folly: "want of understanding; weakness of intellect; criminal weakness; depravity of mind; act of negligence or passion unbecoming gravity or deep wisdom" (Samuel Johnson's Dictionary)

"The fool doth think he is wise, but the wise man doth know himself to be a fool." (Touchstone, As You Like It, V.1.30-31).

"to be noble might then come to mean: to entertain follies." (Nietzsche, 92).

"to punish my missed readings . . ." (student's version of King Henry IV's line, "To punish my mistreadings . . ."

Folly, as Johnson said of comedy, has been "particularly unpropitious to definers," struggling to conceive a notoriously indeterminate term. "Folly" is usually derogatory, pinned on any disbeliever or adversary, telling us as much about the judge as the judged, or ironically laudatory, as used by Touchstone or Nietzsche. While "folly" flaunts its maddening elusiveness, fools will rush in where wise men fear to tread. This essay tries nobly and probably foolishly to explore the concept of folly, investigate its pertinence for literary criticism, and test its usefulness in a consideration of literature's greatest fool, Falstaff.

Traditionally, especially in literature, fools are a potential source of wisdom or insight: foolish nonsense may be Foolosophy or somehow "jocoserious." As though to offer an alternate or competing "gospel," fools regularly cite Scripture. Sometimes the fool's gospel is explicitly promulgated, as when Erasmus's Folly mounts her podium or when Tristram Shandy brazenly proselytizes: "True Shandeism, think what you will against it, opens the heart and lungs, and like all those affections which partake of its nature, it forces the blood and other vital fluids to run freely thro' its channels, and makes the wheel of life run long and cheerfully round" (Sterne, 338-39). The fool's cross-eyed vision always threatens to become a revelation; what starts as impish play may end as The New Jerusalem or as Joyce's New Bloomusalem. Strong fools, like Erasmus's Folly, Panurge, Falstaff, Lear's Fool, Tristram Shandy, Dostoevsky's Idiot, Joyce's Bloom or Shem, make assets of their defects, and convert clowning into commentary.

Yet even such simple receptivity to folly risks taking Foolosophy too seriously, for the fool like a child in dress-up loves to impersonate and mock the grownups. Sorting out the tomfoolery from the moral is sometimes a fool's errand, but an unavoidable challenge of folly; a basic problem in contemplating clowns and fools is that they will say anything for the sake of a joke. Fools divide and confuse us, so that we either scant or privilege folly by reducing it to diverting babble or magnifying it into encoded prophecy. Sifting the jocose from the serious keeps readers busy and leaves little hope, or danger, that anybody will ever settle the issue, for here the border between fooling and meaning is always open. Compounding the difficulty of interpretation is that fools may be not merely bumptious, inspired clowns like Bottom but natural fools, disturbed or downright crazy. Natural or artificial, the Fool abides our questions but will not stay for an answer. Generalizations about folly must be heavily hedged or expressed paradoxically because the fool by definition eludes definition: he exists topsy-turvy, willy-nilly, to defy categories of understanding.

A great fool has amazing powers of disorientation: he is an avatar of disequilibrium, a spanner in the works, a local lord of misrule, yet he usually lands on his feet. To accompany a fool is thus to experience vicariously both exhilarating freedom and titillating fear, the pleasure and peril of exploring no-man's land, a shifting, evanescent, murky world of will-o'-the-wisps and fool's gold. It is not simply that we are tricked and illuminated by the fool's license to kid; more likely, we recapitulate time and again the movement of folly, discovering significance only to see it slip from revelation to mirage, or vice versa. Fools multiply vertigo, or create a hall of mirrors designed to amuse and calculated to discombobulate.

Like Feste moving between the courts of Orsinio and Olivia, fools in the medieval and early modern era "led an easy wandering existence" (Foucault, 8) and were not ordinarily segregated, banished, or incarcerated. Shakespeare's "primitive" genius confoundingly mingles clowns and kings to query our conception of separate realms of discourse, court and tavern, civilization and its discontents, reason and madness. By the eighteenth-century, as if in keeping with neo-classical decorum, the need to keep cultural categories distinct, clowns or fools were "normally" segregated or distinctly separated from society, except in places sanctioned for play like the circus where the nimble trapeze artists may be interrupted by clowns aping their betters and threatening to drag the spectators into the arena.

