Dr. Johnson, habitually wont to kick the rock, addresses Falsta as though he were a real presence, no longer a literary invention but an enduring spirit or force still and always with us: `ùnimitated, unimitable Falsta, how shall I describe thee?'' (Johnson, Notes 1971: 315). Hence the fool oers, along with his self-re¯exive, skeptical Verfremdungseekt, an alternative authenticity: he inspires foolish faith. What it means to consider something (a sentiment, desire, lament) ``real'' is especially urgent in contemplating fools whose performances ¯aunt the arti®ciality of their art. What, if anything, does the playful, histrionic fool feel beneath all those crocodile tears? Hath not a fool senses, aections, passionsÐif you prick him, doth he not bleed? Consider, for instance, Bradley's marvelous empathy for Falsta, informed by the conviction that Shakespeare's language conveys the feeling and the meaning directly from the playwright to the reader's heart. Bradley enters Falsta's joy: `` `Happy,' '' says Bradley, is ``too weak a word; he is in bliss, and we share his glory,'' for his enjoyment is ``contagious.'' (Bradley 1909: 261±262). Following Bradley, some readers regard Falsta as not merely a privileged but a sanctioned voice. Roy Battenhouse's Falsta has a `` `gravity' quite interior to his physical poundage: he lards the earth not merely with his sweat, but covertly with a Christian spirit as wise as serpents and as harmless as doves'' (Battenhouse 1975: 32±33). Harold Bloom regards Falsta as `à comic Socrates,'' an inspired foolosopher ``who is free, instructs us in freedom,'' like Hamlet, one of Shakespeare's two most charismatic ®gures, `ìn their plays, but not of them _ Falsta is a person, while Hal and Hotspur are ®ctions'' (Bloom 1998: 275, 276, 279). The gospel of folly wins converts and provokes skeptics; fools are beloved and scapegoated. J. Dover Wilson designates Falsta's stock repertory as ``mock-repentance'' or ``mock-maudlin'' and cannot even credit his love for Hal: ``the old humbug's professions of aection are no more to be credited than his oers of marriage'' (Wilson 1944: 32, 95, 104). Anatomy of folly in Shakespeare 193

Alert to the danger of being hoodwinked by the master trickster, Wilson discredits everything Falsta says or does as mere jest. So too John W. Draper, constructing Falsta in the narrowest sense as `À Fool and Jester,'' ®nds nothing but ``mock-moralizing proverbs, chop-logic and fake syllogisms, the poltroon's parade of ``moralistic shreds and patches'' (Draper 1946: 458, 460). One man's foolish humbug is another man's Holy Fool. Dedicated Fools like Falsta, Tristram, Quixote, and Shem provoke wildly diering reactions to such basic questions: is this wise or nonsensical, lovable or despicable, prophetic or antic, sincere or disin- genuous? Since Falsta will say or do anything for a laugh, one can never determine with con®dence what the fool is or means at a given moment, for he means only what he is now playing. ``Sincerity'' and ``fooling'' are as riotously entangled as ``purpose'' and ``play.'' In folly these are false dichotomies; to confound them is the fool's mission. Falsta has no true colors but motley; he is always only fooling, ardently sincere about fooling us. More confusing, a fool like Falsta makes his own feelings the main subject, grist for the mill, or the springboard for endless sallies, pirouettes, and antics. Folly is in this sense made out of the fool's gutsÐas Joyce's Shem writes, `òver every square inch of the only foolscap available, his own body'' (Joyce, Wake 1968: 185). Falsta as joker is the wild card in any game: he can be anything and trump everything. Falsta robustly embodies the power of folly and dimly, occasionally perceives its limits. ``Thou seest,'' Falsta comments, `Ì have more ¯esh than another man, and therefore more frailty'' (Shakespeare 1HIV, 3.3.166±168; my emphasis). The jest is also comically orthodox: If Jesus was right in saying that the spirit is willing but the ¯esh is weak, then Falsta is correct in concluding, the more ¯esh, the more frailty. Falsta's ``therefore'' distinguishes Falsta from other great fools, in suggesting self-recognition. Like King Lear, ``The Henriad'' licenses folly to explore the intimate, necessary relationship between fool and king but diers from the later work in that it continually tests and ultimately contains folly by revealing its make-believe, ephemeral nature. Sur- prised and seduced by folly, we are released and clari®edÐrather as in Paradise Lost we are ``Surprised by Sin'' and glad of correction. The ``play extempore'' (Shakespeare 1HIV, 2.4.280) displays and anat- omizes folly, and dramatizes competing versions of folly. For Falsta folly is an end in itself, while for Hal, it serves