In 1777, Maurice Morgann published an essay on the character of Sir John Falstaff, arguing “that courage is a part of Falstaff’s character, that it belonged to his constitution, and was manifest in the conduct and practice of his whole life” (Essay 28). To make his case, Morgann sets about imagining for Falstaff a life outside the scope of the play, suggesting, for instance, how he may have fallen into dissolution after years of being encouraged to display his wit, leaning in to a reputation for licentiousness. As for the “general Opinion” that Falstaff is “an absolute coward” (Preface 1, 2): Morgann blames this on “the idle tricks of the player, who practices on this occasion all the attitudes and wild apprehensions of fear; more ambitious, it should seem, of representing a Caliban than a Falstaff; or indeed rather a poor unwieldy tortoise, than either” (Essay 24–25).
Morgann is often cited as an early practitioner of character criticism, or of what Deidre Lynch has called “character appreciation”—in which “the truth of a character” is assumed to reside “somewhere other than in the visible marks by which characters are signified,” and the intuitive reader must piece that self together (133).Footnote 1 It is a mode of reading tied to the development of the novel, and certainly Morgann’s contempt for the “painful Comedian” seems to privilege a Falstaff encountered in print rather than in performance (Essay 25). His stage Falstaff is a monstrous amalgam—part Falstaff, part actor, part Caliban, part tortoise—while the Falstaff of his imagination is “an extraordinary paradox,” complex but beautifully integrated.Footnote 2 And yet, his apparent antitheatricalism aside, I think it is worth taking seriously what Morgann has to say here about the theater, particularly with regard to the creation of its characters. For all Morgann’s evident frustration with what theater does to plays—the introduction of all that theatrical white noise he calls “mummery”—he shows a genuinely sophisticated sense of how it does it (25). Morgann’s Falstaff in performance is a distinctly hybrid creature, formed out of the interplay not just between an actor and his audience but between that player and any number of other performers who have played or are playing this particular part, and, finally, between any number of other parts he may have played or that his performance might lead the audience to recall.Footnote 3 Falstaff’s character is produced and made sense of through an accumulation of references both textual and embodied, through the interplay of a whole system of signs and recollections shared between player and playgoer, and through the manipulation of material objects that might in turn be infused with other, even wayward, significance.Footnote 4
It is the process of this hybrid creature’s cultivation across different media that is the focus of my essay. By media I mean not just print, for which the term is often taken as a synonym, but also performance, including all the various elements out of which it is built: scripted and nonscripted speech and movement as well as song, dance, noise, and even silence.Footnote 5 It is an approach that requires rethinking the term media itself, as a number of scholars have recently done, so that it is used to refer not just to the various forms or technologies through which information is encoded or recorded for transmission but to all of the material (and nonmaterial) elements through which meaning is produced.Footnote 6 It is the interaction of these media, their mutual influence and impact on one another as well as their shared or even competing effects on creative production and reception, that interests me, particularly as these accumulate both in the moment and over time. Part of what I hope to offer is a new sense of what we as scholars mean when we talk about the “roundness” of certain characters, as a synonym for their “liveness.”Footnote 7 Such associations have a long literary-critical history reaching back at least to Morgann (who, in seeming anticipation of E. M. Forster centuries later, celebrates the “roundness and integrity” of Shakespeare’s characters [Essay 58]).Footnote 8 From Morgann’s essay up through Harold Bloom’s loving description of Falstaff’s “personal largeness” (290), it is Falstaff who, along with Hamlet, has most often been at the center of these discussions: he “bulges out of the realistic frame of fiction, calling attention to his own excess” (Calderwood 71); or, in Cleanth Brooks and Robert Heilman’s frustrated formulation, he is viewed as the “brilliant excrescence” who seems somehow to exist outside or beyond the play (318).Footnote 9 This essay takes seriously the distinctiveness of Falstaff’s character, but it locates it less in how the character is written or embodied forth in any one performance than in the accumulation of Falstaff’s many representations, the intermedial abundance of his person.Footnote 10 It opens by sketching out Falstaff’s place within the early modern mediascape, focusing especially on the theatrical mediation of his person, before turning to Merry Wives of Windsor—a comedy whose very existence is said to have been inspired by an audience member’s imaginatively generative response to Falstaff’s character. In the end, it comes back to eighteenth-century responses to Falstaff in an effort to challenge certain disciplinary assumptions about character.
