The Face of the Poor in Shakespeare

I was headed toward Miller Road to shop with my daughter.  It was the day after Black Friday, and something unsettling happened.  We were stopped at a light, and a man wearing a brown cardboard sign made eye contact and began gesturing in an aggressive way to his face or his head.  The sign said something about not wanting to get wet.  It had rained for two days straight.  “Don’t look, Mom.”  I caught Katya’s eye, and she was scared.  I wanted to look at the angry beggar’s face and the disapproving face of the black woman sitting on the bus-stop bench.  “Mom, go, the light is green.”  The faces were unsettling.

“Go, take the scroll that lies open in the hand of the angel … Take and swallow it.  It will turn your stomach sour, but in your mouth it will taste as sweet as honey.”  John in Revelations eats the scroll, which is sweet in his mouth and sour in his stomach.  “You must prophesy again about many peoples, nations, tongues, and kings.”  I heard this passage read at a Friday mass on November 18, and Father James emphasized that the holy is supposed to unsettle.  It is so much bigger than we are.  “Why does the God of the universe allow us to be with him in such an intimate way as communion offers?  We take him into our bodies.  I don’t know, but it should push us to go out and … blank … it’s a blank.”  I forgot what Father said we should do when we are unsettled by contact with the Holy.  At that same Mass, in the gospel, Jesus was angry at the merchants selling in the temple precinct.  He overturned their tables and drove them out.  Whatever we are supposed to do, I am certain that being nice, being silent, doing nothing is not what ought to be filled in that blank.  “Prophesy!”

I have been teaching Shakespeare’s second cycle of history plays this semester (called The Henriad).  I purposefully did this during the run-up to the 2016 U.S. presidential election, because the four plays that chart the rise of the Lancastrian dynasty after the deposition of Richard II, the last king thought to reign by divine right, is a study in the emergence of the political as a sphere of activity that human beings control.  Does Shakespeare offer any hope for our politics?  That was the overarching question that I hoped would stir up comparisons between the history plays and our own election.  For myself, I think Shakespeare offers real hope although it’s a kind of longshot hope, dependent on the smarts and compassion of his original audiences and readers capable of original response.  The plays teach that society desperately needs good rulers.  What makes a leader good?  He must be something of a rogue or renegade, as Prince Hal is, who leaves the court behind to drink with tinkers, learn about their struggles and hopes, and learn from core values like fellowship.  Kings—and U.S. presidents—need prophets to keep them honest.  In the Bible—the books that detail the emergence of kings in Israel (I & 2 Samuel)—prophecy is born with monarchy.  Prophets (Samuel for Saul and Nathan for David) exist to remind kings that they are men and that they exists to serve the people … not, as David did, to take Bathsheba for adulterous sex and then send her husband to the front lines to be killed.  When he did that, Nathan came to court:  “There was a rich man and a poor man.  When a traveler came to the city, instead of culling an animal from his own herds, the rich man took the poor man’s one ewe, which was like a personal pet to him.  You are that man.” 

Shakespeare in The Henriad turns the fat knight Falstaff, a man addicted to a sweet wine called sack, into the prophet who attempts to educate Hal.  He teaches him how to be himself rather than a fake, how to think and speak freely, how to be humble, how to laugh at himself, and, above all, how to see more in the poor.  In his very first scene, he is essentially asking Hal:  who are we to you?  A bunch of thieves and good for nothings, men destined for the hangman?  “Let us not that are squires of the night’s body be called thieves of the day’s beauty.  Let us be Diana’s foresters, gentlemen of the shade, minions of the moon under whose countenance we steal.”  Falstaff is admitting that they steal and often get away with it (incidentally, Diana was one of the mythological identitites Queen Elizabeth claimed), but he is also challenging Hal to see more and better … perhaps to see “feelingly” which is an adjective made up by a character who is blinded and has an epiphany.  But that is another play.  It’s questionable whether Prince Hal ever learns to drink deep of prophet Falstaff’s imaginative generosity.  Falstaff is fat.  The prince is thin.  Falstaff countenances the poor with undeserved praise while the Prince reduces them to something like their income bracket.  What is a man worth?  Trump and Clinton both referred to the poor in the most cynical ways during the campaign.  Trump said that he “loved the poorly educated,” who Clinton called “a basket of deplorables.”  We need Falstaff or someone like Falstaff (perhaps Pope Francis or Father James Mangan) to challenge us.

