SOURCE: “Falstaff and the Art of Dying,” in Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900, Vol. 27, No. 2, Spring, 1987, pp. 197-211.

[In the essay below, Cubeta evaluates the secondhand account of Falstaff's death in Henry V (II.iii) with particular reference to fifteenth- and sixteenth-century religious writings on how one should prepare for final judgment. Noting that Falstaff has always been more interested in the art of living than the art of dying, Cubeta relates the spiritual ambiguity of the fat knight's death to the moral ambiguity of his life.]

Once the historical myths and dramatic concerns of The Henriad served by Falstaff's comic vision have been resolved by his legendary repudiation, Falstaff the character can no longer exist: “Reply not to me with a foolborn jest” (Shakespeare, 2H4 V.v.55).¹ On that command to silence, the newly crowned king has destroyed his fool and jester. Falstaff could undergo a mock-magical death and resurrection at the end of 1 Henry IV, and he essentially “dies of a sweat” at the end of 2 Henry IV, when he races recklessly to Westminster Abbey “to stand stain'd with travel, and sweating with desire to see” Hal newly crowned (V.v.24-25). But Falstaff the man cannot be dismissed or lie forgotten in Fleet Prison, abandoned by king and playwright. The Shakespearean investment in the saving grace of that comic spirit in his Lancastrian world has been too great. And so in Henry V he redeems Epilogue's promise in 2 Henry IV to continue the story “with Sir John in it” (Epi., 28) with a vividly realized, yet non-existent death scene, both comic and pathetic, private and demonstrated, dedicated to the spirit of Falstaff the man.

Never allowed securely to grasp this protean giant even when his comic imagination and ironic vision die, the audience participates in the immediacy and intensity of the deathbed scene but not by observing those who stand at Falstaff's bedside. Simultaneously the audience is kept at double distance from the mystery of Falstaff's dying thoughts. Instead of a sentimental farewell in the cold, pragmatic Lancastrian world, Shakespeare seeks instead a resolution in which tragedy and comedy, doubt and belief, clarity and confusion are bound in a manner historically appropriate, morally satisfying, and psychologically dazzling. The theatrical gamble of creating a character by not creating him, of giving him life by destroying him yields the most memorable scene of the play.

To achieve the dense texture of this recollected deathbed scene, Shakespeare does not turn to his usual source for things even vaguely Falstaffian in The Henriad—The Famous Victories of Henry V (1598). In the life of Falstaff, Shakespeare has embodied rituals, folk tales, conventions, festivals as familiar to an Elizabethan audience as those he may now be suggestively recalling in the medieval and Renaissance tradition of ars moriendi, or the art of dying. To design a coherent structure and meaning to Falstaff's dying moments of introspection and memory, which appear as merely broken, delirious fragments, Shakespeare may also give Falstaff the occasion to attempt a private meditation on his life in the manner of a Renaissance meditation for Wednesday night.

Reported in an intensely moving yet uncertain retelling, Falstaff's mode of dying is as mysterious and as hauntingly perplexing as any circumstance in his life. The only words directly attributed to him, the great inventor of language, are “God, God, God!” (H5 II.iii.19). But what this punster, this parodist and unparalleled player with the rhythms of spoken language means or what tone the repetitions are spoken in is not ours to hear. The challenger of the moral, social, political, and religious values on which civilization rests dies with a word, the Word, on which pun cannot prevail. Like his heart, which Pistol avers, was “fracted and corroborate” (II.i.124), the scene recollecting Falstaff's death is a kind of transitory memorial moment, broken, unfocused, contradictory, unchronological and impossible to recreate for even their listeners by his bedside mourners, who are then about to be swept up into events in France and propelled to their own deaths.

For the old man's allegedly delirious dying moments as told by a grieving companion whose control of the English language was never firm, Shakespeare needed some kind of intelligible inner structure not available to him in the limited theatrical possibilities of an undramatic scene of dubious recollection. All that is really necessary to complete the exposition of the Falstaff story is Pistol's opening declaration and exhortation, “for Falstaff he is dead, / And we must ern therefore” (H5 II.iii. 5-6). The flexible strategies of the meditative exercises on ars moriendi allow Shakespeare the undergirding of a coherent traditional structure familiar to a Renaissance audience, with its fascination for deathbed scenes. Thus he can both shape rhetorically the dramatized design of the brief scene of companionable reminiscence and give meaning to the interior monologue and meditation of the dying Falstaff. Not rheumatic, as the Hostess suggests, he is also not incoherent, only seeming so in her narrative. In this shaky account, Shakespeare illuminates for his theater audience thoughts and intentions which even in happier times Falstaff could not always share with these companions. Yet Falstaff's voice must now be the Hostess's, hopelessly literal-minded and completely antithetical to his own.