“A Tun of Man”
Morgann is describing a process I want to call “thickening”—an accumulation of mediation—that I argue is fundamental to the production of dramatic character. His Falstaff would necessarily have been fashioned out of different materials—different players, different audiences, different playtexts and printed books and performance traditions—than the Falstaff of the late-sixteenth and early-seventeenth-century stage. But the process he is describing is much the same, and it is Falstaff who helps reveal it most vividly. Thickening takes place along multiple axes: there is the relationship between an actor and the part, or parts, they play, and the web of associations linking all of these “persons” together; there is the interplay between theater and various forms of print, including songs and ballads as well as emblems, engravings, and so on, across which characters move (or, as David Brewer puts it, “migrate” [78]); and there is the iteration of specific characters who appear again and again in serialized or even apparently unrelated texts.Footnote 11 My claim is that in the late sixteenth century, changes in London’s theatrical marketplace amplified and intensified these processes in ways that were fundamentally, transformatively new. England’s commercial theater did not appear out of nowhere, nor did it represent an absolute break from earlier practices and traditions. But it did introduce for the first time an abundantly simultaneous field of performance, in which multiple companies staged plays both regularly and repeatedly on different theatrical stages, all in competition for a shared audience. Between the 1590s and 1642, roughly twenty playing companies existed in London.Footnote 12 One of these companies, the Admiral’s Men, staged about thirty-five plays a year, which Roslyn Lander Knutson takes to be a representative number (Repertory 29–30). A “typical run” for a play was between eight to twelve performances over four to six months, and on average 1,250 to 1,500 playgoers attended at a time—and up to as many as 3,000 (Knutson, Repertory 33; Gurr 213).
Specific playhouses were associated with individual companies, but playwrights, players, and plays moved fluidly between them, as theatrical professionals worked in collaboration and competition with one another, picking up on and responding to the treatment of subjects that proved especially popular.Footnote 13 Audiences could choose between playhouses and companies or, more likely, circulate among them. It is the comparisons such circulation made possible—seeing, as Jean Howard writes, how “various theatrical practitioners modified received stories, generic conventions, and stage traditions”—that helped distinguish early modern theatrical culture from the traditions and practices that preceded it (274).Footnote 14 Such comparisons could now happen in real time, across simultaneously staged productions performed in different locations, as well as across past, remembered performances. These developments led to a stunning intensification of theater’s representational potential, especially of its “persons.” Before the late sixteenth century in England, some characters could become well known and intimately familiar, represented annually in festive performances like May games, their stories told in ballads and other forms of cheap print. But it was not until “playing occupied” and “preoccupied” London in the sustained, even saturating way it did in the period that the field of representation could become so densely populated with people—including, often, competing representations of the same people, at virtually or even exactly the same time (West, Common Understandings 52).
