SOURCE: "Discourse of Occasion in Henry IV" in Cahiers Elisabethains, No. 37, April, 1990, pp. 27-42.

[In the essay that follows, Black analyzes the "comic discourse " in the Henry IV plays and argues that while discourse in Shakespeare's history plays is typically limited, the comedic elements in the conversations and discussions (most notably those of Falstaff) in these two plays function as a means of revealing the themes of time and deferment.]

Keir Elam's analysis of Shakespeare's dramatic discourse leads him to propose that opening gambits vary artfully according to genre: "the comic incipit suggests an infinitely extendible continuity of speech . . . , the history play appears on the contrary to establish from the outset a sense of discursive limit and self-sufficiency." But Shakespeare's extensive use of comic techniques in Henry IV gives the play both "a sense of discursive limit" and "an infinitely extendible continuity of speech",¹ especially from Falstaff who, as A.D. Nuttall observes, "is poem unlimited, . . . the great expression in the plays of what we may call the unpractical mystique."²

These apparently diverse perceptions of discursive limit and poem unlimited are in part reconciled by the fact that 1 Henry IV is an interleaved text that, deconstructed (which in this case is to say, dismantled), yields two texts. As proposed by the Ql title page there is The History of Henrie the Fourth; With the baiteli at Shrewsburie between the King and Lord Henry Percy, and there is the humorous conceits of Sir John Falstalffe. These texts, when separated, are respectively a history and a comedy, by Elam's definitions. By the removal of Falstaff from the rebellion plot—a process which requires little more than excision of twenty-three lines from V.1, thirty lines from V.3 and sixty-four lines (with accompanying business) from V.4, a total of one hundred and fifteen lines, all from one act—The History of Henrie the Fourth; With the baiteli at Shrewsburie is completely free of Falstaffian intertextuality and offers a complete and serious plot featuring a king preoccupied with rebellious subjects and a rebellious son, and culminating in the defeat of the chief rebels, with the king and prince, reconciled, going off together to make the victory complete. This plot has an interesting touch of allegory centred in the prodigal-prince whose misbehaviour is fully enough lamented (I.1), upbraided (III.2) and confessed (III.2, V.1), and then thrown off, while the aspiring and failed Hotspur is tragic. And it is a history play with the king, Hotspur and Lady Percy, Mortimer, Glendower, Douglas and Blunt undiminished, with extensive appearances by the prince, and with a lady singing in Welsh. The king, prince and rebellion carry over into Part Two, and the rebellion matter in both Parts is the 'history play' to which I will be referring. Though the history might stand by itself in Part One without the humorous conceits of Falstaff, provided the Falstaffian comedy was only humorous conceits, in Part Two the comedy obviously is inseparable from the history. Shakespeare, as he usually does, is working across genres.³ I intend to show that the play's comic discourse invariably is sounding the major themes of 1 and 2 Henry IV and that the "poem unlimited" is both an invasion and an outgrowth of those discursive limits which characterize the history play.

Part One has the conventional history-play opening noted by Elam, with the king "[inaugurating] the dramatic universe of discourse .. . by inviting a speech act"⁴:

Then let me hearOf you, my gentle cousin Westmorland,What yesternight our Council did decreeIn forwarding this dear expedience,

(I.1.30-5)⁵

The request comes at the end of a thirty-three-line speech (the second longest opening speech, discounting prologues and inductions, in Shakespeare's plays after Gloucester's in Richard III). The dear expedience which is supposed to have been forwarded is the king's crusade, his resolution that the factions in England

Shall now, in mutual well-beseeming ranks,March all one way, and be no more oppos 'dAgainst acquaintance, kindred, and allies.

(I.1.14-16)

For twenty-seven lines the king emphasizes his determination that civil war will end and the crusade begin. Twice he says no more with reference to internal strife, twice now, and once each therefore, and forthwith to indicate the new unity of purpose. The Then let me hear . . . in the last sentence of the speech logically should follow on these emphatic expressions of intention. But this final sentence is made an irrelevancy, or little more than a cue to start Westmorland talking, by the preceding sentence:

But this our purpose now is twelve month old,And bootless 'tis to tell you we will go;Therefor we meet not now.

(I.1.28-30)

The now and not now of this sentence are anti-climactic both in their own sequence and in comparison with the repeated purposeful nows of lines fourteen and twenty. The therefor of line thirty is in lame contrast to the Therefore of line eighteen—Therefore, friends, . . . forthwith a power of English shall we levy. Even allowing for its metadiscursive reference back to the end of Richard II where Henry vowed to make a voyage to the Holy Land, / To wash this blood off from [his] guilty hand (V.6.49-50), the king's speech appears unnecessarily elaborate unless repetitiveness is meant (by the speaker) to be taken for determination. He certainly does indulge in a miles gloriosus fantasy of being Christ's soldier and chasing pagans, and when he swings first from resolution to disappointment in the penultimate sentence and then, with apparent illogic, back again to anticipation in the final sentence he cleverly makes Westmorland bear the responsibility of postponing the crusade—of ratifying the not now that has cancelled all of Henry's nows and forthwiths.