Falstaff's mocking pledges of repentance, comically counter-pointing Lancastrian political guilt, may at the hour of his death, no longer counterfeited, be transformed into another attempt at reformation. But this one is more ambiguous than those extending from Hal's first soliloquy promising to redeem the time to his father's dying plea for divine forgiveness: “How I came by the crown O God forgive” (2H4 IV.v.218).² By prince or whore Falstaff is constantly reproached to repent, to remember his day of reckoning. His friends often sound as though they were repeating the conventional pieties of Thomas Lupset in his Waye of Dyenge Well (1541) or Robert Parsons's The First Booke of the Christian Exercise, Appertayning to Resolution (1582), in which chapter 8 is entitled “The daye of deathe Of what opinion and feelinge we shalbe, touchinge these matters, at the tyme of our deathe,”³ or Gaspar Loarte's The Exercise of a Christian Life (1579). The moral exhortations Loarte insistently makes are typical:

take then a zelous and feruent desire to liue a new here after, and striue to get other new behauiours, & to liue far otherwise than thou hast done tofore. … Eschewe al occasions of sinne, especially the companie of wicked men, but muche more of women, such as may prouoke thee to noughtines, and geue thee loose and lewd example. … Thou must flye suche places where God is customably offended, as be dising houses, tauernes, dauncing schooles, and such like. … Thou must take hede of al excesse in eating, drinking, sleping and clothing, and indeuour thy self to obserue a mediocritie and temperance in eche of them.⁴

These books of Renaissance meditation, among others, Catholic and Protestant, published in numerous editions in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century England, all explored like good-conduct books the ways in which the devout or those whose faith was more fragile should prepare for a final reckoning.⁵ The admonitions of sin, death, and judgment were so common as Renaissance homilies that an English audience could have warned Falstaff as well as Hal or Doll. “Live now as you will wish to have lived when you come to that sorrowful day” is the kind of exhortation that runs through Parsons's First Book. He would find a curious moral ally in Doll: “when wilt thou leave fighting a' days and foining a' nights, and begin to patch up thine old body for heaven?” (2H4 II.iv.231-33). Hal, newly crowned, is only more austerely puritanical in chastising the Falstaff he abandons: “Leave gormandizing, know the grave doth gape / For thee thrice wider than for other men” (V.v.53-54).

For Falstaff, playing the penitent is a subject for infinite amusement. In plays which find their moral center in redeeming the time, repentance, reformation, and reckoning, Hal and Falstaff can counterpoint their pledges. “I'll so offend, to make offense a skill, / Redeeming time when men think least I will” (1H4 I.ii.216-17) is Hal's first promise to himself and to the audience as he rationalizes his manipulation of his tavern friends both to learn about the potential corruption of fleshly indulgence and to prepare for a public apotheosis in good time. The language may be spiritual, but the hours of study, more active than contemplative, are more for his brilliant political future than for the salvation necessary for his eternal life. For Falstaff, on the other hand, the language of moral reformation in 1 and 2 Henry IV carries economic, not political or spiritual ambiguities. Hal, ironically amused, notes the rapidity with which Falstaff transforms his pledge to “give over this life, … and I do not, I am a villain, I'll be damned for never a king's son in Christendom” (1H4 I.ii.95-97) into a plan to take purses at Gadshill: “I see a good amendment of life in thee, from praying to pursetaking” (102-103). Falstaff's instant moral defense is that it is “no sin for a man to labor in his vocation” (104-105). His pun on vocation as profession and religious conversion is echoed at Shrewsbury when Hal tells Falstaff to prepare for battle and say his prayers, for he “owest God a death” (V.i.126). Falstaff's rejoinder picks up the homophonic pun on debt, as he is determined that this is not the day to prepare to die well or at all: “'Tis not due yet. I would be loath to pay him before his day” (127-28). Let those who value honor do so. “A trim reckoning” (135). Playful language then can redeem all moral questions.