Foolosophers may be surprisingly erudite, allusive, obscure. They gaily pilfer material, and sometimes flaunt their thefts. Both Robert Burton and his closest follower in English literature, Laurence Sterne, make word-stealing a frequent theme and a running joke. Tristram Shandy castigates such nefarious practices in a denunciation largely cribbed from The Anatomy of Melancholy. For this eminent folly Finnegans Wake coins the term "stolentelling" (Joyce, 424). Mimicry of authority is a favorite foolish enterprise: allusiveness which in other discourse enables meaning furthers folly's infuriating handy-dandy: just as folly's central beliefs or values are expressed jocoseriously, so its sources or references are treated willy-nilly: the most basic questions, what to think and feel about the text, remain vexingly problematic.

In many of his metamorphoses, the fool is traditionally construed as innocent, sometimes literally insane ("a natural fool") or preternaturally child-like, saying whatever pops into his head without troubling about decorum, decency, propriety, or privilege. The fool never stops asking those annoying, persistent, children's questions: don't you want to play? why do I have to do that? who says? To the fool life is a "fond pageant" (MND: III.2.114) seen vividly, in sharp outline, but without depth, oddly focused on some fantastic realm invisible or irrelevant to others. We naturally find the fool's vision fetching and dubious, for like the child he perceives everything as bright, new, ever-changing, and reacts to events with provisional passion, all afire with excitement only until something else moves into view. Innocent and heartless and gay, the fool rarely fathoms anyone else's perspective, least of all another's suffering, and even direct confrontation with woe is unlikely to move the fool except to make fun of feelings. Like the little tyrant in Auden's "Mundus et Infans," the fool's infantile whims dominate his world: his immediate well-being is his top priority, to the exclusion of any competing consideration. What makes such behavior especially discomfiting is that we have all been just such tiny tyrants, taught or forced to do better whether we like it or not. Unremitting self-interest or selfish appropriations seem spontaneous and charming only in the very foolish or very young.

But foolish innocence is rarely simple: if the fool is more pure than others he is conversely more corrupt or tainted by evil. Childlike obliviousness shades into callousness or something even more horrific: the fool often appears not just disreputable but disgusting, monstrous, a "noxious pervert" (Joyce, 174). He is often depicted as a sporting devil or as mocking death itself, as in King Richard's image of monarchy and folly: "Keeps Death his court, and there the antic sits, / Scoffing his state and grinning at his pomp" (Richard II, 3.2.162-163). On the Elizabethan stage, Vice was often another name for The Fool, as we are reminded when Hal specifically denounces Falstaff as "that reverend vice, that gray iniquity" (1HIV: II.4.431-432). Enid Welsford notes that the terms "fool" and "knave" were often coupled, "but not always in quite the same way: for sometimes they were treated as synonyms, sometimes emphasis was laid on the distinction between them" (Welsford, 259). Folly thus implies both innocence, particularly childish inexperience, and sin, especially lewdness. In his elfish duality, Harpo Marx epitomizes the fool's two bodies--now all wide-eyed beguilement, now all predatory intent, like a demonic Shirley Temple. There is a suspicious intimacy between folly and evil, for the fool's heart may be a concealed weapon.

Affinity with evil includes intense focus upon the human body and its corporeal functions, rendered as obscene or repulsive. To highlight their vulgarity or fascination with what Bakhtin terms "the lower bodily element," fools get names like Bottom, Belch, and Falstaff. Since "folly," "love," and "desire" are so inevitably enmeshed, it almost goes without saying that folly will be enacted in sexuality. Erasmus's Folly, noting that "the human race is propagated by the part which is so foolish and funny that it cannot even be mentioned without a snicker" (Erasmus, 18), knows that sex is invariably an amusing subject. Erasmus's Elizabethan translator rendered "that part" as "that selie member," a felicitous phrase, for selie connotes both folly and innocence, and the fool's sexuality is a peculiar mixture of instinct and insouciance. Sex preoccupies professional fools yet their obsessive interest is surprisingly distant from erotic activity.

The fool's fate is often sexual frustration. Here again Falstaff is epitomal, his very name suggesting a superannuated phallus. "Is it not strange," ponders Poins, as he and the Prince spy on Falstaff and Doll Tearsheet, "that desire should so many years outlive performance?" (2HIV, II.4.242-243). In this regard, the difference between the fool and the comic hero is decisive; for figures like Odysseus, Tom Jones, or Zorba the Greek, life is a series of consummations. Unlike the comic hero, the fool rarely enjoys unproblematic sexuality, for folly focuses quite differently upon the body as a site of contestation between the ideal and the actual: folly precludes ideal fulfillment and stresses degrading descents. (It will be my sad duty as the chronicler of folly to investigate these sordid depths in dismaying detail.)