ulterior purposes. Hal's 194 R. H. Bell play is thus, in Freudian terms, tendentious even when it appears inconsequential. At ®rst we delight wholeheartedly in Falsta's impro- visations, picking up props and incorporating Mistress Quickly's blather, initially in ``royal'' blank verse and with suitably solemn demeanor. Fool's First Rule: to be funny, stay serious. Falsta's sententious and moralistic discourse caricatures regal rhetoric (the King's opening speech suggests a penchant for over-elaboration, and in 3.2 Henry delivers one of the longest speeches in all Shakespeare). Falsta blends pompous in¯ation (`à question to be asked'') and burlesque reduction (``That thou art my son, I have partly thy mother's word _'') (2.4.410, 402). Right after Hal so devastatingly ``takes o'' one of the Percies/ purses, and just before Hal vows to take the Percies for real and for good, Falsta puns fruitfully: ``Shall the son of heaven prove a thief and take purses'' (409±410). Second Rule: two meanings, preferably contradictory, are more than twice as good as one. ``Deposing'' the mock-king to play the king in earnest, Prince Hal also reveals the self behind his antic persona. But Falsta continues to ignore or misread what Hal presents as `òpen and apparent'' (2.4.264): that holiday will give way to workaday, that play must yield to responsibility, that make-believe is subordinate to reality. When Falsta gloriously declares, ``This chair shall be my state, this dagger my scepter, and this cushion my crown'' (378±379), the Prince instantly revises his formulation, changing the fool's ``shall be'' to his own actor-king's `às if'': ``Thy state is taken for a join'd-stool, thy golden scepter for a leaden dagger, and thy precious rich crown for a pitiful bald crown'' (380±382). Like the scene, and the whole play, Hal's revision moves us from participation in folly to more detached contemplation, both in and out of folly. Playing, he stresses the provisional, tentative nature of the game and underscores the disparity between show and truth: the mock-king's ``precious rich crown'' is really `à pitiful bald crown.'' Playing the King, Hal ruthlessly excoriates folly and denounces Falsta as `à devil _ that reverent Vice, that gray Iniquity, that father ruan _ worthy, but in nothing'' (447±459). This is one of the moments in ``The Henriad'' when the fool is most strongly associated with his traditional companion or double, the devil. Another such close identi®cation appears in 2HIV, when the Lord Chief Justice says Falsta lives `ìn great infamy'' and is ``like his [Hal's] ill angel'' (1.2.136±137, 164). Falsta's remarkable reply, the ``banish not him thy Harry's company'' speech (2.4.466±480), crystallizes the appeal and limits of folly in this Anatomy of folly in Shakespeare 195 play. The speech is another magni®cent recovery: once again the great fool seems to have `` 'scaped by miracle'' (2.4.165±166). But the resound- ing climax, ``banish plump Jack, and banish all the world'' (479±480) is a will-o'-the-wisp, as everyone but Falsta must realize. Hal's devastating reply, `Ì do, I will'' (481), accomplishes several things simultaneously. Besting Falsta in the battle of wits, he decrees the fool's ancillary, dependent status, rearms his own command of language, situation, and self, progresses from the level of humor (`Ì do'') to the higher plateau to come (`Ì will''), contemplates that future state as forthcoming and a ®eld for continued mastery, and concludes the play extempore by announcing that as king he will, indeed, end the game. Ironically, Hal pronounces the sundering of kingship and folly in the very scene, which had seemed to connect them most intimately. Falsta's foolish illusions melt under the harsh rays of the sun-prince, no slouch at interpreting a trope or enforcing his will. Falsta's `Ì wish'' is the opposite of Hal's oft-repeated formulation, `Ì will.'' That knock on the door, signaling the sheri's arrival, ends the game, despite Falsta's desperate attempts to maintain the illusion. `Ì'll to the court in the morning,'' Hal declares (2.4.543±544), while Falsta might as well murmur, `Ànd I'll to bed at noon'' (KL, 3.6.85). Although Falsta doesn't yet disappear like Lear's Fool, his reign of folly is over. The Prince's time has come and that of Falsta, ``that vanity in years'' (454), has most assuredly passed. Even in his decline, the fool has unsettling force. Consider how Falsta migrates in and out of the ``real'' military-political world of ``The Henriad.'' Egregiously, hilariously out of place at Shrewsbury, he is accepted as part of the King's inner circle in 5.1. Ludicrously yet with apparent success he claims credit for defeating Hotspur, for in Part 2 he enjoys the bene®ts of his ``good service'' (1.2.61±62), and