Given the shadings of fantasy and policy in his lengthy opening speech, the king's abrupt relinquishment of forthwith and now may indicate either a genuine or a pretended confusion. Over the course of the two Parts of the play he continues to attempt, or profess to attempt, to start his crusade, and to be endlessly thwarted by necessity from cleansing his hands or completing his policy of busying giddy minds with foreign quarrels—he states both motives. He also defers his death in Jerusalem, or is his death in Jerusalem deferred?—Shakespeare makes it impossible to choose between the active-and-passive-voice ways of stating the fact of deferment. Henry thus hovers in that state of unfulfilment which in the history play is serious (for the kingdom too needs cleansing and unity) but which also borders on that comic situation where intention, grandiosely stated but not quite committed to, is thwarted by external intrusion: as with the Navarronian academic contract in Love's Labour 's Lost, for instance, or, nearer at hand, the self-reforming intentions, periodically repeated, of Falstaff, who exactly like King Henry is first presented as having a high-handedness with or confusion about time and who sets up a trajectory of discourse about it parallel to the king's.

Taken at its best, the king's opening speech sets a level of history-play discourse, a strait and narrow path of formal court verse from which Falstaff s and Hal's improvisational prose, boundlessly discursive, broad and easy, will seem to continually deviate. Yet Falstaff s opening query in I.2, Now, Hal, what time of day is it, lad? and Hal's response that unless time were to comply with his desires Falstaff has nothing to do with it resonate from the king's confusion of now and not now. That open-vowelled yawn of Falstaff s first line may seem far from the king's evocation of a breathless occasion,

So shaken as we are, so wan with care,Find we a time for frighted peace to pantAnd breathe short-winded accents of new broils

(I.1.1-3),

yet short-winded accents are Falstaff s mode of speaking. He complains (at length) of being broken-winded (Pt. 1, II.2.12-13) and Poins notes that his only brevity in communication is brevity in breath, short-winded (Pt. 2, II.2.118). A comic reflection of the king's characterization of the thirsty entrance of this soil [Daubing] her lips with her own children's blood (1.1.5-6) is Falstaff larding the lean earth as he sweats to death at Gad's Hill (II.2.103-04). His echoes of the king are distant and debased, yet satirically antiphonal. And in his first exchange with Hal he asks a question whose substance, like Henry's preoccupation with the Holy Land, will arch over all the action of both Parts of the play to its resolution in the last acts of Part Two. The question is emphasized by repetition and by the deferral of its shaping:

Fal. . . . I prithee sweet wag, when thou art king,
as God save thy Grace—Majesty I should say, for
grace thou wilt have none—
Prince. What, none?
Fal. No, by my troth, not so much as will serve to
be prologue to an egg and butter.
Prince. Well, how then? Come, roundly, roundly.
Fal. Marry then sweet wag, when thou art king let
not us that are squires of the night 's body be called
thieves of the day's beauty . . .

(Pt 1, 1.2.16-25)

Falstaff starts the question, interrupts himself to enjoy the syllepsis inherent in his use of the word Grace, and when urged to get on with the matter turns back to a prologue to the question (this prologue being a prompting of the answer he hopes to get), then appears to let Hal sidetrack him. But the question waits, and forty lines after it was begun he begins it again, and again prompts the reply:

But I prithee sweet wag, shall there be gallows standing in England when thou art king? and resolution thus fubbed as it is with the rusty curb of old father Antic the law? Do not thou when thou art king hang a thief.

(I.2.56-60)

Twice prompted to the answer Falstaff wants, Hal fubs off resolution of the question by a quibble on hang a thief:

Prince. No, thou s halt.
Fal. Shall I? O rare! By the Lord, I'll be a brave judge.
Prince. Then judgest false already, I mean thou shalt have the hanging of the thieves and so become a rare hangman. 

(1.2.61-5)

Thus the matter of what sort of king Hal will be, like the question of what kind of soldier King Henry is going to be, takes many lines to pose. And, as mentioned, neither question is resolved until the last acts of Part Two, though returned to many times by the king, Falstaff and others. Here, in extended deferral, is where comic speech is bred upon the history-play's discourse, because comic discourse, being infinitely extendible (Elam: 91) and moving with its own organs, is the discourse of evasion, of (to use Falstaff s and Quickly's word) fubbing off. Hal's word-play in: Thou shalt [hang a thief] instantly entraps Falstaff—a quibble being the fatal Cleopatra for which Falstaff is often content to lose the thread of his thought—and the comedic path is followed even after Falstaff discovers Hal means him to be hangman, not judge.

Fal. Well, Hal, well; and in some sort it jumps with
my humour, as well as waiting in the court . . .
Prince. For obtaining of suits?
Fal. Yea, for obtaining of suits, whereof the hangman
hath no lean wardrobe. 

(I.1.66-71)

In the history Northumberland's party see themselves as waiting in the court and obtaining no suit whatever. Worcester tells the king (whom he sees as a political gourmand):

. . . Being fed by us, you used us so,As that ungentle gull the cuckoo's birdUseth the sparrow—did oppress our nest,Grew by our feeding to so great a bulkThat even our love durst not come near your sightFor fear of swallowing.

(Pt 1; V.1.54-64)

Hotspur puts the same point even more forcefully, employing (with a mock-apology for his colloquial excursion) Hal's and Falstaff s metaphor and run of quibbles. Shall it be, he asks Northumberland and Worcester,

That you a world of curses undergo,Being the agents or base second means,The cords, the ladder, or the hangman rather?—O, pardon me that I do stoop so low,To show the line and the predicamentWherein you range under this subtle king!