So sexuality like folly itself is both flamboyant and insubstantial, too much with us and strangely absent. Instead of making love, fools make discourse: "The fool also multiplieth words" (Ecclesiastes, 10.12), and fools like Falstaff, Don Quixote, Tristram Shandy, and Shem tend to channel libido into language. Instead of consummating desire, these great fools are forever wantoning with words, disseminating meanings, proliferating puns. Foolish yearning has other objects. Fools like Bottom, Tristram Shandy and Falstaff are constantly reaching out to the audience, figuratively in our faces, testing their continued significance through our reassuring concern and amusement. Don Quixote's staging of love-sick despair becomes a ritual of certification, rather than the cartwheels of a half-naked madman, only if Sancho is there to bear witness to Dulcinea. In this way too the fool is a liminal figure confounding our sense of what is and is not real; the border between real and imaginary is more wide-open than virtually anywhere, partly because the fool is always playing to two audiences, within and without the fiction. Often a choral figure, or privileged liaison with the audience, the fool may also highlight the make-believe nature of the show. The dichotomy between "play" and "real" breaks down under the pressure of folly.

Disabled yet enabled, invincible yet particularly vulnerable, the fool is always double, both lightning bolt and lightning rod: his bad luck might bring me good luck, so we make room for fools but keep our distance: there with/but for the grace of God go I. The Fool has a strange duality, like the medieval monarch, two separate "bodies," one enduring, potent, capable of revival, personifying survival and adaptability; the other marginal, susceptible, provisional, easily hurt. Indeed, closer to death: Shakespeare's single most enduring image of folly is one sublime fool Hamlet contemplating the skull of another. Folly is always a high-wire performance--potentially ingratiating and alienating. That we all play out the conflict between "civilization and its discontents" helps account for both the profound sympathy and the massive antipathy aroused by fools. What any civilized or socialized soul has had to suppress finds a surreptitious surrogate, or its opposite, the humiliated scapegoat, in the fool. Depending on what kind of balance between id and super-ego or Dionysian and Apollonian or Misrule and Government we strike or acknowledge, we have--are bound to have--radically different attitudes toward folly.

Since much of what we feel and believe about folly derives from Shakespeare, especially from Falstaff and reactions to him, the prudent student of folly, if one can imagine such a freak of nature, should begin with "The Henriad." Here Shakespeare's most majestic fool dramatizes folly's powers, perils, and paradoxes. Foolishly immersed in the "lower bodily element," Falstaff imagines himself somehow freed from natural law; simultaneously Caliban and Ariel, he is enmired yet aloft, immanent yet transcendent, that quality wonderfully characterized as Falstaff's "inexplicable touch of infinity" (Bradley, 273). When "Falstaff riseth up" (1HIV, s.d. after 5.4.110) from playing possum, his comic resurrection seems the definitive triumph, "the true and perfect image of life indeed" (1HIV, 5.4.117-119). This "great fool" (2HIV, 2.1.195) not only affirms life but outrageously redeems it with "counterfeit" or bogus scriptural idiom. His denial notwithstanding, he is always the "double man" (1HIV, 5.4.138), for one of Falstaff's favorite routines is a form of doubling he terms "damnable iteration" (1HIV, I.2.90), or the Devil Citing Scripture: " 'Tis no sin for a man to labor in his vocation" (1.2.184-85), "By this fire, that's God's angel" (3.3.35), etc. Preposterous or blasphemous as his "iterations" are, they are also consistent in that Falstaff, at least throughout Henry IV, Part 1, does have a vocation: that of Sublime Fool.

Like the Prince, the Fool constantly harps on redemption, metaphorically linking folly with divinity, or identifying sacred and profane. Though Falstaff cites Scripture to spoof piety and to promulgate Foolosophy, for a long time he confidently and efficaciously pronounces the enabling power of folly: "A good wit will make use of any thing. I will turn diseases to commodity" (2HIV, 1.2.234-35). He terms his annihilation of honor "my catechism" (1HIV, 5.1.141) and defines addiction to sack as "the first humane principle I would teach" (2HIV, 4.3.123). Falstaff seems graced with god-like powers, as when he joyously boasts, "The brain of this foolish-compounded clay, man, is not able to invent anything that intends to laughter more than I invent or is invented on me" (2HIV, 1.2.7-9).