One of the deliberately unresolved mysteries of The Henriad is whether Falstaff does finally make a good end, for we have only the Hostess's not unbiased judgment that “'A made a finer end, and went away and it had been any christom child” (H5 II.iii.10-12). An audience comes to this scene after another one of public confession and repentance so carefully orchestrated that the broken and uncertain fragments of Falstaff's only private meditation are made more resonantly convincing. Scroop, Cambridge, and Gray, trapped into confessing their treason and sentencing themselves to death, seem relieved that they have been caught. Each in turn thanks God for “the discovery of most dangerous treason” (II.ii.162), asks for divine and monarchial forgiveness, and seem almost to parody the assertion of Lupset and others that in ars moriendi “this dyenge well is in effecte to dye gladlye”:⁶

Cam[bridge:] But God be thanked for prevention,
                    Which [I] in sufferance heartily will rejoice,
                    Beseeching God, and you, to pardon me.

(158-60)

The traitors, “poor miserable wretches” (178), are borne off to their execution at the moment when Falstaff also dies, betrayed by his king, who, says the Hostess, “kill'd his heart” (II.i.88). The perspectives of betrayer betrayed, parodied and balanced, continue as a Lancastrian legacy from the time of Bolingbroke and Northumberland in Richard II.

For a brief interlude, almost outside the time of Henry V, as Henry dispatches his traitors and exultantly moves to France “to busy giddy minds / With foreign quarrels” (2H4 IV.v.213-14), Shakespeare elusively distances the dramatic scene of Falstaff's death by recessing it into an interior moment, a scene-within-a-scene and then within that a memory-within-a-memory. Those last friends of Falstaff—Hostess, Boy, Pistol, Nym, and Bardolph—try to recapture Falstaff's deathbed hour as a last memory. But so equivocal is their disagreement that an audience cannot even be sure who was there besides the Hostess, the Boy, and Bardolph. Nym has heard another account of Falstaff's death: “They say he cried out of sack” (II.iii.27). But who are these anonymous bedside witnesses whose story is as quickly challenged as are the contradictory reports of those who now botch the telling of their witnessed accounts? The distorted perspective of each seems finally to return the memory of Falstaff only to the security of the theater audience which can only intuit the manner of his death.

The design of the scene that is played is constructed from ambiguities of time, imagery, and theme inherent in the history plays: order/disorder, bawdy/sentimental, innocence/experience, youth/age, physical/spiritual, salvation/damnation, time/sea, life/death. Falstaff's dying like his living remains beyond precise description or adequate dramatization, imbedded in the structure of its telling. The Hostess, as the primary witness, does not herself understand the import of her account. In the confusion, distancing, and failure of Falstaff's last story lies its dramatic achievement.

To the extent that there are facts, they suggest that an emaciated Falstaff developed a sudden sweat and a high fever and died shortly after midnight. Although delirious, he seemed aware that he was on his deathbed. He apparently saw a flea on Bardolph's nose and said it was a black soul burning in hell. He inveighed against sack and prostitutes whom he called devils incarnate. He talked about the Whore of Babylon. He fumbled with his sheets, smiled at his fingertips, apparently mumbled something about green fields, called out “God” three or four times. As his feet grew cold, he asked the Hostess for more bedclothes and died.

If Falstaff is making a determined effort to die well by attempting a deathbed repentance, it is one only his Maker could be sure of. No character has been advised more insistently to remember his end, nor promised more persistently to do so when the time was right. Yet at the moment of Falstaff's dying the Hostess urges upon him as a dubious theological comfort not to think of God: “I hop'd there was no need to trouble himself with such thoughts yet” (II.iii.21-22). Her words express Falstaff's long-standing determination to postpone any day of spiritual reckoning. Nonetheless, Falstaff may be attempting a meditation in the Renaissance manner of ars moriendi, perhaps as broken and as incomplete as the narrated account of it. Whether spiritually efficacious or not remains beyond the limits of the play. But the dramatic, ritualistic, and psychological appropriateness of such a spiritual moment fulfills the design of Falstaff's creation and existence.

