The Folly of Faulting Falstaff

The Rogation Dragon, defending the indefensible since 2021

Welcome, creatures! In this newsletter I take on the most pressing problem of our time: the moral status of Jack Falstaff.

Are We Lovers (of Falstaff) Anymore?

Let me tell a story, which has occasional contact with the truth but may also be blown about by the winds of my personal obsessions. In my halcyon youth, viz. the late 1990s, young people were more likely to hide than to blazon any interest in morality. In those days there were moral relativists! This really happened. Moral relativism didn’t make people any less moralistic (at least, not when the people were me), but, well, we had such hopes…. The youth were out there doing drugs, getting teen-pregnant, and killin’ folk. All the books and movies were about Children of Divorce (remember when people used to get married and have kids?) who just wanted to have fun, until they learned that fun kills.

And so I came to New Haven, a cauldron of illicit loves. At this time the man Harold Bloom bestrode the globe of Shakespeare scholarship like a colossus. And Harold Bloom, bless his old husk of a heart, loved Falstaff like a mother. God, me too. Discovering that kinship of the unwell—unforgettable.

Everybody loves Falstaff! Audiences loved the guy. Directors made “Falstaffiads” (obvious one; weird one).

But then the whirligig of time brought in his revenges. The youth began to feel that it was important to be moral from the beginning, not just in a chastened and humiliated way later on. Readers of Shakespeare rediscovered that it’s bad to lie to your friends to get alcohol (ok but like if you can’t lie to your friends to get alcohol how are you supposed to get it?), it’s bad to run away from battle (I mean, sometimes), it’s bad to lie for stolen valor, it’s bad to steal and to patronize brothels; it’s bad to take bribes so that poor men die in rich men’s wars. I saw this Elizabethan hot take most recently on Twitter, which is what brought it to mind. I don’t feel like linking, Twitter is the Land of Fleeting Content in both pronunciations, and anyway this friend’s other Shakespeare opinions were good and interesting, so I am all the happier to blame his shallow Falstaff take on generational factors.

It seems to me that nowadays people are very quick to say that Falstaff is bad #actually. This is simultaneously true and missing the point.

(Here’s an endearing recent counterexample, an academic who gets real deep in her feelings on the subject. And her thesis supports the point I’ll make at the end….)

So, a series of Falstaff opinions. Imho a huge part of why the Henry plays work is that Falstaff is there being both right and wrong. What he says about honor reflects something real and deep in human experience. It isn’t just cowardice; there’s a critique there which, again, applies specifically to Henry’s wars and more generally often. But it is also really cowardice. It’s also really craven and absurd, the voice of id and ego.

Most of our experiences have this double aspect. Even our prayers are mottled with self-will; and many of our sins are mottled with truth. (This is what I meant about “Succession” always giving every relationship and act at least two opposing motives, by the way. Love it.) Many people’s spirituality is characterized not by clarity but by a specific internal conflict, and although that conflict is sometimes resolved by letting one side win, usually no, usually there’s some third unseen door that God is pulling you toward. This is presumably one reason the Church speaks so many different “languages”; the forms of Catholic spirituality which are necessary, illuminating, and life-saving for one person will be off-putting or even harmful for another. Anyways back to the fat knight.

In the same way that Hamlet turns the delaying tactics necessary for the borrowed plot to unspool into metaphysical and moral questions, so Falstaff takes the morality-play figure of Vice, or Sensuall Appetyte etc, and gives him a point—a point of view, and poignancy.

Falstaff protects the plays from becoming a tale of power perfectly allied to morality; he preserves the plays’ awareness of the tension between power and self-surrender, i.e. love. This caution too the youth in every age don’t like to hear.

Also lol Falstaff > Hal because Falstaff is more erotic. More aware of his own lack and longings. That’s why he gets such a good death scene.

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icymi

I wrote a piece for the Tablet (UK) about my new book, basically giving my sense of what it is about and why a book on restoring gay people’s relationship with God is so necessary. I also did a brief interview with Christians for Social Action, where I once more ask why we hyperfocus on morality, and you can also get an excerpt from the first chapter of my book. It’s a drinking game!

Now Playing

Danielle Rose, “Crown of Thorns.” I love this; it sounds like an English ballad to me, and the lyrics are a startling combination of the Song of Songs (the searching lover beaten by the watchmen of the city) and “The Dream of the Rood.” All Nature suffers in the Crucifixion, and longs for resurrection.

Trustworthy face of fair Jack Falstaff by Eduard von Grutzner, and used here under a Creative Commons license.