But countering every vaunt of Falstaff is Prince Hal, involved in folly yet wary of it and ultimately averse to it. "Well," muses Hal, "thus we play the fools with the time, and the spirits of the wise sit in the clouds and mock us" (2HIV, 2.2.142-43). The Prince, playing the fool yet heeding the wise, and implying that the fool's days are numbered, locates himself simultaneously in and out of time. Also constructing his identity as dual, Hal is less complexly amphibious: his antic self enacts folly, but behind it is the "true prince" (1HIV, 2.4.270), biding his time. Confident that he himself has a true and essential identity, Hal assumes that Falstaff has one as well: "How might we see Falstaff bestow himself to-night in his true colors, and not ourselves be seen?" he asks Poins (2HIV, 2.2.169-70). The Prince is sure that Falstaff's essential nature is "open, palpable" (1HIV, 2.4.226), but that he himself can remain securely disguised. Hal's tellingly positions himself vis-a-vis folly: ""Well then, once in my days," Hal says, "I'll be a madcap" (1.2.142-43). Dr. Johnson's definition of the word madcap, "either taking the cap for the head, or alluding to the caps put upon distracted persons by way of distinction," underscores the ambiguity of Hal's folly: it can be seen as either "put upon" or intrinsic, or (as with Hamlet) some complex mixture.

In soliloquy (1HIV, 1.2.195-217), Hal envisions himself as folly's antithesis. The speech, beginning "I know" and ending "I will," resounds with regal certitude, and subordinates Falstaff's folly to its dread, disdained adversaries: authority, reality, time, truth. Hal's regal blank verse seems to contain and transmute much of his banter with Falstaff. Their exchanges began with Falstaff inquiring the time; now, alone, Hal makes time his theme--indeed presents himself as the master of timing: "I know you all, and will a while uphold / The unyok'd humor of your idleness . . . That, when he please again to be himself . . . I'll so offend, to make offense a skill, / Redeeming time when men think least I will" (my emphases). Hal's central self-image as "the sun" (1.2.197) recalls Falstaff's inventive characterization of his gang as "gentlemen of the shade, minions of the moon" (1.2.26) and implies the true order: the moon, waxing and waning, depends for its luster on the sun. When this son becomes "the sun," he will illuminate everything truly and brightly.

Hal plays the fool but will not be the fool. If Hal's repertory is less dazzling than that of the old maestro, Hal's relative deficiency as impresario is more than compensated by his magisterial sense of audience, timing, and reality. For Falstaff the show must go on, for life is always and only a show; the Prince knows better, including when to play what parts. Even kingship, he already realizes, is spectacle, so that (in sustained theatrical metaphors) he will "imitate the sun" and "show more goodly and attract more eyes / Than that which hath no foil to set it off" (1HIV, 1.2.197, 214-215). Hal has a fairly good idea of Falstaffian folly but Falstaff has no conception of royal reality or princely purpose. From Falstaff and in his apprenticeship in folly Hal learns how to "yoke" folly and make it work. The Prince's play is both parti-colored and many-minded.

Compared to the Prince, Falstaff has no identity, only a series of roles. Falstaffian folly has protean multiplicity and no essence. Falstaff's incarnations are voluntary, delightful, and ephemeral. All the world's a stage for his witty invention, multiple metamorphoses, playful pluralism: "Marry, then, sweet wag, when thou art king, let not us that are squires of the night's body be call'd thieves of the day's beauty" (1HIV, 1.2.23-25). Falstaff typically transforms reality (literally, the body) into a more appealing illusion (figuratively, beauty), a magical mastery of meaning through the pun on the thieves' "booty." Performing before the Prince who moments later swears to "imitate the sun" (1.2.197), Falstaff dubs himself one of "Diana's foresters, gentlemen of the shade, minions of the moon, and let men say we be men of good government, being govern'd as the sea is, by our noble and chaste mistress the moon, under whose countenance we steal" (1HIV, 1.2.25-29). The puns proliferate like the phases of the moon, that fitting emblem for the fool's "self."

