Shakespeare’s Belly
Carnival and the Morality Tradition
Interludes and morality plays
Who?: originally performed by clergy, later servants or
wandering players and paid for by aristocratic patrons
Where?: indoors – halls of great households, inns
When?: in between courses at household feasts and
banquets – interlude literally means ‘in-between play’
Interludes and morality plays
Morality plays
Allegorical: not directly dramatising Bible stories
‘Everyman’ figure, Virtues and Vices:
Performers cast in Vice roles were often expected to ad-lib (Wiles
2005: 4-5);
The Vice would wear a motley coat and carry a wooden dagger.
Mankind was performed during the winter festive season, c. 1470,
probably for an aristocratic banquet somewhere in East Anglia
(though it could have been performed in an inn).
Audience includes seated ‘sovereigns’ and standing ‘brothers’.
The Medieval Hall
Mankind
All the characters in morality drama appeal directly to the audience,
offering advice, injunctions, suggestions etc.
The opening speech sets up Mercy as the voice of moral authority:
MERCY. Mercy is my name, that mourneth for your offence.
Divert not yourselves in time of temptation,
That ye may be acceptable to God at your going hence. (18-20)
On the other hand, Mischief, as David Wiles puts it, ‘is at once the
villain, whom the audience learn to shun, and the welcome gamemaker who makes the play possible’ (2005: 1-2):
MISCHIEF. I say, sir! I am come hither to make you game;
Yet, bade ye me not go out in the devil’s name,
And I will abide. (68-70)
Mankind: body vs. soul
MANKIND. My name is Mankind. I have my composition
Of a body and of a soul, of condition contrary.
Betwixt the twain is a great division;
He that should be subject, now he hath the victory. (193-6)
MERCY. Distemper not your brain with good ale, nor with wine!
Measure is treasure: I forbid you not the use;
Measure yourself ever! Beware of excess! (235-7)
TITIVILLUS. Arise, and avent thee! Nature compels!
MANKIND. I will into thi[s] yard, sovereigns! and come again soon;
For dread of the colic, and eke of the stone,
I will go do that needs must be done;
My beads shall be here for whomsoever will else. (561-5)
Mankind: Vices
‘In other early interludes written for professional troupes we find
that the Vices are venial rather than deadly sins. They offer man a
life of holiday pleasures. Pride is paired with Riot in Youth. Lustand-liking and Folly in Mundus et Infans set up carnivalesque
freedom as an alternative to ecclesiastical discipline.’ (Wiles 2005: 3)
New Guise, Nought and Now-a-Days as entertainers: dancers,
singers, practical jokers and play-actors
Mixture of scatological humour and blasphemy:
NOW-A-DAYS. I pray you heartily, worshipful clerk!
To have this English made in Latin:
‘I have eaten a dishful of curds,
And I have shitten your mouth full of turds.’
Mankind: dramaturgy of sinning and
redemption
NOW-A-DAYS (to Mercy). When ye will, go forth your way!
Men have little dainty of your play
Because ye make no sport. (265-7)
Inversion of authority: mock Latin, parodic version of
law court
Platea dimension: local and topical references
Audience participation: first the blasphemous Christmas
carol, then payment to see Titivillus
Mankind: dramaturgy of sinning and
redemption
TITIVILLUS. And ever ye did, for me keep now your silence!
Not a word! I charge you, pain of forty pence!
A pr[et]ty game shall be showed you ere ye go hence. (590-2)
Breaking complicity: the Vices’ cruelty becomes clear by
the end of the play as they gleefully help Mankind to kill
himself.
Henry IV as morality drama
The morality play as model for the story of the young Henry V was
already implicit in the earlier drama The Famous Victories of Henry V
(printed c. 1594).
Shakespeare follows this pattern to some extent…
KING HENRY. …Therefore, friends,
As far as to the sepulchre of Christ –
Whose soldier now, under whose blessed cross
We are impressed and engaged to fight –
Forthwith a power of English shall we levy,
Whose arms were moulded in their mothers’ womb
To chase these pagans in those holy fields
Over whose acres walked those blessed feet
Which fourteen hundred years ago were nailed,
For our advantage, on the bitter cross. (1.1.18-27)
PRINCE HARRY. For my part, I may speak it to my shame,
I have a truant been to chivalry. (5.1.93-4)
Falstaff as Vice
PRINCE HARRY. …that reverend
Vice, that grey Iniquity, that father
Ruffian, that Vanity in Years…
(2.5.458-9)
LORD CHIEF JUSTICE. You follow
the young prince up and down, like
his ill angel. (Part Two, 1.2.150-1)
Bardolph as junior Vice?