(I.3.161-7)

Thus in the history the king and the king's former allies, and in the comedy the prince's parasite, are kept 'hanging'—a suspended state clearly defined, by discursive echo and other means, in the first three scenes. The king himself is frozen between now and not now and he in turn practises that most delicate of political skills, the art of deferral. He knows at what time to promise, when to pay (IV.3.52-3). When to promise usually is 'now' while when to pay is 'not now'. Hal intends, he says in the famous soliloquy which ends the second scene of Part One, to pay the debt [he] never promised by Redeeming time when men think least [he] will. To redeem can mean to free or recover something by paying a pledge or obligation; this is the way in which the word is used in Part Two: My honour is at pawn, / And, but my going, nothing can redeem it (II.2.7-9). A time will come, the prince appears to be saying, when to promise will be to pay and there will be no more fubbing off and no more confusing of now with not now. Redeeming time of course comes from the Bishops' Bible translation of Ephesians V. 16. Instead of redeeming the time the Great Bible of 1539 has the phrase avoydyng occasion,⁶ a locution which neatly describes the side-stepping and deferral practised throughout Henry IV. Of all the characters, Hal makes the fewest promises.

The king on the other hand avoids occasion when he can, withholding satisfaction from the Percies, deferring Jerusalem, keeping back Mortimer's ransom. In retaliation Hotspur withholds his prisoners. He also withholds information (and himself) from his wife; Northumberland promises support at Shrewsbury but never pays. In the comedy the matter of Falstaff s answering for the Gad's Hill robbery in Part One is still outstanding in Part Two (I.2.100, 147-8); he continually evades his debts to Quickly (even in his brief penetration into the history at the battle of Shrewsbury he acknowledges that at London he escapes shot-free), inspiring the hostess's ineffable complaint:

A hundred mark is a long one for a poor lone woman to bear, and I have borne, and borne, and borne, and have been fubbed off, and fubbed off, and fubbed off, from this day to that day, that it is a shame to be thought on.

(Pt. 2, II.1.30-5)

At the end, Falstaff owes Shallow a thousand pounds, and fubs him off as well (Pt 2, V.5.72-85). And suspended over both Parts are Falstaff s own expectations which are vested (though he doesn't know this) in the matter expressed in both the history and the comedy: Hal's promise to reform.

There is no question that the puttings-off in the history flow from the matter of the king's title, which is linked to the pattern of rebellion, theft (of crowns, Pt. 1, I.2.127-8) and the general impotence of law in the kingdom—hence, in the comedy, Falstaff s freedom and expectations. The Percies believe that supplantation of the king by Mortimer will cure all the ills. Rather than avoydyng occasion, therefore, they are prepared to seize it, to make it—Let us on, and publish the occasion of our arms (Pt. 2, I.3.86)—or say that they are driven by it.:

We see which way the stream of time doth run,And are enforc'd from our most quiet thereBy the rough torrent of occasion.

(Pt. 2, IV.1.70-2)

Hotspur is most characteristically an occasion-maker, chafing always at delay, invariably trying to create or seize opportunities for hostilities and 'honour': I am on fire / To hear this rich reprisal is so night, and yet not ours! (Pt. 1, IV.1.117-19). Yet all Hotspur's bristle and avidity for 'now' in Part One should not obscure the fact that the two Parts of Henry IV constitute a kind of vigil-play. Succession, not supplantation, ends the reign of King Henry and turns the kingdom around, and the time for succession can neither be predicted nor hurried: it has to be waited for. As with the king's Jerusalem dream—and with Falstaff s question—'now' waits upon 'not now'. The king will respond only to 'necessity': Are these things then, necessities? / Then let us meet them like necessities (Pt 2, III. 1.92-3). Like Falstaff he will face only what he cannot defer:

Prince. Why, thou owest God a death.

Fal. Tis not due yet, I would be loath to pay him before his day—what need I be so forward with him that calls not on me?

(Pt. 1, V.1.126-9)

Thus in history and comedy both Hal's 'fathers' defer and delay. Falstaff saves himself from being killed at Shrewsbury by playing dead, fubbing off death by seeming to die, and doing it well enough to deceive Hal and take away Hal's redemptive victory over Hotspur. The king too seems to Hal to have died, only to gather strength for one final scene. In each case there is a deferment of Hal's redemption of time, an avoidance of Hal's occasion.

Hal's vigil is very difficult. Apparently from the moment of his father's accession, as we learn in Richard //(V.3.1-22), he had committed himself to the form of political theatre which he explains in the soliloquy on redeeming time. Faithfulness to this programme means that the redemptive act can take place only at his father's death and his own succession. Till then, all his 'I wills' are intentional, Hal's version of 'not now': Redeeming time when men think least I will; I do, I will [banish Falstaff]. Even the intention that he does fulfill in Part One, I will redeem all this on Percy's head, brings credit not to himself but to Falstaff. Hence king and prince are waiting, as it were, for Jerusalem, for an occasion that neither really wishes to come and for an event about which they scarcely can speak. With no one to confide in (except the audience, and Shakespeare gives him just one more soliloquy after redeeming time), Hal only once obliquely approaches the uncomfortable subject with Poins:

Poins. Tell me, how many good young princes would [talk so idly], their fathers being so sick as yours at this time is . . .

Prince. Marry, I tell thee it is not meet that I should he sad now my father is sick; albeit I could tell to thee, as to one it pleases me for fault of a better to call my friend, I could be sad, and sad indeed too.

Poins. Very hardly, upon such a subject.

Prince. . . . Let the end try the man. But I tell thee, my heart bleeds inwardly that my father is so sick; and keeping such vile company as thou art hath in reason taken from me all ostentation of sorrow. . . . what wouldst thou think of me if I should weep?

Poins. I would think thee a most princely hypocrite. Prince. It would be every man's thought; and thou art a blessed fellow, to think as every man thinks. . . . Every man would think me an hypocrite indeed.