Falstaff invariably applies the fool's double standard. Juxtaposing words with similar sounds and disparate meanings, puns provide Falstaff with opportunities for the Fool's Standard Reversal: "I would it were otherwise, I would my means were greater and my waist slenderer" (2HIV, 1.2.142-43), or "O give me the spare men, and spare me the great ones" (2HIV, 3.2.269-70). A variation on the reversal is the Old Switcheroo, as when Falstaff claims that were it not for the corrupting influence of the young Prince, he would be known for "pure and immaculate valour" (2HIV, 4.3.36-37). At its best, Falstaff's wit is fluently melodious and wondrously free, like his girth, "out of all compass" (1HIV, 3.3.20). Logic and reason are mundane, confining categories Falstaff invariably ignores or trammels: he is the epitome of contradiction, inconsistency, and incongruity. He is the master escape-artist: the Chief Justice notes that he is "well acquainted with your manner of wrenching the true cause the false way" (2HIV, 2.1.109-11). Unable to imagine how far the fool lives from the strictures of conscience, the Chief Justice, Hal--and we--regularly underestimate the fool's freedom from reality and identification with folly. Falstaff habitually outfoxes his adversaries by accepting and celebrating his foolish indignities. Invited to mock him, we laugh with him. Falstaff revels in folly everywhere, especially in himself, in contrast to satirists like Thersites or Jaques, who rail at vice ex cathedra. Not only witty in himself, Falstaff is "the cause that wit is in other men" (2HIV, 1.2.10).

Temporarily, Falstaff has the capacity to make himself what he will and as he likes it. He tries out various honorific titles--Diana's forester, gentleman of the shade, minion of the moon--and sports several names and a host of epithets: Sir John, Falstaff, Jack, "that huge bombard of sack, that stuff'd cloak-bag of guts . . . that reverent Vice, that gray Iniquity" (1HIV, 2.4.428-33), etc. No Shakespeare play provides more ways to "identify" someone, for this great fool is no one thing and requires others to see him as many things at once.

Capering, cavorting outrageously, fools like Falstaff incessantly appeal to the audience, "only" playing or fooling, yet gauging their worth in our responses. The Fool would have his way with us, to woo us or fool us. Pursuing the fool's quest for affirmation, Falstaff regularly soliloquizes or directly addresses the audience; perhaps because he does not know what his feelings are or what he is, he strives for validation earnestly and perpetually. With one exception we do not see Falstaff asleep or supine, but at work, directly in our faces, his eyes moving in anticipation of the response he might elicit, perspiring with the ardent effort of performance and craven longing.

Asserting his privileged reality yet underscoring the made-up make-believe, the fool is always playing to two audiences, within and without the fiction. Falstaff's toy like "dagger of lathe" (1HIV, 2.4.137) is thus emblematic: never "really" used, it is hacked to simulate strenuous activity in the Gadshill caper. Anywhere and everywhere he fashions props for that long-running show, "Falstaff's Follies." Falstaff, Rex Ludens, makes all the world his stage, and presides over the kingdom of Never-land.

Descriptions of Falstaff as a "stuffed cloak-bag" and "a creature of bombast" (1HIV, 2.4.451-452, 327) buttress the disorienting sense that this figure on the stage is really an actor in costume and greasepaint, enacting lines in the playbook. When "Falstaff riseth up," the resurrection of the fool reminds us that the "really" dead Hotspur and Blunt will also rise up, wash off their makeup, hang up their costumes, and mull their performances over an ale. In his great set pieces, annihilating honor or celebrating sack, Falstaff is an actor playing an actor, yet a figure somehow capable of stepping out of the play to assert independent life. Even Dr. Johnson, habitually wont to kick the rock, addresses Falstaff as though he were a real presence, no longer a literary invention but an enduring spirit or force still and always with us: "unimitated, unimitable Falstaff, how shall I describe thee?" (Johnson, Notes, 315). Hence the fool offers, along with his self-reflexive, skeptical Verfremdungseffekt, an alternative authenticity: he inspires foolish faith.

What it means to consider something (a sentiment, desire, lament) "real" is especially urgent in contemplating fools whose performances flaunt the artificiality of their art. What, if anything, does the playful, histrionic fool feel beneath all those crocodile tears? Hath not a fool senses, affections, passions--if you prick him, does he not bleed? Consider, for instance, Bradley's marvelous empathy for Falstaff, informed by the conviction that Shakespeare's language conveys the feeling and the meaning directly from the playwright to the reader's heart. Bradley enters Falstaff's joy: " 'Happy,' " says Bradley, is "too weak a word; he is in bliss, and we share his glory," for his enjoyment is "contagious." (Bradley, 261-262). Following Bradley, some readers regard Falstaff as not merely a privileged but a sanctioned voice. Roy Battenhouse's Falstaff has a " 'gravity' quite interior to his physical poundage: he lards the earth not merely with his sweat, but covertly with a Christian spirit as wise as serpents and as harmless as doves" (Battenhouse, 32-33). Harold Bloom regards Falstaff as "a comic Socrates," an inspired foolosopher "who is free, instructs us in freedom," like Hamlet, one of Shakespeare's two most charismatic figures, "in their plays, but not of them . . . Falstaff is a person, while Hal and Hotspur are fictions" (Bloom, 275, 276, 279).