 Falstaff is really too big a subject for a brief blog entry.  Brilliant satirist, jovial clown, inspired prophet: he is an “in your face” kind of character.  But it is a different face I wanted to look into.  Bardolph is one of Falstaff’s sidekicks.  He has none of the cleverness, charisma, or credentials of his leader.  Moreover, his face is really messed up:  like one of those ugly faces that is so compelling you cannot help but look:  “His face is all bubuckles and whelks, and knobs, and flames o’fire, and his lips blows at his nose, and it is like a coal of fire, sometimes blue and sometimes red.”  It is this face that trails through The Henriad like a comet, calling us to look and to say what we see in it.  Fluellen, the man who gives the above description, is a Welsh military commander who values men for their discipline, open valor, and knowledge of classical warfare.  His merciless and literal description of our test face, befits a man who has no compassion for the condemned.  Bardolph is “arrested” for stealing a pax from a church, and when his friend, Pistol, tries to speak to Fluellen on his behalf, the Welshman says, “Were he my brother, I would wish the sentence be done on him.”  And so another crucifixion happens without any kind of devotion. 

Bardolph is executed in Act 3 of Henry V, but his red face is the butt of many jokes in the earlier plays, Henry IV, Parts 1 and 2.  Interestingly, it is the man, himself—perhaps to combat shame—who first calls attention to his ugly face when alone with the Prince.  This is after Falstaff, along with Bardolph and a few others, have robbed some pilgrims.  The Prince had agreed to be part of the jest (stealing the rich to give to the poor), but he chickened out, let Falstaff do the dirty work, and, in disguise, robbed him.  This is the set-up to what is supposed to be a hilarious practical joke:  hearing the wild lies Falstaff will tell about how many men he fought off.  Long story short:  when Falstaff’s magnificent story, peppered with disgust at the Prince’s failure to back his friends, is confronted with Hal’s paltry truth, Falstaff says he knew the prince all along and ran away because he was a valiant lion who acted on instinct.  When Falstaff goes to answer a nobleman come from the court to find the prince, Hal tries to get the dirt on Falstaff from Bardolph, who says that he “blush’d to hear his monstrous devices [lies].”  The prince isn’t having it:  “O villain, thou stolest a cup of sack eighteen years ago, and were taken with the manner, and ever since thou hast blush’d extempore.”  The prince (in his usual mean-spirited way) is mocking not only Bardolph’s face (red from drinking) but his class position.  Bardolph, instead of deflecting the shame, addresses it.  We even get an unusual stage direction from Shakespeare:  “pointing to his face” he says, “My lord, do you see these meteors? Do you behold these exhalations?  What think you they portend?”  The language Bardolph employs to describe his own skin condition is astronomical:  meteors, exhalations, portend or presage.  His diction dignifies his face.  It means something.  To him, it portends “choler” or anger.  We might pause to wonder what Bardolph is choleric or angry about.  He seems so mild-mannered and quiet, compared to Falstaff.  But our thoughts are taken up short by the prince’s shocking inhumaneness.  He says what he thinks that Bardolph’s face bodes “Hot livers and cold purses” which translates into him saying that Bardolph looks like the poor alcoholic he is.  Wow!  And Prince Hal is just getting started. His closing remark is that Bardolph’s face predicts “Halter”:  translation:  he will be hanged, probably for stealing.  Spoiler alert:  he is.  Is this mean comment something like a self-fulfilling prophecy?  Shakespeare seems to be saying that once the powers that be have written off a human being or a whole class of human beings, there is no hope for men like Bardolph.  Don’t be fooled America:  Donald Trump will not countenance your ugly asses:  no cigarettes, botox, fake boobs, and expensive clothes are the rule … only pretty people will be allowed in his court.