(Pt. 2, II.2.29-56)

From this exchange it is clear that Hal is feeling the strain of his pose. He participates in only one Boar's-Head scene in Part Two, where appropriately he 'waits upon' Falstaff while disguised as a drawer (II.2.164-5) and comes forward calling out Anon, anon, sir (II.4.279). Anon, anon, sir is the drawer Francis' repeated cry in Part One when Hal holds him in one room while Poins calls from another. It is one of the comedy's echoes to 'now' and 'not now' and 'I will'—all of these expressions coming from characters, from the king down to Francis, who are time's subjects (Pt. 2, I.3.110). Commentators on Henry IV who read Hal as having a cool agenda neatly worked out overlook the fact that no one has control over the time-table. Hal must wait and wait, like everyone else, and even when Hotspur's impulsiveness results in one 'I will'—I will redeem all this on Percy's head—being accomplished, no credit accrues to Hal and, far from all this being redeemed, Hotspur's elimination is only prologue to the another day announced (appropriately) by the king in the final words of Part One. Another day is the day the rebels are finally checked, but not by Hal, and behind that day waits yet another, the day of Jerusalem, the day of change that necessitates the king's death. And while Hal waits, without being able to express to anyone what he is waiting for, he can say only Let the end try the man.

During this period of waiting—to borrow a phrase from Linda Woodbridge⁷ this imitation of inaction—discursive limitation and poem unlimited run closely together in the matter of what can and cannot be discoursed on. Discussion of King Henry's death is clearly off-limits, especially between father and son. Just once, in a breathless, unguarded moment, does the prince blurt out the proscribed word. When Hal saves him from Douglas, the king says he has show'd thou mak'st some tender of my life, / In this fair rescue, and the prince responds:

O God, they did me too much injuryThat ever said I hearken'd for your death.

(Pt. 1, V.4.48, 51-2)

The king's choice of words, my life, evades naming what has nearly happened, while Hal's your death is understandably but exceptionally blunt. The topic of the king's death does not return again until the king actually begins to die, in Part Two, IV.4.

Falstaff also is prickly on the subject of death and the related matter of his age. He can and frequently does mention age himself, usually in rhetorical self-defence, as in there lives not three good men unhanged in England, and one of them is fat, and grows old, or in the plea for valiant Jack Falstaff, and therefore more valiant, being as he is old Jack Falstaff. And he complains of decay:

Bardolph, am I not fallen away vilely since this last action? Do I not bate? Do I not dwindle? Why, my skin hangs about me like an old lady's loose gown.

(Pi. 1, III.3.1-3)

But when Bardolph responds to this complaint by saying that Falstaff is so fretful he cannot live long, it is made clear to him that Falstaff really doesn't want his opinion, for he gives Bardolph the curtest of acknowledgements, Why, there is it. He equivocates on whether it is gout, a disease of age, or pox, a malady of youth, that pains his great toe (Pt. 2, I.2.244-6) and attempts to falsify his age. In the Boar's Head playlet he admits to as I think, some fifty, and when this obviously draws derision, hastily adds or by'r lady inclining to threescore (Pt. 1, II.4.418-19); and with the Chief Justice he brazenly says You that are old consider not the capacities of us that are young (Pt 2, I.2.172-4). When Doll Tearsheet asks him when he is going to patch up his old body for heaven he begs her not to speak like a death 's-head, do no bid me remember mine end (Pt. 2, II.4.227-32). She at once changes the subject, but he returns to it himself in his most genuinely morose utterance in either Part: I am old, I am old. Thou 7 forget me when I am gone (II.4.268, 274). Shallow's near-senile reminiscences embarrass or irritate him—No more of that, good Master Shallow, no more of that (Pt. 2, III.2.191)—especially when Shallow seems to think time has stood still:

Shal. . . . And is Jane Nightwork alive?
Fal. She lives, Master Shallow.
Shal. . . . Doth she hold her own well?
Fal. Old, old, Master Shallow.

Shal. Nay, she must be old, she cannot choose but be old, certain she's old, and had Robin Nightwork by old Nightwork before I came to Clement's Inn.

Sil. That 's fifty-five year ago.

(Pt. 2, III.2.193-205)

Shallow's leitmotifs in the first orchard scene are dead and old. Falstaff resists admitting contemporaneity by side-stepping the reminiscences as much as he can—no more of that, good Master Shallow—or by touching them, sordid as they are, with grace: We have heard the chimes at midnight. Skeletal as he always has been (a was the very genius of famine, III.2.307-08) and withered as he now is, Shallow is an emblematic death's head, the memento mori Falstaff implored Doll not to be in his previous scene. In Part One Falstaff cheerfully compared Bardolph's fiery face to a death's-head, or a memento-mori, but 'dead' and 'old' seem too present and vocal in Part Two at the Boar's Head and in Gloucestershire. The death'sheads set up a discourse which Falstaff is finding increasingly hard to control.

Control of discourse, usually by dazzling reaction, is Falstaff s strength, his way of organizing and directing the wit that is in other men. As king of language, he holds a monopoly and gives out patents to suit himself. The exchange with Bardolph already mentioned is a good example of Falstaff s restraint-of-trade. Because Falstaff begins the scene by saying Bardolph, am I not fallen away vilely since this last action?, Bardolph thinks he really is being asked for comment, so when Falstaff goes on to complain that he lives out of all order, out of all compass, Bardolph attempts to decorate what he (possibly correctly) takes to be an unconscious Falstaffian pun:

Bard. Why, you are so fat, Sir John, that you must needs be out of all compass, out of all reasonable compass, Sir John.