The gospel of folly wins converts and provokes skeptics; fools are beloved and scapegoated. J. Dover Wilson designates Falstaff's stock repertory as "mock-repentance" or "mock-maudlin" and cannot even credit his love for Hal: "the old humbug's professions of affection are no more to be credited than his offers of marriage" (Wilson, 32, 95, 104). Alert to the danger of being hoodwinked by the master trickster, Wilson discredits everything Falstaff says or does as mere jest. So too John W. Draper, constructing Falstaff in the narrowest sense as "A Fool and Jester," finds nothing but "mock-moralizing proverbs, chop-logic and fake syllogisms, the poltroon's parade of "moralistic shreds and patches." (Draper, 458, 460). One man's foolish humbug is another man's Holy Fool.

Fools like Falstaff, Tristram, Quixote, and Shem provoke wildly differing reactions to such basic questions: is this wise or nonsensical, lovable or despicable, prophetic or antic, sincere or disingenuous? Since Falstaff will say or do anything for a laugh, one can never determine with confidence what the fool is or means at a given moment, for he means only what he is now playing. "Sincerity" and "fooling" are as riotously entangled as " purpose" and "play." In folly these are false dichotomies; to confound them is the fool's mission. Falstaff has no true colors but motley; he is always only fooling, ardently sincere about fooling us. More confusing, a fool like Falstaff makes his own feelings the main subject, grist for the mill, or the springboard for endless sallies, pirouettes, and antics. Folly is in this sense made out of the fool's guts--as Joyce's Shem writes, "over every square inch of the only foolscap available, his own body" (Joyce, 185) Falstaff as joker is the wild card in any game: he can be anything and trump everything.

Falstaff robustly embodies the power of folly and dimly, occasionally perceives its limits. "Thou seest," Falstaff comments, "I have more flesh than another man, and therefore more frailty" (1HIV, 3.3.166-68; my emphasis). The jest is also comically orthodox: If Jesus was right in saying that the spirit is willing but the flesh is weak, then Falstaff is correct in concluding, the more flesh, the more frailty. Falstaff's "therefore" distinguishes Falstaff from other great fools, in suggesting self-recognition. Like King Lear, "The Henriad" licenses folly to explore the intimate, necessary relationship between fool and king but differs from the later work in that it continually tests and ultimately contains folly by revealing its make-believe, ephemeral nature. Surprised and seduced by folly, we are released and clarified--rather as in Paradise Lost we are "Surprised by Sin" and glad of correction.

For Falstaff folly is an end in itself, while for Hal, it serves ulterior purposes. Hal's play is thus, in Freudian terms, tendentious even when it appears inconsequential.

The "play extempore" (1HIV, 2.4.280) displays and anatomizes folly. At first we delight wholeheartedly in Falstaff's improvisations, picking up props and incorporating Mistress Quickly's blather, all in "royal" blank verse and with suitably solemn demeanor. Fool's First Rule: to be funny, stay serious. Falstaff's sententious and moralistic discourse caricatures regal rhetoric (the King's opening speech suggests a penchant for over elaboration, and in 3.2 Henry delivers one of the longest speeches in all Shakespeare). Falstaff blends pompous inflation ("a question to be asked") and burlesque reduction ("That thou art my son, I have partly thy mother's word. . .") (2.4.410, 402ff). Right after Hal so devastatingly "takes off" one of the Percies/purses, and just before Hal vows to take the Percies for real and for good, Falstaff puns fruitfully: "Shall the son of heaven prove a thief and take purses" (409-10), Second Rule: two meanings, preferably contradictory, are more than twice as good as one.

