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The Spirit of Falstaff
(Reprinted from
SOBRAN’S, December 2000, page
3)
I fell
in love with Shakespeare in 1961, when I was 15. This was quite
apart from the authorship question, which I ignored until I was 40. Among
the countless books of criticism I read, A.C. Bradley’s classic
Shakespearean Tragedy and Mark Van Doren’s
Shakespeare stood out.
But the book that changed my entire
way of seeing Shakespeare was The Meaning of Shakespeare,
by Harold Clarke Goddard — to my mind the most original
commentary on Shakespeare ever written. It appeared posthumously in
1951, the rather inapt title supplied by the publisher; a better title would
have been The Spirit of Shakespeare. Goddard would have
resisted the suggestion that Shakespeare can be captured by any single
“meaning.”
Goddard writes of Shakespeare with
an unabashed love bordering on adoration. He was a Quaker who taught at
Bryn Mawr, and his tone is that of a wise and affectionate teacher who
would rather impart his enthusiasm than impose his ideas; he is fond of
quoting William Blake’s saying that “enthusiastic admiration
is the first principle of knowledge, and the last.” He never sounds
academic.
![[Breaker quote: Harold
Goddard, the incomparable Shakespeare commentator]](images/falstaff1.gif)
I didn’t like Goddard at first; in
fact he enraged me. I began with his chapter on Hamlet, in
which he rejects the general assumption that Hamlet is duty-bound to
avenge his father’s murder. This struck me as perversely wrong.
Nevertheless, as I read on I gradually saw that Goddard was right.
Hamlet’s descent into the cycle of violence, driven by a false
conscience which his father’s spirit encourages, results not in
justice but in chaos and destruction. He, his mother, and several others,
including the innocent Ophelia, die along with his murderous uncle, and
Denmark falls under the sway of a foreign power, Norway: that is the price
of revenge.
In Goddard’s view, Hamlet
exemplifies a recurrent pattern in Shakespeare. In play after play, the
hero is torn between Force (the male, atavistic, and often paternal
influence) and Imagination (the feminine principle). Romeo, the tender
lover, is drawn into an ancestral feud that destroys him and Juliet; noble
Brutus tries to defeat tyranny by force, only to produce an even worse
tyranny; Hamlet’s revenge mission results in the ruin of Denmark;
Richard III and Macbeth resort to murder, issuing in wars that consume
them; King Lear tries to impose his will on his children, plunging England
into madness; Coriolanus comes to a tragic end because, under the
influence of his domineering mother, he sacrifices his natural feelings to
military power and patrician intransigence, until even she begs him to
relent. In the comedies, on the other hand, the feminine principle wins out
in the end; anger and enmity (or even the “merry war”
between the sexes) yield to the creative spirit: mercy, peace, and
reconciliation, included in and symbolized by marriage.
But Goddard’s pinnacle may be
his interpretation of the Henry V cycle, beginning with Richard
II. He challenges the prevalent notion that Henry V is
Shakespeare’s ideal king. Instead, he sees the cycle as subtly
debunking a national hero.
In the traditional legend of Henry V,
Henry — as Prince Hal — led a wild youth until his
father’s death, then underwent a sudden reformation, banishing his
lowlife companions and rising to military heroism. And this is the way the
Henry V cycle is usually described: Shakespeare takes the legend at face
value, most critics agree, and Hal has no choice but to reject Falstaff and
the rest.
But according to Goddard, Hal must
choose between the principle of Force represented by his father, Henry IV,
who has deposed Richard II, and the principle of Imagination, represented
by Falstaff. Hal’s cold-blooded rejection of Falstaff proves that he
is too much his father’s son, and the ghost of Falstaff hovers over
Henry V as the “mirror of all Christian kings”
cynically invades and conquers France, using threats of mass rape and
massacre to induce surrender. He warns the city of Harfleur that it will
see its naked infants impaled on his soldiers’ spears if it resists.
(The action scenes in Laurence Olivier’s film of the play, made to
boost British morale during World War II, show Henry fighting righteously
and valiantly; in the play itself, we never see Henry fighting at all, and
Olivier had to cut several passages portraying his ruthless brutality in
order to sustain his heroic aura.)