All performed characters are, to varying degrees, intermedial creatures, produced through a system of shared meaning as well as a range of media forms. In early modern commercial theater, many of them appear more than once, in plays performed by different companies; and many of these are based in turn on figures who were already familiar from other texts and traditions.Footnote 15 If all early modern characters are intermedial, however, few if any are as thickly accumulated as Falstaff, who becomes an extreme case that magnifies or elucidates a general principle of characterization. He is “fundamentally intertextual” and intertheatrical in ways that even the other characters who appear repeatedly in the same plays with him are not (Marino 123).Footnote 16 Like Tamburlaine or Hieronimo, two other enormously popular persons of the early modern stage, he becomes a widely shared cultural referent; but unlike them he is associated with multiple playhouses, companies, and playwrights, and even with multiple kinds of plays. Like numerous other stage persons, he has a historical referent (or even perhaps more than one); but his relationship to that figure, Sir John Oldcastle, is unfixed in ways that seem always to produce a simultaneous, double self.Footnote 17 “[F]or Oldcastle died a martyr, and this is not the man,” the epilogue to 2 Henry IV declares (lines 33–34). Whatever the exact details behind the story of the knight’s notorious name change—under what pressures or compulsions Shakespeare may have first changed “Oldcastle” to “Falstaff,” and whether (as Gary Taylor has argued) the name was ever changed back—it is generally agreed that audiences “saw through” Falstaff to Oldcastle (Kastan 96).Footnote 18 It might be more accurate to say that they readily saw both names, and both figures, more or less at once—that watching Falstaff or Oldcastle entailed a sort of theatrical double vision on the part of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century audiences that was unusual and that was compounded by the doubleness of Oldcastle himself, a Lollard executed for treason who, in the work of John Bale, John Foxe, and others, was later celebrated as a Protestant martyr.Footnote 19 “As his body was hanged and burnt in an unusual posture at Tyburn,” Thomas Fuller writes in his Worthies of England (1655), “so his memory hath ever since been in a strange suspense betwixt malefactor and martyr” (37).
By 1600, a character named either Falstaff or Oldcastle had appeared in at least seven distinct productions.Footnote 20 In the decades to come, both names would be referenced in many more. Collectively these plays form a dense network of representations, a constellation of figures that refer to one another implicitly and at times explicitly. Take, for instance, the moment in 2 Henry IV when Falstaff recalls the “box of the ear” Prince Hal gave to the Lord Chief Justice (1.2.197–98)—an episode that does not occur in either of Shakespeare’s histories but that is a centerpiece of The Famous Victories of Henry the Fifth, which was first performed in the 1580s. In Famous Victories, the scene is essentially acted twice, first by the prince and the chief justice and then by Derick the clown and his companion, John Cobbler, who decide to reenact what they have just witnessed: “Faith John, Ile tel thee what, thou shalt be my Lord Chief Justice, and thou shalt sit in the chaire, and Ile be the yong prince, and hit thee a boxe on the eare” (B4r). Derick, most likely played by the celebrated clown Richard Tarlton, is more like Shakespeare’s Falstaff than Oldcastle is in this play, and Falstaff’s recollection of this moment in 2 Henry IV seems to yoke all these figures—Falstaff, Derick, Oldcastle, Tarlton, and William Kemp—together. The episode’s representative potential is thickened through the interplay of a whole range of different media: not just each of the three plays, but all their many performances, as well as the bodies, texts, and other materials out of which those performances were produced—and, in fact, recorded. Tarlton’s Jests (1613) includes under the heading “An excellent jest of Tarlton suddenly spoken” a description of a specific instance of improvisation in a single performance of this very episode (C2v). Tarlton, stepping in for an “absent” player, temporarily takes on the part of the chief justice; he then returns to the stage as Derick, commenting on the blow he has received (“the report so terrifies me, that me thinks the blow remains still on my cheeke”).Footnote 21 In this passage, a series of connected performances with different players in the various parts, complete with some of the gestures, expressions, and improvisatory moves associated with each, are copied down and folded temporally together. It is an especially dense description that shows how embodied personation allows, in the theater, for a single blow to be felt on no fewer than three cheeks at once.