Fal. Do thou amend thy face, and I'll amend my life . . . I make as good use of [thy face] as many a man doth of a death's head, or a memento mori. I never see thy face but I think upon hell-fire, and Dives that lived in purple; for there he is in his robes, burning, burning. If thou wert any way given to virtue, I would swear by thy face: My oath should be "By this fire, that's God's angel!" But thou art altogether given over; and wert indeed, but for the light in thy face, the son of utter darkness.

(Pt. 1, III.3.24-36)

Bardolph has made the error of intruding on a monologue on Falstaff s favourite topic—Falstaff. When we look at just about any of the exchanges with Falstaff in either Part it can be seen that they are all about Falstaff: they are of course usually about sloth, gluttony, lechery, covetousness, anger and pride—in sum, about Falstaff, who orchestrates the discourse about himself. Bardolph's witticism on Falstaff s girth is squashed because Falstaff has not licensed it. The conscious references to Falstaff s bulk in both Parts of the play come from Bardolph (one reference), Poins (three in all, only one of them made to Falstaff s face), Doll (three affectionate insults including thou whoreson little Bartholomew boar-pig) and the Chief Justice (one). The Sheriff and Carrier in Part One say they are looking for A gross fat man. As fat as butter (ÏL4.504). All the rest of the legion of references to Falstaff s corpulence come from Falstaff himself or from Prince Hal. And the prince and certain of the others discourse on this topic because Falstaff wills them to do so. Witness for instance the Chief Justice attempting to lecture Falstaff on his way of life:

C.J. Well, the truth is, Sir John, you live in great infamy.

Fal. He that buckles himself in my belt cannot live in less.

C.J. Your means are very slender, and your waste is great.

Fal. I would it were otherwise. I would my means were greater and my waist slenderer. . . .

C.J. You are as a candle, the better part burnt out.

Fal. A wassail candle, my lord, all tallow—if I did say of wax, my growth would approve the truth.

C.J. There is not a white hair in your face but should have his effect of gravity.

Fal. His effect of gravy, gravy, gravy.

(I.2.135-61)

As the Justice attacks Falstaff s morals and conduct, Falstaff actually hides behind his own bulk, making the assailant strike, as it were, at a pillow and turning the Justice's thrusts into straight-lines (the Justice's puns are of course all unconscious). The great belly is offered as a target, and absorbs all strictures. Doll likewise is for the erotic occasion permitted to call Falstaff a Bartholomew boar-pig and a whoreson chops, but patching up his old body for heaven is a forbidden subject: do not bid me remember mine end.

In the history, what is not licensed for discussion is not spoken about. The king sets limits most explicitly: no one is to speak of Mortimer, and he will listen to Hal only when Hal promises to overcome Hotspur. Lady Percy is forbidden to ask Hotspur about his plot; Hal stops the Sheriff from carrying out enquiries into the Gad's Hill robbery; Worcester makes Vernon suppress the king's offer to Hotspur. In Part Two a character is called Silence: appropriately, he breaks into song only in the new reign.

In effect, then, Falstaff licences certain other characters to discourse on his belly and by doing so sets limitations on what may be said about his life, his age and his diseased state. Because he knows that men of all sorts take a pride to gird at him he keeps their attention on his girth—one of his techniques being the word-play he uses in gird at me (Pt. 2, I.2.5), and in his first encounter with the Chief Justice, where as mentioned, every criticism is turned into an evading pun and the serious circumstance of Falstaff s vice (living out of compass) into the comic matter of his corpulence (being out of compass).

The prince has the broadest patent to coin Falstaff s belly into diversion, and yet there is a sense that even Hal at times is an 'allowed fool' in the Twelfth Night manner (Twelfth Night, I.5.93-4). Obviously Falstaff is Hal's allowed Fool, but after the pattern of Shakespearean comedy the roles are sometimes reversed: I am the fellow with the great belly, and he my dog is how Falstaff describes their relationship (Pt. 2, I.2.144-5). The great belly, that globe of sinful continents (Pt. 2, II.4.282), is topic unlimited, a comic universe which Hal tirelessly explores and Falstaff deftly exploits. The prince's brief may be described as 'Let him anatomize Falstaff, and so he does, finding a fat-kidneyed rascal, fat guts, Sir John Paunch, that damned brawn, woolsack, whoreson round man, and whoreson obscene greasy tallow-catch. In Henry IV a discourse of insult runs through all the degrees of verbal contention from the Retort Courteous to the Lie Direct (cf. As You Like It, V.4.89-96), and adds another category, the Imputation Scurrilous. Insults pour from Hal with the reprobative energy and inventiveness of a puritan pamphleteer, or Thersites, or Kent on Oswald, or Jonson's Buffone⁸—except that the prince's scurrilities are cheerful, and directed at the easy target which Falstaff presents to him. Falstaff, who is himself a master of base comparisons (Pt. 1, H.4.246), acknowledges that Hal has the most unsavoury similes (Pt. 1, I.2.77), and when he proposes a play extempore and lets Hal play the king to his prince he is giving Hal even further allowance to attack him. This Hal does in a tour-de-force of comic revulsion:

There is a devil haunts thee in the likeness of an old fat man, a tun of man is thy companion. Why dost thou converse with that bolting-hutch of beastliness, that swollen parcel of dropsies, that huge bombard of sack, that stuffed cloak-bag of guts, that roasted Manningtree ox with the pudding in his belly, that reverend vice, that grey iniquity, that father ruffian, that vanity in years?

