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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
As early as I Henry VI, Shakespeare begins the examination of false images in state iconography, setting the ambiguous but forthright Joan of Arc and her "voices" against the hollow authority of the English military leader Talbot, and, incidentally, the honor of the Lancastrian dynasty. Her iconoclastic irreverence and subsequent punishment anticipate the monarchial critique offered by Falstaff, as well as the banishment he must endure. Phyllis Rackin notes the similarity between the characters of Falstaff and Joan, who both stand against the empty words of their rivals: "The play [I Henry VI] defines [Talbot's and Joan's] conflict as a contest between English words and French things, between the historical record that Talbot wishes to preserve and the physical reality that Joan invokes to discredit it" (Rackin 151). What Rackin calls "Joan's reductive, nominalistic attack[s]" threaten the "formal edifice" of the Talbot English myth (153). Edward Berry also aligns Falstaff and Joan, claiming that "Joan foreshadows Falstaff, anticipating [him] in her sarcasm, her indifference to honor in the face of physical reality, [and] her witty perception of life's incongruities" (Berry 17).
Falstaff's real life counterpart, Lord Cobham, like the Maid, is "martyred"; Cobham even suffers hanging (for the charge of treason), before a fire is kindled beneath the gallows and he is burned, like Joan, for his heretical actions and statements. His death duplicates not only the contemporary punishment of heretics up through Shakespeare's time, but also the practice of iconoclasm in the burning of effigies. Reformation Europe of the sixteenth century saw a number of ritual burnings of images at the stake, of statues placed in the pillory, even of the town executioner carrying out the hanging of those religious effigies (Michalski 76, 91). As late as 1599, St. Bartholomew's Day was commemorated in London with the ritual burnings of statues of St. John and the Virgin Mary (Michalski 93). And as early as November 1389, Henry Knighton offers an account of two Lollards in Leicester who suffer public penance for burning a wooden statue of St. Catherine. Knighton indicates that "a feature of this Lollard sect [is] to hate and attack images, and they preached that they were idols, and scorned them as counterfeits (simulacra)" (Aston 133). Closer to home, Holinshed records evidence of Cobham's own iconoclastic defacement of images. Although Cobham, at large after his prison escape, avoids capture on this occasion, his men and some incriminating evidence are seized. In their hiding place
were found books written in English, and some of those books in times past had beene trimlie gilt, limned, and beautified with images, the heads whereof had beene scraped off, and in the Letanie they had boltted foorth the name of our ladie, and of other saints, till they came to the verse Parce nobis Dommine. Diuerse writings were found there also, in derogation of such honor as then was thought due our ladie. The abbat of saint Albons sent the booke so disfigured with scrapings & blottings out, with other such writings as there were found, vnto the king; who sent the booke againe to the archbishop, to shew the same in his sermons at Paules crosse in London, to the end that the citizens and other people of the realme might vnderstand the purposes of those that then were called Lollards, to bring them further in discredit with the people. (Holinshed, 3:92)