Shakespeare is subtle.  He never hits you over the head with anything but is deeply respectful of his auditors’ intelligence.  He plants the seeds, drops the hints, comments on faces, but finally leaves the auditor to water the seeds and bring in the harvest.  To me, he is pointedly contrasting Hal’s reduction of Bardolph to Falstaff’s countenancing of his friend.  The bar where they all hang out is quiet after the long night of post-robbery partying.  A noblemen from the court sent word that Hal was to return to talk to his father, the king, in the morning.  The Percies (a northern power family) were gathering an army to challenge Henry, and the Prince needs to man-up.  Falstaff had him practice how he would answer his father, an intention that led to the uproarious playacting of the king by Falstaff, who is deposed by a nasty Hal who predicts he will banish his tutor, judging him to be a “white bearded Satan” and a “villainous misleader of youth.”  The early morning tavern scene is anything but upbeat.  Probably hungover, they are all full of regrets and are bickering amongst themselves.  Falstaff is trying to make them laugh (I think), talking about how out of shape he is physically and morally, and telling them that he intends to repent because he hasn’t yet forgotten what the inside of a church looks like.  Bardolph flat out calls him fat, and Falstaff is back at him with a face joke.  “Why my face does you no harm, Sir John,” and Falstaff launches into all the uses (literal and spiritual) there are for Bardolph’s face.  I will print the whole face poem.  Yes, I think of it as a poem because of the stunning parade of light imagery.  To me this poem makes Bardolph some kind of angel of light—almost a muse.

I never see thy face but I think upon hell-fire and Dives that liv’d in purple; for there he is in his robes, burning, burning.  If thou wert any way given to virtue, I would swear by thy face; my oath should be “By this fire, that’s God’s angel.”  But thou art altogether given over, and wert indeed, but for the light in thy face, the son of utter darkness.  When thou ran’st up Gadshill in the night to catch my horse, if I did not think thou hadst been an ignis fatuus or a ball of wildfire, there’s no purchase in money.  O, thou art a perpetual triumph, an everlasting bonfire light!  Thou hast sav’d me a thousand marks in links and torches, walking with thee in the night betwixt tavern and tavern; but the sack that thou hast drunk me would have bought me lights as good cheap at the dearest chandlers in  Europe.  I have maintain’d that salamander of your with fire any time this two and thirty years, God reward me for it!

Who wouldn’t want to possess the fire of inspiration or be called an everlasting bonfire light?  There is a parable in Bardolph’s face.  Jesus told the disciples about the rich man, Dives, who refused a beggar, Lazarus, table scraps.  Although he suffered in this earthly world, after he died, Lazarus went to the bosom of Abraham, and from that comfortable vantage point, he watches Dives burning in hell.  Dives begs God to send Lazarus with a drop of water to refresh him, and God refuses, citing the great gap that separates the saved from the damned, as wide a gulf as the one that separates rich from poor in Shakespeare’s time and in ours.  Bardolph reminds Falstaff of the promise God made to the poor.  I am not sure Bardolph takes this love poem for the great compliment it clearly is:  “S’blood, I would my face were in your belly.”  He keeps up the bickering banter as is the way with friends.  But I believe he is touched.  After “the king … kill[s] his heart” by banishing him, Falstaff dies offstage in Henry V, and it is Bardolph who is ready to follow, “Would I were with him whereso’er he is, either in heaven or in hell.”  His comment provokes the tavern hostess’ lovely eulogy that begins, “he’s not in hell, he’s in Arthur’s bosom if ever a man went to Arthur’s bosom.”  Some editors suggest that she means to say Abraham’s bosom (perhaps hanging out with Lazarus), but I think we hear and imagine Falstaff comforted by both holy men—Abraham and the mythical Arthur, King of the Round Table.

