Plump Jack

      There's an interesting (and very lengthy) article from today's NYTimes on the long-standing debate about how to interpret Falstaff, especially in light of the idolatrous proclamations of Harold Bloom in The Invention Of The Human. Bloom, as usual, seems to me to go too far in his indemnification of Falstaff, but the Johnsonian claim of Falstaff's ultimate venereality strikes me as equally unfounded. My feeling on Falstaff is that he's neither to be idolized (or idealized) nor demonized. He represents, at the very least, a Dionysaic possibility for the world that --finally-- cannot be allowed to triumph in the 'new world' that Hal's coronation will create. He eschews the pretensions of other characters in the while, while (very often unintentionally) exposing his own, and this seems to me a profoundly human characteristic; he's the hypocrite who's quick to remind others of their hypocrisy. Falstaff's degeneration in 2 Henry IV is not so much a damning thing as it is suggestive that all such tendencies to appease the lusts and the appetites eventually lead toward the germ of unintentional corruption. Such lusts and appetites are ideals not realities, impossibilities in a world that needs to be governed, in however Machiavellian a fashion, by reason and logic, by prudence and cold sensibility. We're meant, I think, to look on Falstaff with reserved fondness, and with an ounce of tragic inevitability. He's a glory in the moment, but a figure who doesn't accept his own anachronicity. In a way, he's the Platonical poet that has to be exiled from Hal-cum-Henry V's version of The Republic. He's also the voice of the common man, and the teacher whose wisdom must be accepted in part but rejected as practice. When we banish plump Jack, we are indeed banishing all the world, or 'the world' as a kind of Saturnalian locus: we banish him and we banish the simple glories of the world in favour of those things more strictly human, namely reason, logic, honour, and even duplicity, scheming and manipulation.

      It'll be curious to hear what Kevin Kline does with the part. Hopefully the reviews will come to my attention when the production appears.