(Pt. J, II.4.441-9)

Because Falstaff is in character and cannot break in on this assault Hal's attack goes on from his corpulence to his viciousness. But in another exchange, where Falstaff can interrupt, he stops Hal at appearances and replies in kind:

Prince. This sanguine coward, this bed-presser, this horse-back-breaker, this huge hill of flesh,—

Fal. 'Sblood, you starveling, you eel-skin, you dried neat's tongue, you bull's pizzle, you stock-fish . . . you tailor's yard, you sheath, you bow-case, you vile standing tuck!

(Pt. 1, II.4.237-44)

As can be seen from this counter-attack, Falstaff not only uses his bulk as a straw man (well-stuffed) to wear out assailants, but also takes pride in it. In his view, he is not unpleasingly fat but simply a goodly portly man; other men, including Hal, are unnaturally thin. If I were sawed into quantities, he says, I should make four dozen of such bearded hermits' staves as Master Shallow (Pt. 2, V.1.59-61), and when the prince puts the small boy into Falstaff s service to set him off Falstaff persuades himself that the boy, not he, is the phenomenon, a whoreson mandrake, . . . fitter to be worn in my cap than to wait at my heels (Pt. 2, I.2.13-15). He and the prince are the sight-gag of fat and thin together, in perpetual contenton even when (as rarely) they are silent, and the comedy returns again and again to this emblematic discourse. Even at Shrewsbury a visual fat-thin contrast between dead Hotspur and supposedly-dead Falstaff may be encouraged by the Prince's observations (Pt, 1, V.4.86-109) that Hotspur is shrunken in death while Falstaff is as gross as ever. The farewell to dead Falstaff is consciously humorous as well as dismissive: Could not all this flesh keep in a little life?; O, I should have a heavy miss of thee and Death hath not struck so fat a deer today. Because Hal is in only two scenes with Falstaff in Part Two (one of these being the rejection scene), as compared with six scenes in Part One, Shakespeare maintains the emblem by substituting the boy and Shallow, and probably Shadow, as the thin member of the pairing. The Falstaffian insults on Hal's slenderness quoted above—starveling, eel-skin, bow-case, tailor's-yard—come around again on this starved justice and hermit's staff, Shallow: you might have thrust him and all his apparel into an eel-skin—the case of a treble hautboy was a mansion for him (Pt. 2, III.2.297, 319-21). And the discourse of insult between fat man and thin man, old and young, resumes in Part Two when Falstaff, debating with the Chief Justice, over-confidently turns the subject from his bulk to his virtue, his true valour and, at a pitch of egregiousness, his youth—You that are old consider not the capacities of us that are young—and the Justice attacks him in every quarter:

Do you set down your name in the scroll of youth, that are written down old with all the characters of age? Have you not a moist eye, a dry hand, a yellow cheek, a white beard, a decreasing leg, an increasing belly? Is not your voice broken, your wind short, your chin double, your wit single, and every part about you blasted with antiquity?

(I.2.177-83)

The Justice's anatomy of Falstaff is as searching as Hal's—he is, after all, Hal's dramatic stand-in, and will soon replace Falstaff as Hal's 'father' (V.2.118). These are contradictory roles. The Justice who takes part as half of the comedy team, first feeding unconscious straight-lines to Falstaff and then satirically anatomizing him, belongs in The humorous conceits of Sir John Falstalffe, while the frustrated lawman who can neither separate the prince from his lewd companion nor cross-examine the companion, reputed conqueror of Hotspur, on the robbery at Gad's Hill is from The History of Henrie the Fourth, The Justice's two-fold role is a sign of the integration of comedy and history; any attempt to separate Part Two into dual texts as with Part One would be an exercise in sawing Falstaff into quantities.

But the discourse of opposites is not in words only but in woes also (cf. Pt. 1, II.4.412), especially in Part Two, where the comic matter of Falstaff s swollen condition seriously emblematizes King Henry's land. The king says:

Then you perceive the body of our kingdomHow foul it is, what rank diseases grow,And with what danger, near the heart of it.

(III. 1.38-40)

And the king's adversary the Archbishop has the same diagnosis:

We are all diseas 'd,And with our surfeiting, and wanton hours,Have brought ourselves into a burning fever,And we must bleed for it.

(IV.1.54-7)

Warwick's optimistic reply to the king is that the land is but as a body yet distemper'd, / Which to his former strength may be restor 'd. But neither the king nor the rebels can cure the distemper, for they are part of it as Falstaff is emblem of it. When Falstaff complains that he is economically as well as physically afflicted he invokes a general condition of painful langour: I can get no remedy against this consumption of the purse; borrowing only lingers and lingers it out (Pt. 2, I.2.237-8). Northumberland's description of his own indecisiveness also describes a wider anomie:

'Tis with my mindAs with the tide swell'd up unto his height,That makes a still-stand, running neither way.

(Pt 2, II.3.62-4)

The two crises which the corporate swollen state eventually reaches are not brought about by any notable initiatives: they are the rebels' defeat and the king's final collapse. The latter comes when the sick king hears the rebellion is over, and responds.

Will Fortune never come with both hands full...?
She either gives a stomach, and no food—
Such are the poor, in health; or else a feast
And takes away the stomach. 

(Pt. 2, IV.4.103-07)

Falstaff has expressed the same thought and image more succinctly: Now comes in the sweetest morsel of the night, and we must hence and leave it unpicked (Pt. 2, II.4.264-5)—as always, the comedy glosses the history in discursive parallels. Indeed, immediate echoes between history and comedy, comedy and history, emphasize this commentary, as when the Chief Justice in character in the history fervently says, God send the prince a better companion, and Falstaff rejoins, God send the companion a better prince (Pt. 2, I.2.199-200). The king's death does in fact send the companion a better prince, but one out of the history as the Justice means, not out of the comedy as Falstaff desires. In his first scene as Henry V, Hal revitalizes the temporal sense of 'now':

The tide of blood in me
Hath proudly flow 'd in vanity till now.
Now doth it turn and ebb back to the sea,
Where it shall mingle with the state of floods,
And flow henceforth in formal majesty.
Now call we our high court of parliament. 