The paradoxical symmetry of Falstaff's life has always been mythic, not realistic,⁷ as it embodies rituals, folk tales, and festivals. For a man who lives out of all time, the hours of his birth and death are recorded as nowhere else in Shakespeare. As he tells the Chief Justice, “My Lord, I was born about three of the clock in the afternoon, with a white head and something a round belly” (2H4 I.ii.187-89). Born allegedly an old, fat man, he dies “ev'n just between twelve and one, ev'n at the turning o' th' tide” (H5 II.iii.12-13) like a “christom child,” newly christened and now shrouded in his white baptismal clothes. From corrupted old age he moves in death to appearing as an innocent child, even as the play returns to the first time an audience saw Falstaff as he emerged at noon from bed in 1 Henry IV. The first mythic definition of Falstaff is re-enforced in his death scene. It is, as Hal says, superfluous to ask Falstaff the time of day, for he has nothing to do with these symbols of order, political responsibility, or personal self-discipline. It is also superfluous to ask the Hostess how she could have been certain when high tide occurred on the Thames that last night. Like the fertility festival and the ritual games of the purged scapegoat, this moment is haunted by an aura of folklore and superstition. It was an old English belief, according to Sir James Frazer, held along the east coast of England that most deaths occur as the tide ebbs, a natural “melancholy emblem of failure, of weakness, and of death.”⁸ An audience would not have known which turning of the tide, or which twelve and one without a sense of the symbolic rightness that would remove the verbal ambiguity of the Hostess's sense of time and tide. The death of the dubiously legitimate king, Henry IV, who dies repentant in the Jerusalem Chamber as the Thames “thrice flowed, no ebb between” (2H4 IV.iv.125) parallels that of player-king Falstaff, who once mocked him for Hal's amusement in Eastcheap and now dies in Eastcheap no longer playing penitent. These balanced moments suggest again Christian rituals intertwined with folk tales, from the death of newly christened babies to those of kings and errant knights.⁹

If the Hostess, forgiving soul, believes that Falstaff is in Arthur's bosom, she is secure in her belief that Falstaff has not been judged and damned. It makes little difference whether she means the Christian heaven of Abraham's bosom as defined in Luke 16:22 or the pagan heaven of King Arthur's Avalon. And if Henry IV's belief in the prophecy that he would die in Jerusalem on his “voyage to the Holy Land, / To wash this blood off from my guilty hand” (R2 V.vi.49-50) can be accommodated by a quibble on Jerusalem Chamber, the Hostess's malapropism should be no less certain in its intent. Falstaff has always been more a practitioner of his view of ars vivendi than ars moriendi, so if the conduct of his life has been at best morally ambiguous, then its appropriate ending would be spiritually uncertain. Medieval and Renaissance meditative rituals serve both arts for him. At Shrewsbury he prefers catechisms on honor and comic resurrections that leave the body intact; rather than the grinning honor of dead Sir Walter Blunt, he declares, “Give me life, which if I can save, so” (1H4 V.iii.59-60). Salvation is a matter of preserving the body in time present. When at Eastcheap he promises, “I must give over this life, and I will give it over” (I.ii.95-96), the words would suit a Puritan preacher better than does their context in the midst of battle. “But to counterfeit dying, when a man thereby liveth, is to be no counterfeit, but the true and perfect image of life indeed” (V.iv.117-19).

One of Falstaff's most agile verbal games is that in his profane parody of the language of ars vivendi he plays a secular ars moriendi. As Hal tells Poins, “He will give the devil his due” (I.ii.119). He constantly protests his fear of damnation, of being corrupted by Hal even if he were a saint; he delights in refuting the charge that he is “that villainous abominable misleader of youth, Falstaff, that old white-bearded Sathan” (II.iv.462-64). He wishes, he says, that he could have been a puritan weaver so he could sing penitential psalms. He declares to the Chief Justice that he lost his voice “hallowing and singing of anthems” (2H4 I.ii.189-90). Whether he is playing Lord of Misrule, Antic, Miles Gloriosus, Comic Satan, or Corrupter of Youth, his archetypal roles make a travesty of the traditional posture of the penitent who must think of his sins and prepare for the hour of his dying. Robert Parsons indeed writes his First Booke of the Christian Exercise for readers “so carelesse, or so carnallie geeuen” that like Falstaff they would hardly do more than glance at his opening pages. He asks, therefore, only for their patience while he tries to persuade them of the error of their ways and so to move them to the “necessarie resolution, of leauinge vanities to serue God.”¹⁰ Falstaff knows Parsons's text—and Lupset's, Bunny's, and Luis de Granada's—and quotes them as liberally and as cavalierly as he does Scripture, whenever they accommodate his chameleon-like purposes of serving himself while pleasing a prince in whose earthly kingdom he has hopes of long-lasting reward. He will paraphrase a meditative counselor like Parsons to share a moment of self-mockery with his prince: “What are thow the better now to haue liued in credit with the world? in fauour of princes? exalted of men?”¹¹ No Renaissance leader of devotional meditation would have had the imagination to concoct for a deathbed repentance the moral inventory available to Falstaff: lying, cowardice, avarice, vanity, gluttony, drunkenness, sloth, thievery, misusing the king's press, fornication. But their ponderous spiritual guides would also have neglected to point out the love and loyalty, the wit and imagination, and the comic genius that redeem Falstaff's living.

