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"Banish All the Wor(l)d": Falstaff's Iconoclastic Threat to Kingship in I Henry IV

Renascence, Summer 2007 by Caldwell, Ellen M

SHAKESPEARE'S I Henry IV challenges princely power as representational, iconic, and false. Sir John Falstaff espouses a "reformationist" distrust of the image and reflects, in his powerful combination of corporeal presence and punishing rhetoric, a proto-Protestant scorn for ornamentation and hypocrisy. Based on the historical figure of Lord Cobham (John Oldcastle), the leader of an unsuccessful Lollard rebellion and friend of the young Prince Henry, the fictional Falstaff ruthlessly pricks the prince's conscience about his family's theft of the crown. Cobham suffered hanging and burning at Tyburn for his Wycliffite views against transubstantiation and the veneration of relics. Falstaff only symbolically dies, but his rejection is forecast in a chilling exchange in 2.4. When Falstaff argues "Banish plump Jack, and banish all the world," Hal promises, "I do, I will" (476). Banishing Jack in II Henry IV frees Hal to engrave his counterfeit kingly image upon the final plays of Shakespeare's second tetralogy. The arguments that Cobham offered under interrogation against the iconography of the Church are strikingly similar to those leveled by Falstaff against the iconography of the Lancastrian monarchy.

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Rather than the carnivalesque reading of Falstaff ably popularized by Michael Bristol and Valeric Traub,1 I propose to read the play as a site of reformationist commentary. Texts such as Luther's Treatise on the New Testament, that is, the Holy Mass (1520), William Tyndale's The Souper of the Lorde (c.1534), and Lord Cobham's testimony under interrogation provided in Foxe's Actes and Monuments (first English edition 1563) provide the context for reading Falstaff's critique of the Prince's bravado, deceit, and false image-making as arguments shaped by popular Protestant castigations of idolatrous Catholic practices. What does it mean to "banish all the world" in banishing Jack Falstaff? It means to banish the accidental, the human, from the Lancastrian myth of kingship. Banishing the fallible in the iconography of monarchy creates a king distanced from authentic interactions with his subjects. Granted, there are hints of momentary insight in Henry V's late night soliloquy before the battle of Agincourt:

And what have kings that privates have not too,

Save ceremony, save general ceremony?

And what art thou, thou idol ceremony?

What kind of god are thou, that suffer'st more

Of mortal griefs than do thy worshippers?

What are thy rents? What are thy comings-in?

ceremony, show me but thy worth!

What is thy soul of adoration?

Art thou aught but place, degree, and form,

Creating awe and fear in other men? (4.1.236-245)2

Louis Montrose notes the secular and sacred nature of this commentary in his assertion that Henry "evokes both the polemical religious discourse against images, vestments, and plays, and the politic Machiavellian discourse on the utility of state spectacles."3 Henry has earlier proclaimed the king's humanity with the assertion, "I think the king is but a man, as I am [. . .] His ceremonies laid by, in his nakedness he appears but a man" (4.1.102-106). But his statements, delivered in disguise, argue that the king cannot honestly appear frail or fearful lest he "dishearten his army" (112). Essentially, Henry justifies the lie of ceremony and false appearance, disguised in Thomas of Erpingham's cloak, even as he purports to banish the distance between king and common soldier. The Chorus describes Henry's visiting of his troops, where he "Bids them good morrow with a modest smile / And calls them brothers, friends, and countrymen" (4.Chorus.33-4). But 4.1 shows Henry picking fights with Fluellen and defensively justifying the king's behavior to Bates and Williams. When Williams questions the generous characterization of the king, Henry challenges him. The attempts to abandon ceremony in this scene cap insistent comments about ceremony in the second tetralogy.4 Henry never returns to this everyman disguise, preferring the authority of office, despite the crown's unease that his father has already discovered in II Henry IV (3.1.31).

While I Henry IV is certainly not simply a theological treatise, it does allude to two central Protestant theological tenets in its exposition of monarchy: the discrediting of transubstantiation, or the idea that the accidentals (appearances) of bread and wine remain even as the substances are miraculously transformed into the body and blood of Christ to be consumed in the Eucharist; and the rejection of iconography, defined as idolatry by the reformers.5 I Henry IV, and Shakespeare's second tetralogy in general, I believe, argue that image-making and false pretenses have created a false religion of the state. Falstaff, the irrepressible outsider and critic of his betters, ironically emulates the Lollard Lord Cobham, who denounced the doctrine of transubstantiation, arguing that the common substances of bread and wine must coexist with the substance of Christ's body and blood. The common elements of food and drink are not banished, but coexist, with the divine presence. Secondly, Cobham chastises the Catholic Church for idolizing iconography and false images over the Divine presence of God. Both of these theological arguments form the bases for a critique of monarchy that falsely deifies the king by invoking the outmoded concept of divine right, and by privileging ceremony and the artifice of kingship over the humble assumption of royal responsibility.6

"Banish All the Wor(l)d": Falstaff's Iconoclastic Threat to Kingship in I Henry IV

Renascence, Summer 2007 by Caldwell, Ellen M

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