(V.2.129-34)

His repeated 'nows' override 'not now' and 'anon, anon', and replace 'I will' with 'I do', while his metaphor of the changing tides cancels Northumberland's 'still-stand'. The trajectories of the history play and the comedy have brought them both to this occasion, where Hal is king and Falstaff s question about what sort of king he will be is to be answered: shall there be gallows standing and resolution fubbed with the rusty curb of old father Antic the law? It is worth noting that, although the question was so important to Falstaff that he persisted in asking it despite his own digressions and the prince's interruptions, he characteristically visualizes life in Henry V's England as a capsized morality play in which miscreance (which to him is resolution) would contend successfully with law. In such contention he would be the triumphant Vice:

If I do not beat thee out of thy kingdom with a dagger of lath, and drive all thy subjects before me like a flock of wild geese, I'll never wear hair on my face more.

(Pt 1, II.4.133-6)

His last scene with Hal actually is composed as a morality play extempore with Falstaff as delinquent and Hal as king, seconded by the presence of the Chief Justice as law. Thus when Falstaff calls out affectionately and familiarly and Hal orders, My Lord Chief Justice, speak to that vain man, Falstaff s long-suspended question seems to be answered: resolution will be curbed by old Father Antic the law. But ignoring the Justice's intervention, Falstaff again calls out to the king, and the king has to give him the reply direct. The famous banishment speech that follows is intended by the speaker to be all that critics have labelled it—cold, official, dismissive, sermonistic—, and its opening words, I know thee not, old man, probably do come from such Pauline injunctions as . . . Put off concerning the former conversation the old man, which is corrupt according to the deceitful lusts (Ephesians IV. 22), while being awak'd I do despise my dream may derive from Romans XIII. 11, Knowing the time, that now it is high time to awake out of sleep. Yet none of these elements—the public setting, the Justice's intervention, or the king's homily with its biblical echoes—is new to Falstaff. In their first scene together he told Hal:

An old lord of the Council rated me the other day in the street about you, sir, but I marked him not, and yet he talked very wisely, but I regarded him not, and yet he talked wisely, and in the street too.

Prince. Thou didst well, for wisdom cries out in the streets and no man regards it.

Fal. O, thou hast damnable iteration. . . .

(Pt. 2, I.2.81-8)

"Damnable iteration", as Samuel Johnson glossed it, is "a wicked trick of repeating and applying holy texts." What then may Falstaff, who sees plays everywhere, who in Part One's play extempore acted as the delinquent admonished by Hal as king, who knows Hal's damnable iteration, and who above all other persons in the play realizes that majesty is a show and royal speech often scripted (I will do it in King Cambyses ' vein), think of Hal's dismissal of him? Is it sincere, or a show, performative or performance? In their play extempore at the Boar's Head Falstaff as king professed not to know the prince for certain: That thou art my son I have partly thy mother 's word, partly my own opinion, but chiefly a villainous trick of thine eye, and a foolish hanging of thy nether lip, that doth warrant me (Pt 1, II.4.397-400). Nor did Falstaff when in this character quite know Falstaff, There is a virtuous man whom I have often noted in thy company, but I know not his name (413-4). Knowing and not-knowing were reemphasised when they changed places, for Falstaff as prince professed not to know whom the 'king' meant by the devil in the likeness of an old fat man, but when the villainous abominable misleader of youth was named he said,

My lord, the man I know.
Prince. I know thou dost. 

Fal. But to say I know more harm in him than in myself is to say more than I know.

(458-61)

Is I know thee not, old man an echo of that comic play of rejection which was pre-text to this history play of rejection? That Henry V's speech is in public, is in verse, has a biblical ring (Falstaff s biblical knowledge is keen, his application of it situational), and is about 'now' and not about the past—being awak'd I do despise my dream—should be convincing enough, and the king also goes beyond the limitations Falstaff formerly set, discoursing not only on Falstaff s bulk but also unsparingly on his age and his death. And yet the king's cruel line How ill white hairs become a fool and a jester employs the terms so familiar to both in their multitude of comic insults. Nor is this the only reprise of their comic discourse (or in the Pauline phrase former conversation). For, just as in the Boar's-Head exchanges and in the valediction at Shrewsbury, Henry V cannot seem to stop at what he means to be taken as a serious warning. Instead, he goes on:

Make less thy body hence, and more thy grace,Leave gormandizing; know the grave doth gapeFor thee thrice wider than for other men.

In this enlargement on Falstaff s belly, homiletic copia is jostled by comic exaggeration. The full mouthful in gormandizing and the inspired invention about the gaping grave—for whom but Falstaff would not the depth or length but the width of a grave be considered?—are hard to take completely seriously. Though Hal speaks gravely, counselling gravity as his Chief Justice did to Falstaff earlier in Part Two, in Falstaff s presence, as formerly, grave and gravity threaten to take on His effect of gravy, gravy, gravy (Pt. 2, I.2.161). No doubt Falstaff just stirs himself to say some such word, for the king hurriedly cuts him off with Reply not to me with a fool-born jest: he more than anyone knows when he has given Falstaff a straight-line and opened the door to comic continuity.

Falstaff s less than three lines to the king here echo from their first scene together. His first words are God save thy Grace, King Hal. Possibly this cry is quite sincere, and also conventional, but the same words were used when Falstaff first put his question, and there he found it impossible to keep a straight face.

