[In the following excerpt, Kaiser analyzes Falstaff's position as the "wise fool" of the Henriad.]

"But Falstaff, unimitated, unimitable Falstaff, how shall I describe thee?" The frustration of Samuel Johnson's question has been shared by all who have ever tried to encompass the fat old fool. Embodying nothing less than nature itself, he is so enormous that, as Empson has said, "it is hard to get one's mind all round him."¹ Because he actually is, in a certain sense, "all the world," he contains within himself so much that one can never take account of it all, and most attempts to map out this globe of sinful continents have tended to display the partial and falsified perspective of medieval cartography. Yet the very nature of the fool is such that it could hardly be otherwise. Even Stultitia, who knew more about fools than anyone, could not describe herself, because her influence was so vast and her nature so comprehensive (ME 5-6). Falstaff contains all the contradictions of folly, and just as nature includes both summer and winter, good and bad, Falstaff the Martlemas cannot be said to be either wholly good or wholly bad. If, as Empson claims, one's feelings of distaste for all the false sentiment about Falstaff "should not send one in headlong flight to the opposite extreme," at the same time one must confess that "it is hard to defend this strange figure without doing it too much."² In compensation for the affinity he felt with the fat old man, Johnson himself was, in the end, probably too morally censorious of him. But he came perhaps as close as one can to describing Sir John when he addressed him as "thou compound of sense and vice; of sense which may be admired but not esteemed, of vice which may be despised, but hardly detested."³

In calling Falstaff a compound of sense and vice, Johnson points directly at the oxymoronic nature of the wise fool. As an isolated figure, Falstaff is as filled with contradictions as Stultitia: he acts like a young man though he is old, he talks like a Puritan though he is an Epicurean, he teaches by misleading, he pays by borrowing, he counterfeits in order not to counterfeit, he claims that vices are virtues. One could pile up such self-contradictions endlessly, but these are simple in comparison with the complexities he engenders whenever he is in the presence of someone else; for then our point of perspective is not merely dual, but multiple. The dramatic form in which Falstaff is presented multiplies the complexities even more than the mock-encomiastic form in which Stultitia was presented. And while it is easy for Falstaff to pretend he is resolving all the confusion by mendaciously asking "Is not the truth the truth?" the rest of us come to despair of ever knowing what the truth is.

As perhaps only Prince Hal is meant to see, the truth somehow comprehends all the different points of view that the drama presents. But Falstaff, in his own way, comes close to an understanding of this also. At least, he is the only other person in the drama who is able to understand a point of view opposite to his own; it is because he understands it so well that he realizes he must oppose it so strongly. Another way of looking at this capacity of his is to perceive that he could not operate so successfully as a liar if he did not know what the truth is. He demonstrates this clearly when he boasts that he is not only witty in himself, but the cause that wit is in other men. Boast though it is, it is also the truth, and it is a truth of greater dimensions than either of those facts alone. That he can say he is the butt of wit as well as the source of wit reveals that he is able to see himself as others see him. Despite all the bombastic, conceited, stultiloquent smokescreens that he puts out to conceal it (smokescreens which, at times, confuse even him), he knows very well that he is a fool—that, as Dryden put it, he is "a liar, and a coward, a glutton, and a buffoon."⁴

The ability to see the same fact from his and from the opposite point of view is the capacity of the ironic man, and in this Falstaff represents one of the great flowerings of that Socratic irony which Stultitia replanted in the soil of European literature. But if he is what Cicero called Socrates, an eirôn,⁵ he is also what Aristophanes called Socrates, an alazôn.⁶ When Falstaff admits that he is the butt of other men's wit, he is wearing the mask of the eirôn; when he boasts that he is the source of wit in himself, he is wearing the mask of the alazôn. The distinction between the two is most clearly set forth in the Nicomachean Ethics in the course of Aristotle's discussion of the mean to which I have already referred in connection with honor. The passage in which he discusses the characteristics of the eirôn and the alazôn is, however, even more illuminating for the character of Falstaff and must be quoted:

