Thursday 2 May 2013

Banishing Falstaff: Shakespeare and the moral vision of comedy

I wrote this piece for ABC Religion & Ethics, and have reposted it here.

Falstaff is Shakespeare's greatest comic figure. He is one of those characters who seems too big for his own play. But Falstaff is not merely a comic character: the very principle of comedy seems incarnate in him, just as the principle of tragedy seems incarnate in the spectacle of King Lear howling at the storm. In Lear, tragedy assumes cosmic dimensions; it is as if the whole mad universe were raging in the mad king’s cries. In Falstaff, comedy likewise takes on gigantic proportions, as if the foundations of the world were shaken with laughter at Falstaff's wit.

Yet the paradox of Falstaff is that he is not the kind of person we would ordinarily like. The great challenge of performing Falstaff on stage is to portray a character who is at once morally reprehensible and irresistibly loveable. Falstaff cannot be a villain; he cannot be a mere rogue; he cannot be a clown; he cannot be (not for a second) a tragic figure. We have to feel huge revulsion and huge love all at the same time, and for all the same reasons.

John Bell's performance of Falstaff in the Bell Shakespeare production of Henry 4 is a triumph, precisely because Bell's Falstaff is so repulsive and so loveable.

In Bell’s hands, Falstaff becomes a beer-bellied Australian bogan. He spends his time carousing on a set that seems a cross between a brothel and a backyard shed. He wears denim and leather with chains, a grungy biker. He slumps on a vinyl sofa with a hooker on his knee, swigging Jim Beam from the bottle. With his red nose, scraggly white beard, and twinkling eye, he looks for all the world like a degenerate Santa Claus.

And yet we love – no, we adore – that Falstaff.

What Falstaff represents is nothing more or less than life. Life itself, life as such, the sheer indomitable fact of being alive. That is why Falstaff is so fat. He is larger than life, more human and more alive than ordinary mortals. When Hal points out that the grave gapes for Falstaff “thrice wider than for other men,” it is true symbolically as well as literally. No ordinary grave could hold Jack Falstaff, for he is no ordinary mortal. He is large, he contains multitudes. When old Falstaff condescendingly tells the Lord Chief Justice, “You that are old consider not the capacities of us that are young,” we feel the truth of it in our very bones. Falstaff's body might be “blasted with antiquity,” as the Chief Justice alleges, yet nobody is younger than he. He is young because he is youthfulness itself, the very energy and drive of life.

Yet in the final scene, a scene that has scandalised generations of playgoers and critics, Hal banishes his friend Jack Falstaff. Our minds recoil from the thought of it – even though, objectively speaking, Falstaff deserves whatever he gets. It is not just that we like Falstaff and want things to turn out well for him. It is that a rejection of Falstaff seems the same as a rejection of life – an incomprehensible, nonsensical act. As Falstaff himself has intimated, to reject him is to reject everything: “Banish plump Jack, and banish all the world.”

But perhaps the point of this difficult scene is just to show that Falstaff can be rejected. For all his irresistible charm, it is still possible to turn him away. The significance of the last scene is that it makes comedy more vivid by revealing its limits. Falstaff can be banished; life can be refused. We'd never have believed it if we didn't see it played out before our eyes. When we see it happen, we are agitated. We are disquieted. We are moved. We are ready to rush to Falstaff’s defence. His rejection moves the audience to accept him all the more, to say Yes to life by saying Yes to sweet Jack Falstaff, kind Jack Falstaff, true Jack Falstaff.

Falstaff’s banishment reveals something of the central mystery of his character. For all his irrepressible wit, for all his invincible ingenuity, for all his boundless capacity to extricate himself from difficulties, to catapult his corpulent person over every obstacle – for all that, there is a strange vulnerability at the core of Falstaff's being. There is, indeed, a sense in which he is the most elementally vulnerable character in the play, vulnerable in a way that reminds us of Shakespeare's great tragic figures.

Falstaff's invincibility, after all, really just lies in the way others open their hearts to him. He has – or is – “the spirit of persuasion.” We feel moved to love him even when we know he is bad. We find ourselves believing in him even when we know he is lying. To the extent that we cannot help but love him – to that extent, but no further – he is an impregnable castle. When Mistress Quickly accuses Falstaff before the Lord Chief Justice – “he hath eaten me out of house and home; he hath put all my substance into that fat belly of his” – she ends her wild litany of accusations, in one of the finest moments of the Bell production, by running to Falstaff, embracing him, and sobbing the rest of her speech into his shoulder, while he comforts her forgivingly.

That is the form that every moral objection to Falstaff has to take. We begin, quite properly, by reproaching him, and end up embracing him and begging his forgiveness. When, earlier, Mistress Quickly berates Falstaff for evading his debts, he starts out on the defensive but ends with a triumphant show of magnanimity: “Hostess, I forgive thee. Go, make ready breakfast. Love thy husband, look to thy servants, cherish thy guests. Thou shalt find me tractable to any honest reason; thou seest I am pacified still. Nay, prithee, begone.”

Yet we are confronted, at the end of the story, with a person who knows Falstaff, understands him, loves him – and rejects him. This person has just become king. In Henry IV, it is power that refuses life by refusing Falstaff.

At the Bell Shakespeare production last night, we were scandalised by this monstrous wrongness, this insult against the human spirit, this denial of life and joy. Seething with indignation in our seats, we were compelled to make the better choice. We despised the king and all his pomp, and our hearts went out to Falstaff. To the extent that it opens our hearts to Falstaff, Henry IV is a deeply moral play – not a moralising play, God help us, but a grand hilarious demonstration of the absolute, unqualified, unbounded goodness of life. By moving us to say Yes to Falstaff, the play makes us participants in a moral world where life is more important than power and joy is stronger than death.

But if we prize power above joy, we will find prostitutes and tax collectors – yes, even old Jack Falstaff – entering the kingdom ahead of us. If, like Hal, we banish Falstaff from our hearts, we will wake up one day to discover that we have really only banished ourselves.

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