And I prithee sweet wag, when thou art king as God save thy Grace—Majesty I should say, for grace thou wilt have none—

Prince. What, none?

Fal. No, by my troth, not so much as will serve to be prologue to an egg and butter.

Prince. Well, how then? Come, roundly, roundly, roundly.

Fal. Marry then sweet wag, when thou art king. . . .

(Pt. I, 1.2.16-23)

In addition, there is the familiar sweet, used twice in the lines just quoted and again by Falstaff in the same exchange when he returns once more to his question, But I prithee sweet wag, shall there be gallows standing . . . (56-7). The word is appropriate between cronies (the prince addresses Poins as sweet Ned in Pt. 1, II.4.21), and Falstaff likely is using it in a propitiating or cajoling way in the context of asking the question, but it could also be a term of affection, as when about twenty-five lines later he says Thou . . . art indeed the most comparative rascalliest sweet young prince. In the rejection scene Falstaff calls out three times in this vein before being suppressed. Speaking only twenty-five words, he manages to say in three separate sentences, my royal Hal!, my sweet boy! and I speak to thee, my heart. The repeated my, and sweet, could be proprietary as much as tender, yet sweet boy and my heart, like the earlier sweet young prince, seem purely affectionate. These three sentences are the last words Falstaff speaks to Hal.

Thus the morality-play outlines of the banishment scene are deliberately blurred in the discourse between the king and Falstaff. Henry V sets out to be precise and firm, but as his icy homily of rejection proceeds it seems to thaw, and deviate to what was always Hal's favourite path of discourse, a verbal tour of Falstaff s belly. The seriousness of Youth shunning Vice and Law banishing Licence is subverted. Also undermined is the morally-satisfying conclusion to the history in which Right Rule asserts himself and puts an end to still-stand and deferral, abandoning 'anon, anon' and 'not now' in favour of 'now'. Even the sentence of banishment provides time off for good behaviour and leaves open the option of reform, which Falstaff himself has endlessly promised, or threatened, and consistently deferred. Falstaff s last substantive statement is I shall be sent for soon at night,⁹ and the Epilogue, no doubt husbanding Shakespeare's commercial interest in him, advertises that our humble author will continue the story, with Sir John in it, and appears to say that Falstaff will go to France with the king's army. Thus as history and comedy complete their ten-act trajectories there is a sense that resolution has yet again been fubbed off, and that, in one of those strokes of creative synthesis which we credit Shakespeare with whether or not he ever intended them, both the Bishop's Bible's redeeming the time and the Great Bible's avoydyng occasion have been accomplished. In the history Hal has redeemed time, as he said he would, while in the comedy and history Falstaff has avoided occasion—a triumph, we might say, of genre as well as personality, and further evidence that in Henry IV the guarded limit of history-play speech is haunted by the uncurbable spirit of comic discourse in the likeness of an old fat man.

Notes

¹ Keir Elam, Shakespeare 's Universe of Discourse: Language-Games in the Comedies, Cambridge UP (Cambridge, 1984), p. 91.

² A. D. Nuttall, A New Mimesis: Shakespeare and the Representation of Reality, Methuen (London & New York, 1983), p. 152.

³ Writing of Shakespeare's "complexities of genre", Jonathan Goldberg notes that these complexities have been treated by, among others, Rosalie Colie in The Resources of Kind: Genre Theory in the Renaissance, University of California Press (Berkeley & Los Angeles, 1973); Stephen Orgel, "Shakespeare and the Kinds of Drama", Critical Inquiry 6 (1979), and Louise George Clubb, "The Arts of Genre: Torrismondo and Hamlet", ELH 47 (1980). Goldberg's essay is "Shakespearian Inscriptions: the Voicing of Power" in Shakespeare and the Question of Theory, ed. Patricia Parker and Geoffrey Hartman, Methuen (New York & London, 1985), pp. 116-37.

⁴ Elam, p. 91.

⁵ All references to 1 and 2 Henry IV cite the New Arden edition, ed. A.R. Humphries, Methuen (London, 1966, 1967).

⁶The Byble in Englyshe . . . ([London:] Prynted by Rychard Grafton & Edward Whitchurch, 1539), British Library shelfmark G.12.215. Bound in British Library as 'Cranmer's Bible'. According to the B.L. catalogue entry this edition was issued in April 1539. In Ephesians V.d it has the reading avoydyng occasion. . . . Another edition of the same Bible issued in late summer 1539 (B.L. shelfmark C.18.d.2) reads .. . wynnynge occasion. . . .

⁷ "Palisading the Body Politic". Paper read at the Pacific Northwest Renaissance Conference, Victoria, British Columbia (March 1989).

⁸ There is plenty of seriously-intended character assassination in Henry IV: Hotspur has little good to say of anyone, and Doll Tearsheet brilliantly reduces Pistol (Pt. 2, II.4). The king's apotheoses of Hotspur are actually contexts in which to dispraise Hal. Shakespeare's nearest rival in catalogues of cheerful low-life reprobation probably is Thomas Nashe: see for example the dedications to A Strappado for the Divell (1615), and especially To the True Discoverer of Secrets Mounsieur Bacchus, sole sovereign of the Ivy-bush, Mastergunner of the pottle-pot ordnance, prime founder of Red Lattices, Cheerer of the hunger-starv'd Muses, and their thred bare followers, singular Artist in pewter language, and an observant linguist for anon anon Sir.

⁹ A knowledge of Henry V is required to hear in I shall be sent for soon at night a gloomy premonition of Falstaff s death at midnight.