There are also other means, which, though similar to each other, yet are different one from another. They are all connected with intercourse in words and deeds, but they differ in that one is concerned with truth in this intercourse and the others with its pleasure. Of these latter two, one is concerned with giving pleasure in all circumstances of life . . . With regard to truth, the moderate man is a truthful person (alêthes) and the mean is truthfulness: pretense, which exaggerates, is boastfulness and he who has pretenses is a boaster (alazôn); understatement is false modesty and he who understates is falsely modest (eirôn). With regard to pleasure in amusement, the moderate man is witty (eutrapelos) and the condition wit: excess is buffoonery and he who exceeds a buffoon (bômolochos); he who is defective is a boor (agroikos) and the condition boorishness. With regard to the other pleasure, that in the affairs of life, he who is properly pleasant is a friend (philos) and the moderation is friendship: he who exceeds is (if he has no ulterior motive) obsequious (areskos) or (if he is looking for gain) a flatterer (kolax); he who is defective and unpleasant in every circumstance is contentious (dyseris) and surly (dyskolos). . . . ⁷

[The] application of this Aristotelian schematization to Falstaff can help us to understand some of his paradoxical complexity and may indeed even help us to make his defeat more comprehensible. For once we perceive that Falstaff plays the alazôn as well as the eirôn, we can better understand, it seems to me, not only his personality but also the role he plays in this cycle of history plays. Whatever the old fool is, he is never the man of mean. That role is reserved for Hal to play when he becomes Henry V; and one way of looking at the story of the reign of Henry IV is to see it as a kind of Bildungsspiel—an account of a prince's education. Hal's ultimate role, like that of Spenser's Prince Arthur, is to personify Aristotle's magnanimous man, and that goal is reached by way of the middle road upon which he is able to set out only after he has defeated Hotspur in Part One and Falstaff in Part Two.

While Hotspur himself may be seen as a kind of alazôn, it is really the old lad of the castle who usurps this role. When Falstaff gives his speech on honor, when he admits to being old and white-bearded, when he concedes that he is the butt of other men's jokes, he is the eirôn. At most other times, however, he is the alazôn; for generally we hear him boasting of his prowess in love and war, his friendship with the prince, his courage and virtue. We think of him more often as the buffoon than as the boor. The point is that he incorporates within himself both extremes, and the complexity of his character arises from just this fact. What is more, he confuses things even further because, in a certain sense, he plays his roles in the wrong places. From one point of view at least, the alazôn, the man who claims to be more than he is, may be thought properly to belong to the heroics of the battlefield; the eirôn, the man who claims to be less than he is, would belong to the antics of the tavern world. Yet Falstaff reverses this. It is in the tavern world that he plays the alazôn, "the man of war" (2:V.i.31), boasting that he is more than he actually is. It is in the world of battle that he plays the eirôn, pretending that he is less than he is, even to the extent of pretending that he is dead.

The way of excess is the winding mountain path to the battlefield of tragedy; the way of defect is the crooked back-alley to the tavern of comedy; the middle road is the Camino Real of history. Although history may lead to either comedy or tragedy, the moment of comedy and the moment of tragedy are essentially timeless and outside history. Since time, as we have seen, is the fool's mortal enemy, he can play a role in either of those timeless moments, that of comedy (like Feste) or that of tragedy (like Lear's fool), but he cannot survive in the time of history. Time and history destroyed the comic moment of Yorick's gibes and gambols, but when the moment of tragedy comes he has a role to play once more. Thus Falstaff can be the eirôn and mock at honor and death on the battlefield of tragedy, and he can also be the alazôn and boast of courage and youth in the tavern of comedy. The prince, on the other hand, though he is challenged onto the battlefield by Hotspur and misled into the tavern by Falstaff, has his destiny on the broad King's Highway that leads between them, and, when he finally passes down this highway, the fool must stand rejected at the side.

That highway is, as Aristotle says, the place of truth. Since eirôn and alazôn stand on either side, and since Falstaff plays both, in him we look on truth from both sides. And this is where the greatest complexity of his character lies. By spanning the distance between defect and excess, he also manages to take in the mean. Were he simply on one side or the other, the mean would be external to him; but since he is constantly moving from one extreme to the other, the implication is that he is constantly passing through the condition of the mean, the location of truth. To be sure, he does not stop there (for to stay would be suicide), but he does pass through. In an inexplicable, paradoxical sense that such imagery may or may not help to understand, he comprehends the truth of the mean within his advocacy of the two extremes. And just as he may be looked upon as the most faithful friend (philos) and the wittiest man (eutrapelos) in the play, so he may also be said to be in possession of truth (alêthes)—perhaps even of the greatest truth. Not only does he possess the truth that he is a fool, but also, with his synoptic, comprehensive view of all three conditions of defect, mean, and excess, he possesses the Stultitian truth that folly is truth.