It is also, as a printed text, part of the larger mediascape that includes not just Tarlton’s Jests and the plays and performances it references, but other forms as well: gossipy letters that mention Falstaff by name, commonplace books including bits of his speeches, printed playbooks, pamphlets.Footnote 22 All of these combine with each of the plays’ multiple performances to produce a vibrantly proliferating Falstaff, one who is expanded further still by the historical and critical commentary that begins to attach to his person. This richly intertextual, intertheatrical Falstaff is, in fact, the most frequently referenced of all Shakespeare’s characters in the period—even more so than Hamlet.Footnote 23 He becomes what the playwright-turned-antitheatricalist Stephen Gosson would call a “by worde” (D3v): a shared cultural referent as well as a way of slyly alluding to persons both living and historical (Oldcastle and his descendants, including William Brooke, Lord Cobham, who was Lord Chamberlain from 1596 to 1597). This sort of hunting for personal allusions—seeing Brooke in Oldcastle or Falstaff—is what Ben Jonson derides in the epistle to Volpone as “application,” a practice he insists had become all but ubiquitous by the start of the seventeenth century:
I would ask…what nation, society, or general order or state, I have provoked? What public person? Whether I have not in all these preserved their dignity, as mine own person, safe? My works are read, allowed…look into them, what broad reproofs have I used? where have I been particular? where personal? except to a mimic, cheater, bawd, or buffoon, creatures, for their insolencies, worthy to be taxed.…Application is now grown a trade with many; and there are that profess to have a key for the decyphering of every thing. (lines 52–58)
Jonson’s insistence that he has not taxed any “public person”—that is, anyone involved in the affairs of state—is a reminder of just how unusual it was in this period to be publicized and not be “public,” to be unaffiliated with the court and nonetheless be made known.Footnote 24 This sense of popular publicity is evident, too, in Gosson’s use of the phrase “by worde” (D3v), which appears in a passage condemning the stage’s “man[n]er of rebuking” (D3r): “whosever taketh that office upon him,” Gosson writes, “must do it secretly…because we ought not to defame the partie rebuked…. But when any thing is reprehended by Players upon the Stage, it is openly blowne into the eares of many and made a by worde” (D3v). Whoever is being rebuked or “defamed” by the stage, whether a “public person” or not, it is the publicity of the act that matters—the ways in which performance necessarily blows a person’s name into the ears and mouths of the many.Footnote 25 For both Gosson and Jonson, the stage has a peculiar capacity to create such newly popular public people, just as it creates familiar iterations of any number of mimicked character types (mimics, cheaters, buffoons).Footnote 26 Plays seem to probe this capacity again and again. Scholars have long been attentive to the publicity that attached to the stage’s most celebrated performers, particularly its clowns, but they have paid far less attention to the publicization of its parts.Footnote 27 And yet it is these that circulated most widely.
Falstaff, who is at once public and popular, real and fictional, actual and virtual, original and representative of any number of dramatic types, is especially good for thinking about what early modern commercial theater—as a particular media form—has the capacity to do, and do differently, to its persons. It is not that Falstaff is unique. Nor is the phenomenon he embodies a uniquely English one. As a means of understanding how dramatic character is produced, thickening might well be applied to other theatrical traditions, other periods: to the innamorata of Italian theater, say, or to historical persons who appear as characters in the Spanish comedia.Footnote 28 These, too, are highly mobile, vividly imagined figures with a richly intermedial presence. Rather, it is that Falstaff helps to make visible something intrinsic to theatrical performance. Like the introduction of print, which suddenly makes plain the fact that a medium exists (and existed before, albeit in different forms not recognized as such), the rise of commercial theater makes newly visible the fact of mediation itself, that information is being delivered in a new way.Footnote 29 And what the stage is mediating, most often and most visibly, is people: fictional ones, translated from various sources into recognizable dramatic types embodied forth by actors in performance, and also sometimes actual persons, both historical and contemporary. It is not that earlier theatrical traditions did not feature characters, of course, even characters modeled on “real” people: in England there were saints’ lives plays (nearly all of which have been lost) and the biblical figures of the morality and mystery plays, as well as the quasi-historical figures of legend, such as Robin Hood and Long Meg. Royal entries and mayoral shows regularly featured living rulers alongside historical and mythological figures. But it was not until the late sixteenth century that the embodied representation of persons could happen on the scale that it did, both in terms of the number of persons represented and in terms of the number of representations of any one, specific “person of the play.”Footnote 30 A single part might be performed eight to twelve times over the course of a play’s run, but that play might then be revived or imitated or even revised and represented again, with a new person (or persons) in the role. For instance, Falstaff was said to have been played to “mighty Applause” in the 1630s by the actor John Lowin, who also played “Morose, Vulpone, and Mammon in the Alchymist” as well as other parts for the King’s Men—all of whom might be said to be present in, or to haunt, Falstaff’s person, as would the players whose earlier performances Lowin’s echoes or rejects (James Wright qtd. in Munro 9, 10). Commercial playing, with its repertory system, multiplies the number of persons who are in play in any one person of the play, and it does so over and over again (“how long,” Thomas Palmer writes in 1647, “Falstaff from cracking nuts hath kept the throng”). The stage’s performed embodiment of persons represents not a break from earlier theatrical practice, then, so much as an amplification of it, a revivifying of drama’s representational potential, which picks up on and complicates aspects already present in playing. In the final decades of the sixteenth century, as permanent, dedicated theaters were being established in London and companies were competing with one another for market share, this thickening of the stage’s representative power must have been palpable—a form of mass reduplication before such a term was available, but not necessarily before it was thinkable.