If Falstaff's deathbed scene were simply to conclude a dissolute life as Hal, his brothers, or the Chief Justice would have it, Falstaff would fall to his prayers and seek the grace Henry urges in his repudiation of him—“How ill white hairs becomes a fool and jester!” (2H4 V.v.48). What for Luis de Granada is a metaphor of consequence for a wasted life has been Falstaff's whole reality in Eastcheap, but the Shakespearean dramatic moment of Falstaff's dying will not yield transparent spiritual conclusions to Luis de Granada's easy rhetorical questions:

If a waiefaringe man, hauinge but one farthinge in his purse, shoulde enter into an inne, and placinge him selfe downe at the table, shoulde require of the host to bringe in Partridges, Capons, Phesauntes, and all other delicates, that maie be founde in the howse, and shoulde suppe with verie great pleasure, and contentation, neuer remembringe that at the last there must come a time of accompt: who woulde not take this fellowe, either for a iester, or for a verie foole? Now what greater folie or madnes can be deuised, than for men to geue them selues so looselye to all kindes of vices, and to sleepe so sowndlie in them, without euer remembringe, that shortly after at their departinge out of their Inne, there shall be required of them a verie strayt and particular accompte of all their dissolute and wicked lyfe?¹²

If Falstaff denies Luis de Granada's economic and moral premises, which are also at the heart of the Lancastrian political enterprises, his dying moments are brilliantly poised between accepting and rejecting those spiritual conclusions.

The undramatized scene of Falstaff's death has been ruthlessly anticipated in 2 Henry IV as his voice modulates from robust, zesty parody to a genuine fear of encroaching death—“Peace, good Doll, do not speak like a death's head, do not bid me remember mine end” (2H4 II.iv.234-35). At his end he appears to be a shrunken, dying old man, no longer the maker and embodiment of vital language and consummate comic actor. No longer wittily supporting his role-playing as the devil incarnate, his language, incoherent and disconnected, is reduced to conventional religious platitudes, traditional pieties, and pleas for more blankets. No longer able to hide behind the fantasies of invented language, he cannot counterfeit kings of England nor play Lord of Misrule. He cannot turn diseases to self-serving commodity or spiritual utility. And he is no longer “the cause that wit is in other men” (I.ii.10).

As a great performer in need of an audience, Falstaff has never before had an introspective or meditative moment which might be called personal. His soliloquies on honor in I Henry IV or on sack in 2 Henry IV are essentially public moments, the comedian indulging himself with the theater audience rather than his stage audience. Only in a play in which he does not exist and on his deathbed does Falstaff have a ritualistic moment of meditation in which he is only partly aware of those around him and in which his mind turns inward and backward in memory.

Just before his death Falstaff may meditatively engage what Ignatius Loyola calls “seeing the spot,” recalling the scene upon which one is meditating with the immediacy of actually being present in it.¹³ This conventional “composition of place,” which begins a meditation, would invoke the first of the “three powers of the soul”—memory, understanding, and will.¹⁴ Falstaff may remember a romantic moment when he picked flowers in a green meadow, although the text remains as brilliantly insecure as the telling of the babbling. That lost innocence bears no resemblance to other memories recollected in Shallow's orchard of those nights when old classmates recall having heard the chimes at midnight. Other reminiscences are also unambiguous emblems of his life—sack and women; but those memories seem now touched with the recognition of some kind of moral or spiritual understanding, the second stage of the meditative process. Now Falstaff no longer cries out for sack but against it, and he calls the women of Eastcheap “dev'ls incarnate” (H5 II.iii.31-32). The Hostess's well-meaning denial, based on the fact that he “could never abide carnation” (33), was repudiated from the first when Falstaff admits that he would enjoy the sun only if it were “a fair hot wench in flame-color'd taffata” (1H4 I.ii.9-10). The identification of his whores with the Whore of Babylon may suggest that Falstaff is thinking of the Apocalypse in Rev. 17:3-6: “and I saw a woman sit upon a scarlet colored beast. … And the woman was arrayed in purple and scarlet colour.” Or perhaps as a dubiously reformed Puritan he is attacking the Catholic Church, as Edmund Bunny would have him do in his meditation. The Hostess's possible pun on “rheum” for Rome—“but then he was rheumatic” (H5 II.iii.38)—may reinforce the allusion without clarifying Falstaff's “understanding.” Seeing a flea land on Bardolph's nose may be only the last flicker of the endless jokes at his expense—“his face is Lucifer's privy kitchen” (2H4 II.iv.333)—or a deathbed prophecy of Bardolph's impending sacrilege and punishment.

