FALSTAFF: Sir John Falstaff’s story is also shaped by his role as a sidekick to Prince Hal, and in his case his death is not even a precursor of a larger tragedy but in fact a precursor of Hal’s triumph. Falstaff shares many other characteristics with Mercutio–and manages to steal Hal’s fire even more often than Mercutio stole Romeo’s–but adds to them a greater sense of a life lived for the purpose of living, of the satisfaction of the body serving to satisfy the soul. Shakespeare does not present him as a man without a soul, and does not condemn him as Hal and his ministers do; his excesses of the flesh come from his decision to live with gusto. Especially in the second part of Henry IV, he is an old man who wants to enjoy himself and to cheat death for as long as he can. He lives against death; upon Bardolph’s reminder that “you are so fretful you cannot live long” (1H4 III.iii.11), he agrees but quickly turns his attention to bawdy songs, merrymaking, and jests about his earlier life of “virtue,” in which he “went to a bawdy-house not above once in a quarter–of an hour” (1H4 III.iii.15-6). He denies that he is a sinner on the grounds that “If to be old and merry be a sin, then many an old host that I know is damned: if to be fat be to be hated, then Pharaoh’s lean kine are to be loved” (1H4 II.iv.465-8). Not just his vitality, but also his quick wit and his love for Hal give the lie to the Prince’s insinuations that he is merely a lump of fat and bad wine. Their relationship starts off jokingly and only slightly more antagonistic than Romeo and Mercutio’s; just as Romeo, without malice, describes his friend as “A gentleman… that loves to hear himself talk and will speak more in a minute than he will stand to in a month” (II.iv.149-51), so Hal disparages Falstaff as “so fat-witted… that thou hast forgotten to demand that truly which thou wouldst truly know” (1H4 I.ii.2-5) without the audience hearing any real discord. Falstaff responds to Hal’s barbs in Mercutio’s fashion, with his cascades of words, and does Mercutio one better by mixing in classical, Biblical, and canting references to create a wryly grandiloquent manner of speaking. He also gets his own digs in at Hal, saying that “grace thou wilt have none… not so much as will serve to be prologue to an egg and butter” (1H4 I.ii.18-21) and overturning the conventions of his morality-play forebears by proclaiming that Hal is “indeed able to corrupt a saint” and has “done much harm upon me… God forgive thee for it” (1H4 I.ii.88-90). In fact, both Falstaff and Hal subvert the morality-play framework; Vice is not nearly so vicious, nor Virtue so virtuous, as we might expect. Falstaff claims that “Company, villainous company, hath been the spoil of me” (1H4 III.iii.9-10), turning the “youth is corrupted by aged sin, and at last repents” storyline on its head.

As the representative of the un-heroic, anti-abstract faith, Falstaff provides not only a lusty vitality but also a running commentary on heroes, ideals, and politics which is far more subtle and sophisticated than the earlier malcontent archetype could have presented. Just as he undermines the conventions of the morality play with his wit and his good-hearted loyalty, he also undermines the conventions of the morality play with his wit and his good-hearted loyalty, he also undermines the conventions of the history play, in which the main purpose is the glorification of the state. While Hal, once he becomes Henry V, is given all the reverent, mythologizing treatment befitting a king and a leader in war, throughout the first two plays Falstaff has been there to deflate all the grand ideals of national honor and royal greatness. He has no respect for Prince Henry, saying, “By the Lord, I’ll be a traitor then, when thou art king” (1H4 I.ii.141); his love is for Hal the man, not the crown that man will wear. To him, the next king of England is “the most comparative rascalliest sweet young prince” (1H4 I.ii.78-9), well-loved but not revered. He pokes fun at the idea that kings are any better than his band of thieves: “There’s neither honesty, manhood, nor good fellowship in three, nor thou cam’st not of the blood royal, if thou darest not stand for ten shillings” (1H4 I.ii.135-7). In this terrific overturning sentence, Hal’s willingness to rob is a proof of his royalty. Falstaff shows similar irreverence toward every pillar of a stable society; he talks of “the rusty curb of old father Antic the law” (1H4 I.ii.59), and even in a solemn conference of war he is irrepressible, responding to Worcester’s “I have not sought the day of this dislike” with his own “Rebellion lay in his way, and he found it” (1H4 V.i.26, 28). Falstaff has a well-developed morality of his own, one in which pleasure is valued higher than battlefield honor. When it comes to taking action, “I were better to be eaten to death with a rust than to be scoured to nothing with perpetual motion” (2H4 I.ii.219-21). His view of Hal’s pursuit of glory is summed up in the line, “I would ’twere bed-time, Hal, and all well” (1H4 V.i.125). For honor he can say only,