All of this leads to a question: What happens when a person is theatrically mass-produced? Falstaff is my best answer to this question. It is not just that he is so well-known, or even that he is so often embodied or referenced onstage and in print. Falstaff’s outsize reputation is part of who he is, or who he becomes; it is interpolated into his character. Falstaff is, above all else, embodied, present, a mass not just of physicality but of personation. His fatness seems to be less about the actual size of the character than about the bigness of the part—the swollen, accumulated, thickened self Falstaff-Oldcastle has become.Footnote 31 It is striking how often the plays link size and reputation, as when Falstaff is warned that he “live[s] in great infamy,” and replies, “He that buckles himself in my belt cannot live in less” (2 Henry IV 1.2.139–42). It is not just that Falstaff is large, as the plays point out over and over again; it is that he is known to be large, is famously huge, so that his physical size seems almost to be a metaphor for his outsize reputation.Footnote 32 The centerpiece of 1 Henry IV, Hal and Falstaff’s “play extempore” (2.4.271), is itself centered on an ever-swelling collection of phrases meaning “fat”:
[T]here is a devil haunts thee in the likeness of an old fat man; a tun of man is thy companion. Why dost thou converse with that trunk of humours, that bolting-hutch of beastliness, that swollen parcel of dropsies, that huge bombard of sack, that stuffed cloak-bag of guts, that roasted Manningtree ox with the pudding in his belly, that reverend vice, that grey iniquity, that father ruffian, that vanity in years? (2.4.435–42)
This list of epithets is not just about size, or girth, but about a capaciousness of selves, which runs in the end into a catalog of theatrical types: the vice, the old sinner. He is a “tun of man” and a “trunk of humours,” a person who is full of people.Footnote 33 Whenever he is recalled, in fact, it seems that his size is invoked almost as an epic epithet: Falstaff is always “the fat knight with the great-belly doublet,” as Fluellen calls him in Henry V, when he struggles to remember his name (4.7.47). If anything, the association between fatness and Falstaff increases over time, as though swelling through its own repetition. From the “pampered glutton” complained of in Sir John Oldcastle, Part 1 (prologue, line 6) up through The Wandering Jew’s mention of his “huge kindred” (38)—a phrase that suggests both a sizable number and the physical size of those counted among that number—it is his self-abundance that is remembered. This extended family of fat knights is large not just in body but in the aggregate, a collective of theatrical selves, a history of character and personation that seems to have stood out as distinct and memorable in part for its volume: the capaciousness of its personation.
“A Puffed Man”
It is worth remembering that while there is at least one early modern play called Oldcastle, there is none that is called Falstaff—at least, not officially.Footnote 34 For that, audiences would have to wait until Giuseppe Verdi’s opera in the late nineteenth century. And of course, that opera would not exist without The Merry Wives of Windsor. If the Falstaff of Henry IV parts 1 and 2 is dizzyingly, capaciously multiple, the Falstaff of Merry Wives is a bloated, swollen version of himself beached on the shore of a new kind of play. “What tempest, I trow, threw this whale, with so many tuns of oil in his belly, ashore at Windsor?” Mistress Ford exclaims, in what is one of the play’s numerous references not just to Falstaff’s size but to his monstrosity, his “grossness” (2.1.56–57).Footnote 35 He is a fish out of water, jolted out of dramatic time and place, but he is also—as he will say of himself later on, when he has been plucked out of the Thames—“swelled” with accumulative references until he is about ready to burst (3.5.16).
