The Dyers Hand and Other Essays

If it really was Queen Elizabeth who demanded to see Falstaff in a comedy, then she showed herself a very perceptive critic. But even in The Merry Wives of Windsor, Falstaff has not and could not have found his true home because Shake­speare was only a poet. For that he was to wait nearly two hundred years till Verdi wrote his last opera. Falstaff is not the only case of a character whose true home is the world of music; others are Tristan, Isolde, and Don Giovanni.¹

Though they each call for a different kind of music, Tristan, Don Giovanni, and Falstaff have certain traits in common. They do not belong to the temporal world of change. One cannot imagine any of them as babies, for a Tristan who is not in love, a Don Giovanni who has no name on his list, a

¹ If Verdi's Macbetto

fails to come off, the main reason is that the proper world for Macbeth is poetry, not song; he won't go into notes.

Falstaff who is not old and fat, are inconceivable. When Fal- staff says, "When I was about their years, Hal, I was not an eagle's talent in the waist; I could have crept into an alder­man's thumb-ring"—we take it as a typical Falstaffian fib, but we believe him when he says, "I was born about three in the afternoon, with a white head and something of a round belly."

Time, for Tristan, is a single moment stretched out tighter and tighter until it snaps. Time, for Don Giovanni, is an infinite arithmetical series of unrelated moments which has no beginning and would have no end if Heaven did not inter­vene and cut it short. For Falstaff, time does not exist, since he belongs to the opera huff a world of play and mock action governed not by will or desire, but by innocent wish, a world where no one can suffer because everything he says and does is only a pretense.

Thus, while we must see Tristan die in Isolde's arms and we must see Don Giovanni sink into the earth, because being doomed to die and to go to hell are essential to their beings, we cannot see Falstaff die on stage because, if we did, we should not believe it; we should know that, as at the battle of Shrewsbury, he was only shamming. I am not even quite sure that we believe it when we are told of his death in Henry V; I think we accept it, as we accept the death of Sherlock Holmes, as his creator's way of saying, "I am getting tired of this character"; we feel sure that, if the public pleads with him strongly enough, Shakespeare will find some way to bring him to life again. The only kind of funeral music we can associate with him is the mock-requiem in the last act of Verdi's opera.

Domine fallo casto

Ma salvaggi I'addomine

Domine fallo guasto.

Ma salvaggi I'addomine.

There are at least two places in the play where the in­congruity of the opera huffa world with the historical world is too much, even for Shakespeare, and a patendy false note is struck. The first occurs when, on the battlefield of Shrews­bury, Falstaff thrusts his sword into Hotspur's corpse. Within his own world, Falstaff could stab a corpse because, there, all battles are mock batdes, all corpses straw dummies; but we, the audience, are too conscious that this battle has been a real batde and that this corpse is the real dead body of a brave and noble young man. Pistol could do it, because Pistol is a contemptible character, but Falstaff cannot; that is to say, there is no way in which an actor can play the scene con­vincingly. So, too, with the surrender of Colevile to Falstaff in the Second Part. In his conversation, first with Colevile and then with Prince John, Falstaff talks exacdy as we expect —to him, the whole business is a huge joke. But then he is present during a scene when we are shown that it is no joke at all. How is any actor to behave and speak his lines during the following?

Lancaster—Is thy name Colevile?

colevile—It is, my lord.

Lancaster—A famous rebel art thou, Colevile.

falstaff

—And a famous true subject took him.

colevile—I am, my lord, but as my betters are,

That led me hither. Had they been ruled by me, You would have won them dearer than you have.

falstaff—I know not how they sold themselves: but thou, like a kind fellow, gavest thyself away gratis; and I thank thee for thee.

Lancaster—Now have you left pursuit?

Westmoreland—Retreat is made and execution stay'd.

Lancaster—Send Colevile, with his confederates, To York, to present execution.

The Falstaffian frivolity and the headsman's axe cannot so direcdy confront each other.