Is Falstaff like Hal seeking a reformation that will glitter o'er his fault as he tries without parody to redeem the time? The fragmented and disconnected structure of his last words, the ambiguity of his observations, and the malapropisms of the Hostess deny resolution as Falstaff may drift to the third and final step in the meditative process, the engaging of the affections, or the will, which traditionally concludes with a colloquy. A meditation on ars moriendi would appropriately end in an invocation or prayer to God. And Falstaff calls out to God. But what does he mean? Is this only a feverish cry of fear? Is he trying to make an act of contrition and asking for divine forgiveness? Is this the cry of a man who believes that he has been abandoned by God—as by friend and king—in his last hour? Is one perhaps to hear an elusive echo of Christ's last words on the Cross, a moment Renaissance spiritual advisors urged for deathbed meditations; as, for example, Thomas More in Four Last Things: “But whan the poynt approched in which his sacred soule shold depart out of his blessed bodye, at that pointe he cryed loude once or twice to his father in heuen”?¹⁵ Luis de Granada in his ars moriendi exercise for Wednesday night would be secure in his spiritual interpretation of this colloquy, but Shakespeare's audience is denied that certainty:

And as well herein, as in the other thinges, thou hast to consider what great greiffe and anguishe of mynde the sycke person shall then abide in callinge to minde his wicked and synfull life: and how gladly he wishethe at that time that he had taken a better waie: and what an awstere kinde of lyfe he woulde then determine to leade, if he might haue time to doe the same: and how fayne he woulde then enforce himselfe to call vpon almightie God, and to desier him of helpe and succour. Howbeit the verie paine, greife, and continuall increasinge of his sickenes and death will scarcely permitte him so to doe.¹⁶

The Hostess is equally certain that she knows, but she urges Falstaff to get his mind off death and an afterlife. This, the only time any one tells Falstaff not to worry about his end, physical or spiritual, would be an ironic comfort, indeed, if Luis de Granada's precepts were attended to:

The first stroke wherewith death is wont to strike, is the feare of death. Suerlie this is a very great anguishe vnto him that is in loue with his lyfe: and this forewarninge is such a great greife vnto a man, that oftentimes his carnall friendes doe vse to dissemble it, and will not haue the sicke man to beleue it, least it shoulde vexe and disquiet him: and this they will doe sometimes although it be to the preiudice and destruction of his miserable sowle.¹⁷

The Hostess's spiritual purposes may be a miscalculation, but this is her finest moment, not just in the innocence of her double entendres, the humor of her verbal blunders, or her sentimental recollecting of Falstaff's death. If ever there was a woman who had been sorely abused and put upon and “borne, and … been fubb'd off” (2H4 II.i.34), it is she who has been victimized by Falstaff, who has indeed “handled” her most outrageously. Yet at the end she loves and comforts, forgives by forgetting. There is in her a Christian charity starkly missing in Falstaff's monarch. Her ministrations may also be reminiscent of those of Socrates' friends at the onset of the death of their companion, condemned as another alleged villainous, abominable misleader of youth and a threat to the established political order: “I put my hand into the bed and felt them, and they were as cold as any stone; then I felt to his knees, and so up'ard and up'ard, and all was as cold as any stone” (H5 II.iii.23-26). At the beginning of his “Remembrance of Death” in Four Last Things, Thomas More recalls Plato's account of Socrates' death in the Phaedo—“For some of the olde famous philosophers, whan thei wer demaunded what facultie philosophy was, answerd that it was the meditacion or exercise of death”—and then urges us to “fantasy” our own death in a detailed vision that may bear resemblance to some of the Hostess's recollection: “lying in thy bedde, … thy nose sharping, thy legges coling, thy fingers fimbling, … and thy death drawyng on.” Even if Shakespeare is recalling More, the unintended bawdy is characteristically the Hostess's own in gesture and simile. Falstaff's stones are cold. Desire no longer outlives performance, as Poins once ridiculed the old man. And his nose, now as sharp as a pen, makes Falstaff's gloriously hyperbolic epithets of Hal—“you starveling, you [eel]skin, you dried neat's tongue, you bull's pizzle, you stock-fish” (1H4 II.iv. 244-45)—an inverted echo mocked by death, which has finally dethroned surrogate king and father.