In my reading, Merry Wives offers not the abomination of Falstaff’s character—what A. C. Bradley, a great admirer of Morgann, calls an “impostor” (273)—but the apotheosis of what he has in essence always been: a round collection of himself as a character, “swelled” not from the water but from multiple plays and multiple forms of writing beyond the playhouse; not a “double man” (1 Henry IV 5.4.138), but a now monstrously multiplicative one.Footnote 36 This is a play that flits endlessly between singularity and type, in the sense not just of representativeness but of copying, doubling—of what Mistress Page, in describing the jest that will punish both Falstaff and Ford, calls “a double excellency” (Merry Wives 3.3.161). The clearest, or grossest, examples of the play’s interest in doubling are the letters Falstaff sends to Mistress Page and Mistress Ford in an effort to “be cheaters to them both”—that is, to seduce them in order to access their husbands’ money (1.3.66–67). The plan backfires when the women discover that the letters are the same. To Mistress Ford’s “Did you ever hear the like?” Mistress Page responds, “Letter for letter, but that the name of Page and Ford differs…here’s the twin brother of thy letter” (2.1.61–65). Falstaff’s letters proliferate in their (and the audience’s) imagination until “I warrant he hath a thousand of these letters, writ with blank space for different names—sure, more, and these are the second edition” (2.1.66–68). Printing—the idea of the letters being a “second edition”—is used here to think about what would now be called mass production, an endless, alarmingly proliferative replication of the exact same words, or the exact same “letters,” in both senses.Footnote 37 They are of a type—again, in both senses of the word. “Why, this is the very same—the very hand, the very words!” cries Mistress Ford (2.1.73–74). The betrayal here, the shock of it, is not just that he could write such a letter but that he could do it twice, and therefore possibly a thousand times more, over and over, exactly the same, letter for letter and word for word. What was singular—his hand, his character—has become grotesquely multiple because mass produced.Footnote 38
When Mistress Ford observes that Falstaff’s “disposition” and his “words” “no more adhere and keep place together than the hundred psalms to the tune of ‘Greensleeves’” (2.1.52, 53, 54–56), she is pointing out the inauthenticity of his language through an imaginatively monstrous act of remediation.Footnote 39 This is something that happens repeatedly in Merry Wives, which is interested not just in the seeming inauthenticity of print but in the problems inevitably introduced by translation: of language, of bodies, of wealth.Footnote 40 Consider when Evans, overcome with “cholers” and “melancholies” (3.1.11, 13), begins to sing aloud the second stanza of Christopher Marlowe’s “The Passionate Shepherd to His Love,” only to shift into Psalm 137 and then back again to Marlowe:
[Sings] To shallow rivers, to whose falls,
Melodious birds sing madrigals—
There will we make our peds of roses
And a thousand fragrant posies.
To shallow—
Mercy on me, I have a great dispositions to cry.
[Sings] Melodious birds sing madrigals
Whenas I sat in Pabylon—
And a thousand vagram posies.
To shallow, etc.(3.1.16–25)
By the time Merry Wives was first performed, whether in 1597 or later, Marlowe’s well-known poem had become a multimedia sensation—not just a blend of music and words, vocalization and print, but a poem set to music in ballads and in printed books like William Corkine’s 1612 The Second Book of Aires (which, crucially, includes only the first line of the verse, suggesting singers could be counted on to supply the rest). Psalm 137, too, is a much printed and reprinted object, appearing in the all-but-ubiquitous Sternhold and Hopkins psalter (the first line of which reads, “When as we sat in Babylon the rivers round about” [Sternhold and Hopkins 350]).Footnote 41 These moments, in which one kind or form of expression is repurposed or reframed, set to the “wrong” music or blended with something altogether different, bring mediation itself into focus: the fact or presence of song, writing, print, poetry, the speaker’s body, the actor speaking or singing this part as mediating phenomena.