"Deposing" the mock-king to play the king in earnest, Prince Hal also reveals the self behind his antic persona. But Falstaff continues to ignore or misread what Hal presents as "open and apparent" (2.4.264): that holiday will give way to workaday, that play must yield to responsibility, that make-believe is subordinate to reality. When Falstaff gloriously declares, "This chair shall be my state, this dagger my scepter, and this cushion my crown" (378-79), the Prince instantly revises his formulation, changing the fool's "shall be" to his own actor-king's "as if": "Thy state is taken for a join'd-stool, thy golden scepter for a leaden dagger, and thy precious rich crown for a pitiful bald crown" (380-82). Like the scene, and the whole play, Hal's revision moves us from participation in folly to more detached contemplation, both in and out of folly. Playing, he stresses the provisional, tentative nature of the game and underscores the disparity between show and truth: the mock-king's "precious rich crown" is really "a pitiful bald crown." Playing the King, Hal ruthlessly excoriates folly and denounces Falstaff as "a devil . . . that reverent Vice, that gray Iniquity, that father ruffian . . . worthy, but in nothing" (447-59).

Falstaff's remarkable reply, the "banish not him thy Harry's company" speech (2.4.466-80), crystallizes the appeal and limits of folly in this play. The speech is another magnificent recovery: once again the great fool seems to have " 'scaped by miracle" (2.4.165-166). But the resounding climax, "banish plump Jack, and banish all the world" (479-80) is a will-o'-the-wisp, as everyone but Falstaff must realize. Hal's devastating reply, "I do, I will" (481), accomplishes several things simultaneously. Besting Falstaff in the battle of wits, he decrees the fool's ancillary, dependent status, reaffirms his own command of language, situation, and self, progresses from the level of humour ("I do") to the higher plateau to come ("I will"), contemplates that future state as forthcoming and a field for continued mastery, and concludes the play extempore by announcing that as king he will, indeed, end the game. Ironically, Hal pronounces the sundering of kingship and folly in the very scene which had seemed to connect them most intimately. The knock on the door, signaling the sheriff's arrival, ends the game, despite Falstaff's desperate attempts to maintain the illusion. "I'll to the court in the morning," Hal declares (2.4.543-44), while Falstaff might as well murmur, "And I'll to bed at noon" (KL, 3.6.85). Although Falstaff doesn't yet disappear like Lear's Fool, his reign of folly is over. The Prince's time has come and that of Falstaff, "that vanity in years" (454), has most assuredly passed.

Even in his decline, the fool has unsettling force. Consider how Falstaff migrates in and out of the "real" military-political world of "The Henriad." Egregiously, hilariously out of place at Shrewsbury, he is accepted as part of the King's inner circle in 5.1. Ludicrously yet with apparent success he claims credit for defeating Hotspur, for in Part 2 he enjoys the benefits of his "good service" (1.2.61-62), and Coleville, upon hearing his name, surrenders without a fight. Such wacky inconsistencies figure the fool as a perennially amphibious figure, dual or split every which way. Shadow-like, the fool confounds our sense of reality. Evidently not all there, the fool sometimes seems to be all we have.

Yet in 2Henry IV, Falstaff, obviously enfeebled, becomes more the object than the source of humour. From his first entrance, a Renaissance star turn, he regards himself as an institution, full of comic hubris, short on self-irony, still enacting but no longer anatomizing folly; at times he resembles the vaunting and strutting Pistol, that disabled fool, full of bluster, void of power. Falstaff the Carnival King or Mock Monarch becomes, like Richard, "a mockery king of snow" (RII, 4.1.260). If Falstaff's credo in Part 1 is the exhortatory celebration, "Give me life" (5.3.59), in Part 2, his motto becomes the elegiac lament, "We have heard the chimes at midnight" (3.2.214). In Part 2, Falstaff appears asking his page for the doctor's diagnosis of his urine, and the boy's jesting rejoinder, like so many jokes in this play, is not cheering.