Can honour set to a leg? No. Or an arm? No. Or take away the grief of a wound? No. Honour hath no skill in surgery then? No. What is honour? A word. …What is that word honour? Air. …Who hath it? He that died a-Wednesday. Doth he feel it? No. Doth he hear it? No. …Therefore I’ll none of it. Honour is a mere scutcheon–and so ends my catechism. (1H4 V.ii.131-41)

In all Henry V’s fiery words about honor, victory, and the glory of England, there is nothing which can answer this speech.

Hal’s rejection of Falstaff, which was in the workings from their first scene together, overshadows the play and turns Sir John’s story into what would be a tragedy, if only the lusty knight were the hero. Hal sees his time with Falstaff as an exhilarating sojourn in Vice, like a trip to a foreign country, and he is preparing for his return home all the time that he is there. From the first, his verbal thrusts at Falstaff are far more threatening than anything he receives in return; her talks of “the ridge of the gallows” (1H4 I.ii.38), the buff jerkin of the constable which is “a most sweet robe of durance” (1H4 I.ii.42) and the “suits” obtained by the hangman from felons, all in his first scene with Falstaff. Falstaff knows that his own position is tenuous in a way that Hal’s never will be; he has good reason to say, “as thou art prince, I fear thee as I fear the roaring of the lion’s whelp” (1H4 III.iii.145-6). Hal readily acknowledges this difference: “I am good friends with my father and may do anything” (1H4 III.iii.180). When Hal has Falstaff play at being the rebellious prince, while he pretends to be his own father the King, no one pays attention to his promise to banish Falstaff, set out so plainly–“I do, I will” (1H4 II.iv.475)–as to be unbelievable; yet it comes to pass, because Hal wills it. By the second part of Henry IV, Falstaff’s powers are failing him in Hal’s absence; the Lord Chief Justice gives his wits more trouble than he expected, and Doll Tearsheet talks as if he is soon to die and must “patch up [his] old body for heaven” (2H4 II.iv.229-30). When at last the rejection comes, it is public and cruel, with Hal naming Falstaff “that vain man” (2H4 V.v.43) and banishing him, “Not to come near our person by ten mile” (2H4 V.v.65). Although Hal provides Falstaff with money and a chance at reinstatement if he “reform” (which is unimaginable), it is the banishment which breaks Sir John’s heart; the thieves may have joked about hanging, but the upright King Henry V proved to be Falstaff’s gallows in the end. Henry goes on to become his old companion’s opposite; when Henry V opens, Canterbury remarks that “Consideration like an angel came/And whipped th’offending Adam out of him,/Leaving his body as a paradise” (I.i.28-30)–nothing could be further from old Falstaff, who indulged his body but never attempted to purify it. Hal’s reformation, which required the rejection of Falstaff, “killed his heart” (II.i.79), leaving it “fracted and corroborate” (II.i.112), and causing his death. Henry goes on to win glory and a wife in his war with France, but the figure which provided the heart of the two earlier plays has gone. In Henry IV, part 1 Falstaff warned Hal, “Banish plump Jack, and you banish all the world” (II.iv.473-4); what the Prince banished when he became King was in fact a way of seeing the world which Shakespeare brought to prominence and which Falstaff embodied, the viewpoint of the tragic sidekick.