Remediation is a fitting term, too, for what the play as a whole is doing. Shakespeare’s only play to be set in a seemingly contemporary England—the nearest thing of his to a city comedy—Merry Wives does not just blend tragic and comic elements but famously transplants a set of conventions from one sort of space or place into another (that is, from London to Windsor). The whole feel of this unusual play therefore echoes that of Falstaff’s love letters—or, indeed, of Falstaff himself. A character based on a historical figure, made familiar from a set of plays performed by the Chamberlain’s Men and others, who has been teleported out of the distant past into the present for a whole series of encounters with the material culture of late-sixteenth-century life, Falstaff is himself a conspicuously remediated figure (Korda; Wall). He stands apart from the people of Windsor not just in his corrupt, court-oriented values, but in his fundamental makeup as a character: in the kind of stage person he is. Like other city comedies, Merry Wives is populated with fictional people who are familiar only insofar as they look and sound like others of the same type. Falstaff is, again, something or someone else, a formal “impostor” whose presence in this new form points out the fact that forms exist and have rules and conventions to follow or break in the first place. As Falstaff says early on in the quarto edition of the play, “Falstaff will learn the humour of this age”: the line sounds like a declaration of his readiness to be genre-adapted, and the plot is shaped largely out of an inability to deliver on this promise (Merry Wives 1.3.80).Footnote 42
Part of what this attempted adaptation of his person, from one genre to another, points out is that theater does things to persons that are worth considering and attending to. The question of just what it does matters, and not just to Falstaff. Shortly before his second failed attempt to catch Falstaff and his wife in bed together, Ford announces to his skeptical companions, “If I find not what I seek…let me for ever be your table-sport. Let them say of me, ‘As jealous as Ford, that searched a hollow walnut for his wife’s leman’” (4.2.151–55). What Ford is offering, what he is imagining for himself, is the process of being made (as Sir Hugh Evans says to Doctor Caius) “laughing-stocks to other men’s humours”; of being turned into “a by worde,” a person whose name will become synonymous with a set of characteristics or actions (3.1.76, 77). Ford will not become this. He is not original or interesting enough. What he is, is a type: the jealous husband of city comedy, anonymous in his conventionality and therefore in some ways, ironically, the very opposite of what he imagines becoming. It seems that what Ford is describing here is one of the two kinds of publicity the stage offers its persons: that of exemplary, individual fame, of the sort Falstaff embodies, and that of endlessly replicable, conventionalized type. But the two—like Falstaff’s love letters—are not distinct so much as “twinned.” Both are built out of an accumulation of selves, a newly thickened kind of multimedia personhood. It is only in retrospect—after a sense of character has developed as somehow existing prior to the play, rather than within and across it and other mediating forms—that these two models of characterization can begin to feel so different.
It is from within this context that I think scholars might begin to make sense of one of the stranger stories in Shakespeare studies, and it is here—back in the eighteenth century—that this essay ends. In the prefatory letter to his The Comical Gallant; or, The Amours of Sir John Falstaffe (1702), John Dennis explains that he has chosen to adapt The Merry Wives of Windsor in part because the comedy “pleas’d one of the greatest Queens that ever was in the World”—that is, Queen Elizabeth—who “commanded it to be finished in fourteen days” (A2r). In his 1709 edition of Shakespeare’s works, Nicholas Rowe expands on this account: the Queen “was so well pleas’d with that admirable character of Falstaff, in the two Parts of Henry the Fourth, that she commanded him to continue it for one Play more, and to shew him in Love” (viii–ix). Both Dennis and Rowe imagine Merry Wives as a kind of royally sanctioned fan fiction, and Rowe’s account emphasizes the queen’s desire to see Falstaff do something new—fall in love—which can happen only when he has been translated into a different set of dramatic circumstances, remediated from one kind or form of play into another (where falling in love becomes generically possible). Of course, as anyone who has seen or read Merry Wives knows, falling in love is simply not what Falstaff does in this play—even though Rowe applauds the play’s faithful response to the queen’s “command” (“How well she was obey’d, the Play it self is an admirable Proof” [ix]). Rowe’s praise begins to track, however, if the imagined request is understood