Falstaff countenanced Bardolph.  Shakespeare plays with this verb punningly in a number of plays.  In Taming of the Shrew, one servant tells another that he must “countenance” the new mistress.  Why, asks the other?  She has a face of her own, doesn’t she?  But what if our faces are not our own?  What if it is more true to say that my face is a boundary, a threshold, the place where I appear as the monarch appears on the balcony of the palace?  Perhaps I never come out if the world is too cruel or too judgmental.  In its verb form, countenance means “to look upon with sanction or favor; to favor, patronize, sanction, encourage, back up, bear out.”  Perhaps we never see the Other unless we coax the subject to appear, unless we call it out from behind bars.  The young page, whom Prince Hal gives Falstaff to harass him, when joking about Bardolph’s face to prove his wit, lands upon a similar idea:  “’A calls me e’en now, my lord, through a red lattice, and I could discern no part of his face from the window.  At least I spied his eyes, and methought he had made two holes in the ale-wive’s petticoat and so peep’d through.”  Poor Bardolph trapped within a face that everyone mocks and only Falstaff holds the key to opening the door.  Maybe Bardolph stole the pax of little price because he needed a reminder that his suffering was worth something more; and, ironically, it was the objectified tableau of the crucifixion (of little price but great value to Bardolph) that finally did put a halter (not a halo) around that face..

Shakespeare teaches us that no man is a self-sufficient island.  Our faces are group projects.  When it comes to other people, we have two choices:  countenance or deface.  It is clear that Falstaff’s way is the way of ethics and the Prince’s way is the way of power.  The Prince breaks his bonds with his friends, and, like King David, he must find a way to redeem himself by repenting these broken covenant bonds.  Shakespeare leaves it up to the audience to determine whether Hal, when he becomes Henry V, repents sufficiently.  But, he plants a double of the king in a very minor servant character in the subplot of Henry IV Part 2.  The servant’s name is “Davy,” and the name is used excessively 21 times in a short scene:  Davy, Davy, Davy.  Shakespeare doesn’t want us to miss the biblical echo of David who served King Saul, fought a giant, played his harp, sang to the lord, prophesied, and later repented.  Shakespeare’s Davy is the dutiful servant of Justice Shallow, whose farm Falstaff visits on the way to the wars.  He knows the ins and outs of the house and farm business, and is a very busy character but not too busy to “beseech” Shallow to “countenance William Visor of Woncote against Clement Perkins a’ th’ Hill.”  But there are many complaints against William Visor, protests the Justice.

            I grant your worship that he is a knave, sir, but yet God forbid, sir, but a knave should have some countenance at his friend’s request.  An honest man, sir, is able to speak for himself, when a knave is not.  I have serv’d your worship truly, sir, this eight years; and I cannot once or twice in a quarter bear out a knave against an honest man, I have little credit with your worship.  The knave is mine honest friend, sir, therefore I beseech you to let him be countenanc’d.

We must speak for the fools and the knaves—for those who cannot speak for themselves because they are guilty of dust and sin or because they are ugly and mocked.  Shakespeare, through characters like Falstaff and Davy, speaks for the essential value of a life against a culture that was coming to invent all kinds of new ways of measuring the value of men:  labor power, looks, wealth, education.  There are two scenes in the Henry plays that involve muster rolls.  Muster rolls are quintessential Elizabethan texts:  they began to proliferate in the 1580s and 1590s as the Privy Council increasingly sent orders to local officials to assemble men and determine their fitness for war.  Falstaff’s language of extravagance stands opposed to an emergent discourse of husbandry and sensible expenditure of men.  Give me life is his motto when he runs around the battlefield trying to keep the shot out of his bowels, but he sees and values it in others and, more importantly, calls it out of them.  This, then, is his special form of prophecy.  Life—sacred life—imprisoned in a body that is dead to the eyes of the authorities but, for the master, is something too sacred and too scary not to unsettle and not to inspire.  “You must prophesy again!”