The Hostess's vivid recollection of the approaching coldness of death suggests the unrelenting descriptions constantly set out by Loarte, Parsons, Bunny, and Luis de Granada as they urge one to meditate on the moment of dying with a calculatedly precise enumeration. If Shakespeare had their admonitions in mind, he has transformed the macabre and morbid into a bittersweet and humorous account worthy of Falstaff's vital comic spirit. He has detached the spiritual implications and left instead only the poignant corporeal reality, as the scene moves from meditation and remembrance to those who witness or learn of the event with limited understanding and qualified affection. As Parsons lugubriously imagines the inevitable moment:

Imagine, what the violent mortyfiinge of all the partes together will doe. For we see that first the sowle is driuen by death to leaue the extreamest partes, as the toes, feete and fyngers: then the legges and armes, and so consequentlye one parte dyeth after an other, vntill lyfe be restrained onlye to the harte, which holdeth out longest as the principall parte, but yet must finallye be constrained to render it selve.¹⁹

Not so, however, with Falstaff. His heart was fracted and corroborate and killed first.

This final creating of a character thematically and dramatically dead at the end of 2 Henry IV is thus theatrically and structurally achieved through a transformation of an ars moriendi meditation composed of the fragments of the disintegrating comic world of The Henriad. It is a memorial to a real and mythic character whose essential ambiguity remains as mysteriously allusive in dying as in living. The Shakespearean mode of dramatization is far more affective in its indirectness than any threatening exhortation of a Renaissance spiritual counselor. For us who are invited to meditate on Falstaff the loss of Falstaffian life leads to a diminution of theatrical richness. Consolation is not to be found in any recognition that Falstaff tried to die well.

In the Hostess's disjointed narrative it is possible that some in Shakespeare's audience might recall some of the popular block wood cuts of the Ars Moriendi that circulated in hundreds of editions and unknown numbers of copies throughout the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.²⁰ In the Editio Princeps an emaciated Moriens lies naked in bed with a blanket pulled up to his waist and his arms extended over it. He is variously surrounded by friends, family, servants, doctors, and nurses as well as grotesque little demons.²¹ Such an engraving precedes Luis de Granada's Wednesday night meditation on ars moriendi in Of Prayer, and Meditation. To a Renaissance audience the realistic and the symbolic, the mythic or the allegorical could co-exist in art and could perhaps be recalled in this traditional mode as a model for the moment that Shakespeare is dramatizing through narration. The Hostess is surely an attentive nurse; Boy, a loyal young servant. Bardolph would have made a good devil; he has been advised of that often enough. Possibly at the end the shrunken Falstaff might, in addition to all his other mythic and traditional roles, unwittingly adopt that of Moriens. But whereas Moriens is shown to have died well as his soul, a young child, leaves his mouth and ascends, we are left only with the Hostess's sentimental assurance of Falstaff's “finer end.”

The Hostess's lament brings only a brief truce to erstwhile companions who were at swordpoints earlier that evening. Falstaff's memory now yields to their economic self-serving calculation and suspicion even before the scene is over. By the day of Agincourt his name is forgotten. Swept up in the nationalistic fervor of war against France, this ironic band of brothers shogs off to turn a profit in a world where thievery and whoring have at least moral and mortal consequences. Nym and Bardolph are hanged by order of the King, and Nell dies disease-ridden “i' the spittle / Of a malady of France” (V.i.82-83). And there is none to mourn their passing who would argue that they died well.

Notes

1. Quotations are taken from The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. Blakemore Evans (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1974).

2. For a persuasive exploration of the parallelisms in the Henry IV plays and the two historical tetralogies, see Sherman H. Hawkins, “Henry IV: The Structural Problem Revisited,” SQ 33 (1982):278-301.