not as a desire for new experiences—for a more fully imagined life for this character as a person—but as a request simply for more, expanding the catalog of plays that make Falstaff (as he himself says) “your theme” (Merry Wives 5.5.159). What is being imagined or sought in Rowe’s account is not quite new adventures for the same character so much as new instances of that character. In fact, the queen’s request is followed in Rowe’s account by a whole catalog of other Falstaffian selves, other persons contained within the fattest stag in Shakespeare’s forest: Sir John Oldcastle and his descendants, but also an entirely different Sir John Falstaff, “who was a Knight of the Garter, and a Lieutenant-General,” a person of “distinguished Merit in the Wars in France.”Footnote 43
As John Dryden writes in his Essay of Dramatick Poesy, Falstaff
is not properly one humor, but a Miscellany of Humors or Images, drawn from so many several men, that wherein he is singular in his wit, or those things he says, praeter expectatum, unexpected by the Audience; his quick evasions…are extremely diverting of themselves, [and] receive a great addition from his person; for the very sight of such an unwieldy old debauched fellow is a Comedy alone. (60)
Written roughly a century before Morgann’s Essay and a few decades before Dennis’s adaptation of Merry Wives, Dryden’s description of Falstaff is built out of different elements than either of theirs. Each commentator’s engagement with Falstaff is historically determined and specific. But they all seem to share a sense of how character is created through accumulation, through thickening. A “by worde,” an “old friend”: the circulation of Falstaff’s abundantly thickened self reflects back to the community among whom it moves the fact of that community’s existence. The proliferation of Falstaffs in the eighteenth century, made possible, Brewer argues, by the “placeless omnipresence of print,” helped forge readers into a “virtual community” (86, 82). Falstaff serves vital public-making functions in late-sixteenth-century England, too, solidifying theatergoers familiar with competing representations of his person into a collective, or linking letter writers who use “Falstaff” as code for William Brooke into a community of people “in the know.”Footnote 44 The question of what function, or functions, Falstaff’s thickened self might serve in the emerging theater culture of late-sixteenth-century London is a crucial one. But the central claim of this essay is that Falstaff’s circulation both requires and reflects back on the processes of mediation that make such circulation possible in the first place. Falstaff develops out of and most abundantly embodies an intensification of theatrical representation newly available in London at the turn of the sixteenth century. His extraordinary recognizability, his role as a “by worde,” points out the commercial stage’s peculiar capacity to make all sorts of people public: not just public persons in Jonson’s sense, but also potentially ordinary citizens, fictional personae, historical figures, or, like Falstaff, some vibrant, holographic combination thereof. He is the extreme example, the massed characterological product, that reveals the publicizing potential inherent in the commercial stage’s representational machinery.
Dryden’s celebration of Falstaff as both “singular” and a “Miscellany” speaks, in the end, to how such processes of accumulation might make us feel about the stage’s most thickly mediated persons. The singular figure and the endlessly iterated type are not distinct categories of character or characterization so much as doubled, or twinned, products of the same thickening process. It is a theory of characterization we have decided more or less not to see, not in the original productions themselves and certainly not in the character criticism of writers like Morgann, but I think it is one worth taking seriously. The “liveness” that has long been attributed to Falstaff—this sense that he exists beyond his plays—is rooted not just in how he is written, not just in the boundlessness of Falstaff’s vitality, or even in the ways in which he is read into being, but in the medial thickening of his person. Such a theory of character would locate Falstaff’s “roundness” less in efforts to plumb an imagined interior than in the accumulation of so very many representations, onstage and in print, of his thickly mediated person: a padding out, rather than a going in. How Falstaff is written—his capaciousness of self, his size, the dazzling limitlessness of his language—is echoed and amplified by the interplay of all these representations until, as Dryden puts it, he seems to be in himself “a Comedy alone,” not one but “many several men.” It is a sense of which the plays themselves were very much aware. Banish plump Jack, and banish all the world: this tun of man, this trunk of humors, this vibrantly thickened, accumulated mass of theatrical person.