Coleville, upon hearing his name, surrenders without a ®ght. Such wacky inconsistencies ®gure the fool as a perennially amphibious ®gure, dual or split every which way. Shadow-like, the fool confounds our sense of reality. Evidently not all there, the fool sometimes seems to be all we have. Yet in 2Henry IV, Falsta, obviously enfeebled, becomes more the object than the source of humor. From his ®rst entrance, a Renaissance star turn, he regards himself as an institution, full of comic hubris, short on self-irony, still enacting but no longer anatomizing folly; at times he resembles the vaunting and strutting Pistol, that disabled fool, full of bluster, void of power. Falsta the Carnival King or Mock Monarch 196 R. H. Bell becomes, like Richard, `à mockery king of snow'' (Richard II, 4.1.260). If Falsta's credo in Part 1 is the exhortatory celebration, ``Give me life'' (5.3.59), in Part 2, his motto becomes the elegiac lament, ``We have heard the chimes at midnight'' (3.2.214). In Part 2, Falsta appears asking his page for the doctor's diagnosis of his urine, and the boy's jesting rejoinder, like so many jokes in this play, is not cheering. So constantly pressing are age, disease, and death in Part 2 that Falsta no longer asserts, or pretends to believe, that he is exempt from nature. ``Well,'' he concedes to his adversary the Chief Justice, `Ì cannot last ever _ I am an old man, you should give me rest'' (1.2.213±214, 216±217). Often, as with Doll Tearsheet, he scarcely tries to be amusing, simply lamenting, `Ì am old, I am old'' (2.4.271). Frequently, his jokes limp or back®re. Falsta's vaunted wit deteriorates to merely mechanical inversions, what comics call the old switcheroo, as when the Chief Justice declares, ``God send the Prince a better companion,'' to which Falsta inevitably responds, ``God send the companion a better prince!'' (1.2.199±201). Surveying his pathetic recruits, he relies on wordplay that would once have been too obvious to utter: `Ìs thy name Mouldy? _ 'Tis the more time thou wert us'd'' (3.2.104±106). Worse, the very joke reminds us of the corruption of time, marring the fool like all men. Falsta thus embodies another paradox of folly: full of life, he is closer to death. Gleefully parodying the King's Two Bodies, Falsta ®nds that ultimately the joke is on the Fool. So the `perpetually reviving' Falsta is only temporarily spared. A liminal ®gure, he lives at the border, in closer contact with the pleasures and the debts of the body. Even the way he formulates his outrageous hopes, when he learns of the old King's death, reminds us of the death's-head staring Falsta in the face: `Ì know the young king is sick for me'' (5.3.135). At the coronation Falsta is a sorry ®gure, ``stain'd with travel,'' disheveled, ``sweating with desire to see [Hal]'' (Shakespeare 2HIV, 5.3.24±25). At this point, perhaps more than anywhere else, the fool conveys genuine feelings, not unmixed with grasping greed and self-aggrandizing posturing, but (as he says to Shallow and Pistol) expressing ``the zeal I had to see him'' (l. 14): `Ìt shows my earnestness of aection _ My devotion _ as if there were nothing else to be done but to see him'' (Shakespeare 2HIV, 16, 18, 26±27). The way Falsta addresses his old friend seems calculated to maintain our aection while it alienates our regard. He bursts out, ``God save thy Grace, King Hal! My royal Hal!'' (l. 41), which indicates the momentum of triumph: the King is diminished from ``Grace'' to ``Hal'' Anatomy of folly in Shakespeare 197 to Falsta's possession; the same proprietary diminution is implicit in ``My King, My Jove! I speak to thee, my heart!'' (l. 46). But the triumph of folly is not to be. Hal as newly crowned monarch would be particularly mindful of his royal grace and eager to project it. As one Shakespearean critic notes, ``the young Prince is required to reconstruct a symbolic order of monarchy out of the most diverse and unpromising materials: residues of the dying political theology of the king's two bodies; chivalric protocols of the court and battle®eld; majesterial rhetoric; the prodigalities of the tavern, and Falstaan wit and cynicism'' (La Guardia 1986: 44). The King's rejection of Falsta is terrible and inevitable. Yet if Hal has been mystically translated from mortal body to ``two bodies incorporated in one person'' (Kantorowicz 1957: 23) he is newly empowered and spiritually required to dispel the enchantment that has plagued him, and that even now, at this sacred moment, rises to haunt him. As with any exorcism, stringent measures are required, and the young King is certainly harsh. He stresses that the rejection of Falsta comes not from ``himself '' but as it were from another body: ``Presume not that I am the thing that I was,/ For God doth know, so shall the world perceive,/ That I have turned away my former self'' (5.5.56±58). ``The thing that I was'' conveys Henry's disgust toward his former vanities and follies; they are unformed, too awful to name. He seems to speak from the level of grace with no hint of his mortal person, as thoughÐworried about his legitimacyÐhe too rigidly constructs his divine or mystic person to dispel any doubts. To those with strictly secular and skeptical notions of monarchy, unmoved by the spirit of the king's mystical body, Hal's change may sound contrived, precipitate, and unconvincingÐor even cruel.5 One might understandably feel that Hal is denying part of himself and of life, deliberately deafening himself to voices he once heeded and cultivated. Contemporary criticism has not fully recuperated from nineteenth-century sentimental bias, a problem now aggravated because we are even more distant from the aura of kingship. As shrewd a critic as Jonas A. Barish faults Henry for disclaiming ``what he formerly acknowledged, his proneness to error, his membership in the race of goodman Adam'' (Barish 1970: 86). The Hal we saw teasing Francis, capering with Poins, and cavorting with Falsta now seems to exempt himself from all folly, indeed, from mortality itself. The only touch of wit, his parting shot about the gaping grave, is fairly savage humor. But if one takes seriously the ascension to divinely sanctioned king, and 198 R. H. Bell can imagine that Hal is not merely playing a new role but undergoing a consecration, or can accept that the new king would need to produce a convincing rendition of such mystical movement, then his language and behavior would appear necessary and inevitable. We would not criticize the converted Paul or Augustine for forsaking their companions in sin, or fault God the Father in Paradise Lost for not sounding suciently humane and friendly.6 King Henry pronounces not only his exaltation but Falsta's debasement, from magical enchanter to mere body: `Ì know thee not, old man, fall to thy prayers./ How ill white hairs becomes a fool and jester!/ I have long dreamt of such a kind of man,/ So surfeit-swell'd, so old, and so profane _'' (5.5.47±50). From the divinely-endowed perspective of the King, striving perhaps too evidently to repudiate all vestiges of his mortal folly and to arm his mystic estate, it is the gap, not the connection, between the two states that is real, or must be made to seem real. Like most recently certi®ed authorities, Henry minimizes his liabilities or limitations; it is not convenient at this moment to remember that a king is both immortal and corporeal. Instead, he shows himself to be awakened, and despises his dream that it was otherwise: the great fool's tun of folly is now properly regarded as a most insubstantial pageant. From one vantage point, Barish is precisely right to fault Hal for ``scrapping part of his humanity'' (Barish 1970: 87) but wrong, or at least too relentlessly secular, in ruing Hal's change. The fool is disgraced because the king is graced: as sacramental monarch, Henry employs rhythms that are newly enabled, with two unmistakable caesuras, to mark the actual disparity between the two bodies: ``Make less thy body (hence), and more thy grace./ Leave gormandizing. Know the grave doth gape/ For thee thrice wider than for other men'' (5.5.52±54). In the process of pupation, the speaker moves from the ®rst person to the (emphatically) royal we, yet even in banishing Falsta from `òur person'' (l. 65) he graciously includes a conditional forgiveness and incentive. Of course Falsta has no hope of ful®lling Henry's condition for reconciliation (`Ànd as we hear you do reform yourselves'' [l. 68]), for that would require the fool to banish folly, which means death: the fool cannot change; he must remain a fool. Hal's ®erce disavowal of folly and Falsta is determined: because he has been so full of folly, the newly crowned King must appear to repudiate folly utterly. The banishment of Falsta is anything but humorous and it hurts. Falsta's force draws us all into the ®eld of folly, so that Anatomy of folly in Shakespeare 199 the great fool is our double whose loss we deplore. As a seemingly imperishable fool, exuberantly enacting folly, Falsta liberates life from fact, in de®ance of reason and pursuit of joy. Falsta, like Don Quixote, celebrates folly until the possibilities are exhausted, and dies. In Henry V, folly is a spent force, relegated to the likes of Pistol, or contemplated elegiacally. Only intermittently is folly validated in Henry V, as when the young King tells the French ambassador that he understands the Dauphin's jibe: ``How he comes o'er us with our wilder days,/ Not measuring what use we made of them'' (Henry V, 