3. The work of the English Jesuit Parsons was modified by the Puritan Edmund Bunny in A Book of Christian Exercise (1584), but with his admonitions on the Christian necessity for repentance in preparation for death virtually unchanged.

4. Gaspar Loarte, The Exercise of a Christian Life, trans. James Sancer (pseudo. Stephen Brinkley), (Rheims, 1584), pp. 8-10.

5. When Caxton translated in 1490 the early fifteenth-century anonymous Latin Tractus as the Ars Moriendi, or the Crafte of Dying Well, he was making available a text that was to become immensely popular over the next two centuries. For a full discussion of the tradition of Ars Moriendi in England during the sixteenth century, see Nancy Lee Beatty, The Craft of Dying: A Study in the Literary Tradition of the ‘Ars Moriendi’ in England (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1970), chs. 2 and 4. See also Louis L. Martz, The Poetry of Meditation (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1954), pp. 135-44, and Sister Mary Catharine O'Connor, The Art of Dying Well: The Development of the Ars Moriendi (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1942).

6. Thomas Lupset, The Waye of Dyenge Well (London, 1541), fol. 11^v.

7. Morgann's Essay on the Dramatic Character of Sir John Falstaff, ed. William Arthur Gill (London, 1912), p. 184.

8. Sir James Frazer, The Golden Bough (New York: Macmillan, 1942), abridged edn., pp. 34-35. Noted in J. I. M. Stewart, Character and Motive in Shakespeare (London: Longman, Green, 1949), p. 137.

9. Philip Williams, “The Birth and Death of Falstaff Reconsidered,” SQ 8 (1957):362.

10. Robert Parsons, The First Booke of the Christian Exercise (Rouen, 1582), pp. 8, 9, 14, 25, and passim.

11. Parsons, p. 107.

12. Luis de Granada, Of Prayer, and Meditation, trans. Richard Hopkins (Paris, 1582), fol. 188^r. An English edition was published in London in 1592.

13. “Thou must understand, that they are in such wise to be meditated, as though they happed euen in that instant before thine eyes, in the selfe same place where thou art, or within thy soule: or otherwise imagining thou were in the very places where suche thinges happed, if haply this waies thou shalt feele better deuotion” (Loarte, p. 67).

14. W. H. Longridge, The Spiritual Exercises of Saint Ignatius of Loyola (London: Robert Scott, 1919), pp. 52-57.

15. The Workes of Thomas More … wrytten by him in the Englysh tonge, ed. William Rastell (London, 1557), p. 78.

16. Luis de Granada, fols. 183^v-84^r.

17. Luis de Granada, fol. 190^r.

18. Rastell, pp. 77-78.

19. Parsons, p. 102. Edmund Bunny's account (A Book of Christian Exercise, [London, 1584], p. 90) is essentially the same. Luis de Granada (fol. 184^r) is no less explicit in his urging our attention:

    Consider then also those last accidentes, and panges of the sicknes, (which be as it were messingers of death) how fearfull and terrible they be. How at that time the sicke mans breast panteth: his voyce waxeth hoarce: his feete begynnge to die: his knees to waxe colde, and stiffe: his nostrels ronne out: his eies sincke into his head: his countenace looketh pale and wanne: his tonge faultereth, and is not able to doe his office; finally by reason of the hast of the departure awaye of the sowle out of the bodie, all his senses are sore vexed, and troubled, and they doe vtterlie leese their force, and virtue.

20. O'Connor, pp. 114-71. Of nearly 300 extant copies of block books, Sister Mary Catharine saw sixty-one of the Ars Moriendi in twenty-one printings from thirteen distinct sets of blocks. The series of eleven block prints depicting Moriens's deathbed temptations were printed in England by Wynkyn de Worde in the early sixteenth century and were copied and modeled with many adaptations in costume and character until Shakespeare's day, but always, as in the Wednesday night illustration in Luis de Granada's Of Prayer, and Meditation, with Moriens at the heart of each print in each set.

21. In block cut I a demon with a long nose hooked upward leans menacingly over Moriens. In VIII there is a representation of the mouth of hell, signified by flames with three figures writhing in agony. In IX the long-nosed demon appears with another devil pointing to a cellar where a boy is stealing a jug of wine from one of four casks—memories of past pleasures now to be forsaken? In X a man extends a scroll to Moriens “Ne intendas amicis”—“Do not concern yourself with your friends,” The Ars Moriendi, ed. W. Harry Rylands (London: Wyman and Sons, 1881).