Goddard supports his interpretation
with a close reading of the text. But beyond that, he sees Falstaff as close
to the essence of Shakespeare, not in his vices (which Goddard agrees are
real and indefensible), but in his ability to transcend “the tyranny
of things as they are. Falstaff is immortal because he is a symbol of the
supremacy of the imagination over fact. He forecasts man’s final
victory over Fate itself. Facts stand in our way. Facts melt before Falstaff
like ice before a summer sun — dissolve in the aqua regia of
his resourcefulness and wit. He realizes the age-old dream of all men: to
awaken in the morning and to know that no master, no employer, no bodily
need or sense of duty calls, no fear or obstacle stands in the way —
only a fresh beckoning day that is wholly ours.”
But “freedom is only the
negative side of Falstaff. Possessing it, he perpetually does something
creative with it. It is not enough for him to be the sworn enemy of facts.
Any lazy man or fool is that. He is the sworn enemy of the factual spirit
itself, of whatever is dull, inert, banal. Facts merely exist — and so
do most men. Falstaff lives. And where he is, life becomes bright, active,
enthralling.”
On the other hand, “the
Immortal Falstaff” is undermined by “the Immoral
Falstaff,” and in the end he gives Hal plenty of color for rejecting
and denouncing him. All the same, it’s a terrible pity, even a
tragedy for both men, that Henry and Falstaff come to such a parting of
the ways.
This is not the usual language of
literary criticism. Goddard is frankly concerned with what Shakespeare
has to say about human life and the spirit, and he refuses to treat the
plays as closed texts. He sees them as illuminating each other, showing
how Shakespeare’s insight deepens from one work to the next. For
all their wonderful variety and pageantry, they also have a collective
integrity, an inner unity of purpose. “His plays and poems deserve to
be considered integrally, as chapters, so to speak, of a single work.”
While Shakespeare the Playwright achieves wonderful dramatic effects,
Shakespeare the Poet complicates or even contradicts the plays’
ostensible meanings with hidden ironies.
Falstaff at his best is the very spirit
of Shakespeare, marvelously free and creative. All the greatest
Shakespearean characters — Hamlet, Cleopatra, Rosalind, even the
repentant Lear — have something of the old knight’s ability to
transmute a situation through the power of imagination. At their peak
moments, they refuse to be defeated by mere fact. They are united by their
“refusal to value life in terms of anything but life itself”:
they never measure life by worldly standards.
![[Breaker
quote: Shakespeare dramatizes the struggle between Force and
Imagination.]](images/falstaff2.gif) Goddard audaciously suggests that
Lear dies in joy at seeing that the dead Cordelia is truly alive after all,
despite what a literal reading of the text may seem to say; and in dying,
he joins her in eternal life. Whether such a proposition can be
“proved” is irrelevant to Goddard; he insists that every
reading of the plays involves a meeting between Shakespeare’s
imagination and the reader’s. There is no single inherent meaning
apart from what we make of the plays, provided we read them with full
attention. They mirror our own spirits. The more we put into them, the
more we get out of them. For Goddard this is true of all poetry, not just
Shakespeare. He delights in quoting, with full sympathy, the naive
reactions of his own students. He thinks they can tell us more about
Shakespeare than the sophisticated judgments of sober scholars who
abstain from offering opinions about life outside the plays.
For Goddard, poetry is a kind of
prophecy, and Shakespeare is among the supreme oracles of literature. He
sees not only Shakespeare’s works but all literary works and
spiritual writings as commenting on each other; he appeals to the Bible,
the Upanishads, Blake, Goethe, Emerson, Thoreau, Dostoyevsky, Samuel
Butler, and William James, to name a few.
This makes his style of commentary
embarrassing to most academic scholars. But it gives his book urgency,
and he captures something vital in the perennial appeal of Shakespeare. We
don’t read Shakespeare merely to learn about Elizabethan life; we
read him because he shows us life itself. Goddard acknowledges that we
should understand the historical context of the plays, but he denies that
that context explains those plays. Rather, it is like the soil in which a
flower grows: “The secret of why the germinating seed selects
certain ingredients of the soil, while utterly ignoring others, lies in the
seed, not in the soil.”
Even Shakespeare, if we could
interview him, wouldn’t have the last word on what his plays
“mean.” Once they exist, their meaning is up to us. In this
sense, Goddard resembles the recent deconstructionists, though he has
none of their nihilism. For him the impossibility of a final, definitive
“meaning” is reason for hope, not despair. “For my
part,” he says, “I believe we are nearer the beginning than the
end of our understanding of Shakespeare’s genius.”
Nobody has explained
Shakespeare’s power to enhance life better than Goddard. Everyone
praises Shakespeare; a few critics deepen one’s understanding of
him. But only Goddard leaves the reader feeling that Shakespeare is even
greater than anyone has realized.
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