So constantly pressing are aging, disease, and death in Part 2 that Falstaff no longer asserts, or pretends to believe, that he is exempt from nature. "Well," he concedes to his adversary the Chief Justice, "I cannot last ever . . . I am an old man, you should give me rest" (1.2.213-14, 216-17). Often, as with Doll Tearsheet, he scarcely tries to be amusing, simply lamenting, "I am old, I am old" (2.4.271). Frequently, his jokes limp or backfire. Falstaff's vaunted wit deteriorates to merely mechanical inversions, what comics call the old switcheroo, as when the Chief Justice declares, "God send the Prince a better companion," to which Falstaff inevitably responds, "God send the companion a better prince!" (1.2.199-201). Surveying his pathetic recruits, he relies on wordplay that would once have been too obvious to utter: "Is thy name Mouldy? . . . 'Tis the more time thou wert us'd" (3.2.104-6). Worse, the very joke reminds us of the corruption of time, marring the fool like all men. Falstaff thus embodies another paradox of folly: full of life, he is closer to death. Gleefully parodying the King's Two Bodies, Falstaff finds that ultimately the joke is on the Fool. So the 'perpetually reviving' Falstaff is only temporarily spared. A liminal figure, he lives at the border, in closer contact with the pleasures and the debts of the body. Even the way he formulates his outrageous hopes, when he learns of the old King's death, reminds us of the death's-head staring Falstaff in the face: "I know the young king is sick for me" (5.3.135). At the coronation Falstaff is a sorry figure, "stain'd with travel," disheveled, "sweating with desire to see [Hal]" (2HIV, 5.3.24-25). At this point, perhaps more than anywhere else, the fool conveys genuine feelings, not unmixed with grasping greed and self-aggrandizing posturing, but (as he says to Shallow and Pistol) expressing "the zeal I had to see him" (l. 14): "It shows my earnestness of affection . . . My devotion . . . as if there were nothing else to be done but to see him" (2HIV, 16, 18, 26-27). The way Falstaff addresses his old friend seems calculated to maintain our affection while it alienates our regard. He bursts out, "God save thy Grace, King Hal! My royal Hal!" (l. 41), which indicates the momentum of triumph: the King is diminished from "Grace" to "Hal" to Falstaff's possession; the same proprietary diminution is implicit in "My King, My Jove! I speak to thee, my heart!" (l. 46).

The banishment of Falstaff is not humorous and it hurts. As a seemingly imperishable fool, exuberantly enacting folly, Falstaff liberates life from fact, in defiance of reason and pursuit of joy. Falstaff's force draws us all into the field of folly, so that the great fool is our double whose loss we deplore. Of course Falstaff has no hope of fulfilling Henry's condition for reconciliation ("And as we hear you do reform yourselves" [l. 68]), for that would require banishing folly, which means death: the fool cannot change; he must remain a fool. Falstaff, like Don Quixote, embodies the fate of folly, to celebrate life and confront death.

In Henry V, folly is a poor thing, relegated to the likes of Pistol, or contemplated elegiacally. The Hostess's account of Falstaff's death reminds us that the nearly irresistible charisma of the fool, his power to bewitch, competes with Shakespeare's fundamental premise: the necessity to subordinate folly to that higher authority Falstaff temporarily eludes and foils. The Hostess highlights the fool's innocence, as though he were "any christom child" (HV, 2.3.11-12), a creature of nature who "babbl'd of green fields" (l.17). Our final image of Falstaff is both ludicrous and poignant, as Mistress Quickly describes feeling his cold feet "and so up'ard and up'ard, and all was as cold as any stone" (ll. 25-26). Even yet we might fool ourselves into believing that he descends "up'ard," for like his regal counterparts, this "great fool" (2HIV, 2.1.185) remains indelibly all-too-human and larger-than-life.

WORKS CITED

Bakhtin, Mikhail. Rabelais and His World, tr. Hélene Iswolsky. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1984.

Barton, Anne. "Falstaff and the Comic Community," in Essays Mainly Shakespearean. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1984.

Battenhouse, Roy. "Falstaff as Parodist and Perhaps Holy Fool," Publications of the Modern Language Association 90 (1975).

Bevington, David, ed. Henry IV, Parts I and II: Critical Essays, New York: Garland, 1986.

Empson, William. The Structure of Complex Words. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1967.

Erasmus, Desiderius. The Praise of Folly. Tr. Clarence H. Miller. New Haven: Yale UP, 1979.

Foucault, Michel. Madness and Civilization: A History of

Johnson, Samuel. A Dictionary of the English Language. London: Times Books, 1979.

---------. "Notes on Henry IV," in Rasselas, Poems, and Selected Prose, ed. Bertrand H. Bronson. San Francisco: Rinehart, 1971.

Joyce, James. Finnegans Wake. New York: Viking Press, 1968.

Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Gay Science, ed. and trans. Walter Kaufman. New York: Vintage, 1974.

Shakespeare, William. The Riverside Shakespeare, ed Evans, Levin, et al. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1974.

Sterne, Laurence. The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman. Ed. James Aiken Work. New York: Odyssey, 1940.

Welsford, Enid. The Fool: His Social and Literary History. London: Faber And Faber, 1935.

Willeford, William. The Fool and His Scepter. Chicago: Northwestern, 1969.

Wiles, David. Shakespeare's Clown: Actor and Text in the Elizabethan Playhouse. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1987.

Wilson, J. Dover. The Fortunes of Falstaff. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1944.