Francois Laroque describes
Falstaff as ‘Shakespeare’s most
extraordinary clown and expert in
all tricks – carnivalesque jokes,
theatrical ad-libbing, bibulous
word games or superb comic
monologues to obfuscate his lies
or cover his bad faith’ (2002: 70).
Falstaff as Vice
PRINCE HARRY. Pray God you have not
murdered some of them.
FALSTAFF. Nay, that’s past praying for. I have
peppered two of them. Two I am sure I have
paid – two rogues in buckram suits. I tell thee
what, Hal, if I tell thee a lie, spit in my face,
call me horse. Thou knowest my old ward –
here I lay, and thus I bore my point. Four
rogues in buckram let drive at me.
PRINCE HARRY. What, four? Thou saidst but
two even now.
FALSTAFF. Four, Hal, I told thee four.
POINS. Ay, ay, he said four.
FALSTAFF. These four came all afront, and mainly
thrust at me. I made me no more ado, but
took all their seven points in my target, thus.
(2.5.174-86)
Inversion of morality
PRINCE HARRY. I see a good amendment of life in thee, from
praying to purse-taking.
FALSTAFF. Why, Hal, ’tis my vocation, Hal. ’Tis no sin for a man to
labour in his vocation. (1.2.104-5)
FALSTAFF. Company, villainous company, hath been the spoil of me.
BARDOLPH. Sir John, you are so fretful, you cannot live long.
FALSTAFF. Why, there is it: come sing me a bawdy song, make me
merry. I was as virtuously given as a gentleman need to be; virtuous
enough: swore little, diced not – above seven times a week, went to
a bawdy-house once in a quarter – of an hour, paid money that I
borrowed – three of four times; lived well and in good compass:
and now I live out of all order, out of all compass. (3.3.9-19)
Falstaff as improviser and game-maker
‘Shall we have a play extempore?’ (2.5.282-3)
PRINCE HARRY. Do thou stand for my father, and examine me
upon the particulars of my life.
FALSTAFF. Shall I? Content. This chair shall be my state, this
dagger my sceptre, and this cushion my crown.
PRINCE HARRY. Thy state is taken for a joined-stool, thy
golden sceptre for a leaden dagger, and thy precious rich crown
for a pitiful bald crown. (2.5.379-85)
Falstaff improvises in iambic pentameter (2.5.395-401)
Carnival and Lent (Pieter Bruegel, 1559)
Carnival and Lent (Pieter Bruegel, 1559)
Falstaff as embodiment of Carnival
Falstaff as ‘All-hallown summer’ (1.2.157), a ‘roasted
Manningtree ox’ (2.5.458), ‘Martlemas’ (Part Two,
2.2.86), ‘wassail candle’ (Part Two, 1.2.145).
Social status: both a knight and a pickpocket
Anachronistic identity: ruffs, sack, playhouse, Pistol
Linguistic play: ‘If manhood, good manhood, be not
forgot upon the face of the earth, then am I a shotten
herring’ (2.5.128-9); ‘If I fought not with fifty of them,
I am a bunch of radish’ (2.5.187).
Carnival and the Elizabethan stage
David Wiles:
‘The Elizabethan theatre stood at a point of transition between
the modern concept of theatre as part of a leisure industry and
the medieval or pre-urban concept of drama as part of an
inversionary or carnivalesque mode of living life.’ (2005: xii)
Theatres in the Elizabethan period were distinctly carnivalesque
spaces, as Bristol argues:
‘Theatre occupies a marginal space as well as a marginal time. This
is pragmatically true of the earliest Elizabethan playhouses, which
were situated outside the formal jurisdiction of the city
authorities, although they remained de facto an integral part of
the city’s economic activity.’ (1983: 648)
Carnival and the Elizabethan stage
Carnival and the Elizabethan stage
Stubbes equated theatre with carnival:
‘… some spend the Sabbath day (for the most part) in
frequenting of bawdy stage-plays and interludes, in
maintaining Lords of Misrule (for so they call a certain kind
of play which they use), May games, church-ales, feasts, and
wakes: in piping, dancing, dicing, carding, bowling, tennisplaying: in bear-baiting, cock-fighting, hawking, hunting, and
such like; … whereby the Lord God is dishonoured, his
Sabbath violated, his word neglected, his sacraments
contemned, and his people marvellously corrupted and carried
away from true virtue and godliness.’ (Stubbes, Anatomie of
Abuses)
The Saturnalian pattern
Barber considers ‘the tendency for Elizabethan comedy to be
a saturnalia, rather than to represent saturnalian experience’
(1972: 36).