1.2.267±268). Such recognition of folly is exactly what he withholds from grasping Falsta at the coronation, and will no longer permit. When in soliloquy the night before Agincourt he contemplates his condition, he strictly isolates the King's Two Persons from the Fool's Two Bodies: ``Twin-born with greatness, subject to the breath/ Of every fool whose sense no more can feel/ But his own wringing'' (Henry V, 4.1.234±236). Hal envisions the self pestered not tempted by folly. He wants to believe he is utterly purged of folly, so that the ``hard condition'' (233) is not to be oneself partly or occasionally foolish but to be plagued by the antics of others. Shakespeare's truth is more problematic than Henry understands or acknowledges: that the King and the Fool are not opposites but doubles, not separate bodies but ``twin-born.'' The Hostess's account of Falsta's death reminds us that the nearly irresistible charisma of the fool, his power to bewitch, competes with Hal's fundamental premise: the necessity to subordinate folly to that higher authority Falsta temporarily eludes and foils. The Hostess highlights the fool's innocence, as though he were `àny christom child'' (Henry V, 2.3.11±12), a creature of nature who ``babbl'd of green ®elds'' (l. 17). Our ®nal image of Falsta is both ludicrous and poignant, as Mistress Quickly describes feeling his cold feet `ànd so up'ard and up'ard, and all was as cold as any stone'' (ll. 25±26). Even yet we might fool ourselves into believing that he descends `ùp'ard,'' for like his regal counterparts, this ``great fool'' (Shakespeare 2HIV, 2.1.185) remains indelibly all-too-human and larger-than-life.7

Notes

Correspondence address: [email protected] 1. As Woody Allen says, the dierence between sex and death is that in death there's no one there to make fun of you. 200 R. H. Bell

2. Here is another way professors are commonly regarded as foolish. I regret to report the remark made by the maid at the New York hotel, during an MLA convention, ``I never heard so much talkin' and seen so little screwin'.'' 3. Derived from the Latin for ``®rst coming after'' or reversed, ``preposterous'' literally means ``contrary to reason or common sense; foolish, absurd.'' 4. The image becomes even more lucidly clarifying when we hear the King, in the interview with his son, compare himself to ``a comet'' (Shakespeare 1HIV, 3.2.47), like the sun, celestial and dazzling but transient, less transcendent. When the King, recalling Richard's public relations blunders, does employ the conventional trope, he is somehow removed from rather than identi®ed with ``sunlike majesty/ [ Which] shines seldom in admiring eyes'' (3.2.79±80). 5. Yet we heard intimations of immortality in Part 1. For instance, in his eulogy for Hotspur, the Prince distinguished between Hotspur's ``great heart'' or ``spirit'' that will command praise in ``heaven,'' and his ``body'' to be buried in ``the vilest earth'' (5.4.87±101). Hal was always capable of viewing the larger picture in terms of the two bodies. 6. Though perhaps I should qualify this last point: some do. 7. Thanks to my Williams colleagues Fred Stocking, John Reichert, Jean-Bernard Bucky, and Ilona Bell for their critiques of this essay; all mistreadings and missed readings are poor things but mine own.

References

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Johnson, Samuel 1979 A Dictionary of the English Language. London: Times Books. 1971 Notes on Henry IV. In Bertrand H. Bronson (ed.), Rasselas, Poems, and Selected Prose. San Francisco: Rinehart. Joyce, James 1986 Ulysses: The Corrected Text. New York: Random House. 1968 Finnegans Wake. New York: Viking Press. Kantorowicz, Ernst H. 1957 The King's Two Bodies: A Study in Medieval Political Theology. Princeton: Princeton University Press. La Guardia, Eric 1996 Ceremony and History: The Problem of Symbol from Richard II to Henry IV. Paci®c Court Studies in Shakespeare. Ed. Waldof, McNeir and Thelma Green®eld. Eugene, Washington: University of Washington. Nietzsche, Friedrich 1974 The Gay Science. Ed. and trans. Walter Kaufman. New York: Vintage. Shakespeare, William 1974 The Riverside Shakespeare. Ed. Levin, Evans et al. Boston: Houghton Miin. Sterne, Laurence 1940 The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman. Ed. James Aiken Work. New York: Odyssey. Welsford, Enid 1935 The Fool: His Social and Literary History. London: Faber and Faber. Willeford, William 1969 The Fool and His Scepter. Chicago: Northwestern. Wiles, David 1987 Shakespeare's Clown: Actor and Text in the Elizabethan Playhouse. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wilson, J. Dover 1944 The Fortunes of Falsta. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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