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

Just as, in these two instances, the common, plainspoken believer is exalted in Foxe's accounts, a person of questionable social status might also ironically be the clearest truth speaker in Shakespeare's history play. So it appears to be the case with the whoreson rogue Falstaff. While Falstaff's actions are criticized, he nonetheless voices the iconoclastic argument against the honorable trappings surrounding the images of monarchy, honor, and war. Falstaff looks askance at the insincerity of King Henry and the posturing of the rebels; he is gentle with the foibles of Hal, but nol hesitant to remind the Prince of his questionable right to the throne. If the theological controversies plaguing the Catholic Church can be mapped onto the monarchy of the Lancastrian line, then we might find a secular attempt at transubstantiation in the effort of King Henry and the Prince to "transform" or to reform: an erasure of the reality so that the transcendent mystery of divine right may stand in its place. Just as those who refused to deny the presence of bread and wine after the consecration, Falstaff refuses to forget the usurpation and murder by which the monarchy was gained. He sees the human, vulnerable, and culpable king as he also acknowledges the splendor of his office. The substance of corporeal presence, in other words, must co-exist with the king's sacred body - a consubstantiation that iconoclastically undercuts the royal pomp.

SHAKESPEARE'S I Henry IV is also laden with the language found in anti-Catholic tracts against the worship and misuse of iconography. The target, however, is only peripherally the Catholic Church in this play (and those of the second tetralogy). Instead, the religious imagery of the Reformation is brought to bear upon the iconography of the monarchy. As early as 1547, Stephen Gardiner had drawn a connection between the blasphemy of idol worship and the treasonous betrayal of kingship:

The destruction of images containeth an enterprise to subvert religion, and the state of the world with it, and especially the nobility, who, by images, set forth and spread abroad, to be read of all people, their lineage and parentage, with remembrance of their state and acts. (A&M 6:26-32. Qtd. in Diehl 18)

Gardiner's linking of the need for religious as well as monarchial iconography - and his suggestion that an abasement of the former leads to an abasement of the latter - creates the basis for my reading of the reformationist agenda in / Henry IV. Although the play is not without its religious comment, for the most part, it uses the language of reformationist theology to address the political false gods placed on the pedestal vacated by the usurped King Richard II. "For Gardiner and other traditionalists," claims Diehl, "Protestant iconoclasm is a dangerous enterprise that undermines religious, political, and social order by calling into question the central symbols of that order. His fears suggest how threatening iconoclasm was to a powerful elite who depended on sacred and political images to assert and maintain their privileged positions in the social hierarchy" (Diehl 18-19).13 Those who stand to lose these privileged positions at court must fend off or make peace with the critiques from Eastcheap leveled at the new Lancastrian dynasty. King Henry, who as Bolingbroke had relished his camaraderie with London citizens, now sequesters himself behind the pomp of state. His son, Hal, plays the far more challenging game on the home turf of Falstaff, seeking to create his own royal image in the pragmatic and skeptical tavern world. Eventually, Hal, like his father, will retreat from the commoners, the criticism, and the threat of iconoclasm, the better to preserve his self-image.