Yet history—the middle road, the moderate position, Henry V—defeats him in the end, rejecting the Stultitian truth he stands for. It was preordained that it should, for otherwise Falstaff would have defeated history. He is, as a recent critic has said, "the fool of the history plays. He steps out of the way of English history, an intruder who announces himself in the face of the commonwealth; and in Falstaff the idea of order meets its most dangerous fact."⁸ He had warned that to ban-ish him would be to banish all the world. That is not strictly true, for the world of Henry V goes on. Yet it is true that in order to banish him the world has had to narrow its scope; it has had to shrink, as it were, to fill up the large void the corpulent fool leaves behind. It has had to forego that breadth which can include the opposite extremes of excess and defect and that expansiveness which gives Lebensraum to the laughter of irony. As the fool goes off, he takes part, if not all, of the world with him; and Falstaff is entitled to say with Donne, "since you would have none of mee, I bury some of you."⁹

Though we understand why he must be banished, rare is the man who has not been bothered by the rejection of Falstaff. It is easy to dismiss the distress of Bradley and others as maudlin sentimentality; yet it is, I think, much harder to accept the moral justification of the expulsion provided by Johnson. Moreover, that Johnson felt obliged to give a justification and that so many others have indulged in sentimentality betray the more important fact that somehow the rejection does fail to come off properly. Tragic though it is, no one "objects" to the death of Hamlet, and even the shock of Cordelia's death, which Johnson found hardest to bear, has not occasioned nearly so much discountent as this rejection of the fool. Explain it though we may, if we are really honest with ourselves, I think we must admit that we never feel quite right about it. Falstaff has presented his case too strongly to be put down quite so simply. The fool, as he always will if given half a chance, has run away with us.

C. L. Barber has given a valuable explanation of why, though the rejection is morally justified, it is not dramatically cogent, and his comments on this are as valuable as anything that has been written about the end of Henry IV. His examination of the problem begins with an analysis of the historical situation that is particularly germane to this study:

But Falstaff proves extremely difficult to bring to book—more difficult than an ordinary mummery king—because his burlesque and mockery are developed to a point where the mood of a moment crystallizes as a settled attitude of scepticism. As we have observed before, in a static, monolithic society, a Lord of Misrule can be put back in his place after the revel with relative ease. The festive burlesque of solemn sanctities does not seriously threaten social values in a monolithic culture, because the license depends utterly upon what it mocks: liberty is unable to envisage any alternative to the accepted order except the standing of it on its head. But Shakespeare's culture was not monolithic: though its moralists assumed a single order, scepticism was beginning to have ground to stand on and look about—especially in and around London. So a Lord of Misrule figure, brought up, so to speak, from the country to the city, or from the traditional past into the changing present, could become on the Bankside the mouthpiece not merely for the dependent holiday scepticism which is endemic in a traditional sociey, but also for a dangerously self-sufficient everyday scepticism. When such a figure is set in an environment of sober-blooded great men behaving as opportunistically as he, the effect is to raise radical questions about social sanctities. At the end of Part Two, the expulsion of Falstaff is presented by the dramatist as getting rid of this threat; Shakespeare has recourse to a primitive procedure to meet a modern challenge. We shall find reason to question whether this use of ritual entirely succeeds.¹⁰

Surely this is the case. An increasingly skeptical cen-tury must have found a voice in Falstaff as it had in the two earlier fools; in such remarks as his speech on honor he must have given formulation to the doubts of many who had lived through a century of war. And yet the final appeal of Falstaff involves more than his articulation of doubt. What Barber calls his settled attitude of skepticism does not actually end there. Like the skepticism of Stultitia and Pantagruel, his does not come to rest in the despair of pyrrhonism, but rather it manages to lead beyond that doubt to optimism, which is, as Empson puts it, "a greater trust in the natural man [and] pleasure in contemplating him."¹¹ Hamlet will be left holding the empty skull of Yorick to symbolize all his disillusionment, but Falstaff goes off displaying his great belly as a symbol of the virtues of the little kingdom of natural man. That is his answer to doubt.

If he left us in doubt, we could accept his rejection; it is because he expresses such a positive answer that we find it so intolerable. Unquestionably, Shakespeare invented him in order to create doubt, and the answer to that doubt was to be Henry V; but Falstaff got out of control, so to speak, and answered his own doubt. Fools, if we are not careful, always do. By their very nature, their tendency is to exceed the roles we assign to them, and because we suffer fools gladly we let them take us where we are not supposed to go. The problem can perhaps be seen most clearly as a technical one, and in this Stultitia once again helps to explain Falstaff. Both Erasmus and Shakespeare start out with the intention of attacking the accepted values of society—what Erasmus calls sapientia mundana. In order to depose these idols, they ironically praise the accepted vices of society—stultitia. The two are expected to destroy each other, leaving (as we know from the Enchiridion and the portrait of Henry V) the field free for the triumph of the reasonable man—homo rationalis. Now when you have folly challenge worldly wisdom, the advantages, to begin with, are all on the side of worldly wisdom; for that is what the world accepts as its values. Therefore, in order to make the combat equal (and it must be exactly equal, so that the two opponents will destroy each other), you must give folly all the ammunition you can. Since, that is, the spectators start out having all their sympathies with worldly wisdom, the author must do everything possible to transfer some of those sympathies to folly.

The problem, of course, is that the fool enlists too much of our sympathy. His gaiety and license are so appealing that we cannot keep ourselves from falling in with him completely. In terms of the sympathies of the spectators, it is as easy for the author to kill off the wordly wise as it is for him to kill off Hotspur; but the fool has a frustrating habit of staying alive, even when you think he has died. At the end of Part One the rational man stands triumphant over Hotspur and Falstaff, and everything has worked out as it should: reason has triumphed over both folly and the false wisdom of the world. But then the fool gets up and takes over again. Erasmus wanted to leave us with a picture of a man reasonable in worldly things and a Fool in Christ. In order to exalt the reasonable man, he had to destroy the man "wise" in earthly things, and he created the fool to destroy him. But the arguments he gives to the foolish man are so compelling that we forget about the reasonable man. Once we are made to see things from the perspective of the fool, the reasonable man bears much too close a resemblance to the wise man. Shakespeare is able to force the triumph of the reasonable man, in a way that Erasmus without the drama at his disposal could not, by having him visually crowned at the end. The audience follows his progress to the palace, but too many of its sympathies stay behind with the rejected fool. Only Rabelais seems to have managed to control the situation as he wanted to. His fool, Panurge, creates exactly the proper doubt to knock down the idols of the "wise." Yet Panurge is as much the victim of the wise as they are his: the result is the defeat of both parties. For though Panurge is made powerful enough to demonstrate that the answers of the wise are wrong, he is not powerful enough to get an answer himself. At this point, the rational man, who is also the Fool in Christ, triumphs over both fool and wise in the character of Pantagruel.

We accept Pantagruel's triumph over Panurge in a way that we never do Hal's over Falstaff. We know that Falstaff must go, for he is far in the devil's book. We also know that "the King is a good king." And yet we are obliged to add, with Nym, "but it must be as it may; he passes some humours and careers" (Henry V, II.i.125-6). It is Falstaff who has won our hearts, and we wish, with Queen Elizabeth, to have the old fool back again.

Notes

¹ Empson, "Falstaff and Mr. Dover Wilson," p. 221.

² Empson, "Falstaff," pp. 221, 256.

³Johnson on Shakespeare, ed. Raleigh, p. 125.

⁴ John Dryden, "Preface to Troilus and Cressida: or, Truth Found Too Late, A Tragedy," in The Works of John Dryden, ed. Sir Walter Scott and George Saintsbury, VI (Edinburgh, 1883), 269.

⁵ Cicero, >De officiis, I.xxx.109.

⁶ Aristophanes, Nubes, 102.

⁷ Aristotle, Ethica Nicomachea, 1108a.

⁸ Geoffrey Bush, Shakespeare and the Natural Condition (Cambridge, Mass., 1956), p. 31.

⁹ John Donne, "The Funerali."

¹⁰ Barber, Shakespeare's Festive Comedy, pp. 213-4.

¹¹ Empson, "Falstaff," p. 245.