Northrop Frye (‘The Argument of Comedy’, 1948):
‘…the action of the comedy begins in a world represented as a
normal world, moves into the green world, goes into a
metamorphosis there in which the comic resolution is
achieved, and returns to the normal world.’ (Palmer 1984: 80)
(Is A Midsummer Night’s Dream ‘closed off ’ in this sense? Is
Henry IV?)
Audience complicity
Falstaff ’s direct address: Kempe’s stand-up?
‘There’s honour for you’ (5.3.32-3).
As with the medieval Vice, the dark side of Falstaff ’s moral
ambivalence becomes clearer as the play progresses:
PRINCE HARRY. I did never see such pitiful rascals.
FALSTAFF. Tut, tut, good enough to toss, food for powder, food for powder.
They’ll fill a pit as well as better. Tush, man, mortal men, mortal men. (4.2.64-7)
FALSTAFF. I have led my ragamuffins where they are peppered; there’s not three
of my hundred and fifty left alive, and they are for the town’s end, to beg during
life. (5.3.35-8)
Audience complicity
PRINCE HARRY. Why, thou owest God a death.
Exit
FALSTAFF. ’Tis not due yet. I would be loath to pay him before his day.
What need I be so forward with him that calls not on me? Well, ’tis no
matter; honour pricks me on. Yea, but how if honour prick me off
when I come on? How then? Can honour set to a leg? No. Or an arm?
No. Or take away the grief of a wound? No. Honour hath no skill in
surgery, then? No. What is honour? A word. What is in that word
‘honour’? What is that ‘honour’? Air. A trim reckoning! Who hath it?
He that died o’ Wednesday. Doth he feel it? No. Doth he hear it? No.
’Tis insensible, then? Yea, to the dead. But will it not live with the
living? No. Why? Detraction will not suffer it. Therefore I’ll none of it.
Honour is a mere scutcheon. And so ends my catechism. (5.1.126-40)
Audience complicity
But Harry gets there first!
PRINCE HARRY. I know you all, and will awhile uphold
The unyoked humour of your idleness.
Yet herein will I imitate the sun,
Who doth permit the base contagious clouds
To smother up his beauty from the world,
That, when he please again to be himself,
Being wanted, he may be more wondered at
By breaking through the foul and ugly mists
Of vapours that did seem to strangle him.
[…]
I’ll so offend to make offence a skill,
Redeeming time when men think least I will. (1.2. 192-214)
Indeed, at the end, his father tells him: ‘Thou hast redeemed thy lost
opinion, / And showed thou mak’st some tender of my life, / In this
fair rescue thou hast brought to me’ (5.4.46-9).
PRINCE HARRY. I shall hereafter, my thrice-gracious lord, / Be more myself.
(3.2.92-3)
Complicating the morality reading
KING HENRY. I’ll make a voyage to the Holy Land
To wash the blood off from my guilty hand. (Richard II, 5.6.49-50)
KING HENRY. My blood hath been too cold and temperate,
Unapt to stir at these indignities,
And you have found me; for accordingly
You tread upon my patience. But be sure
I will from henceforth rather be myself,
Mighty and to be feared, than my condition,
Which hath been smooth as oil, soft as young down,
And therefore lost that title of respect
Which the proud soul ne’er pays but to the proud. (1.3.1-9)
Complicating the morality reading
KING HENRY. And then I stole all courtesy from heaven,
And dressed myself in such humility
That I did pluck allegiance from men’s hearts,
Loud shouts and salutations from their mouths,
Even in the presence of the crowned King.
Thus did I keep my person fresh and new,
My presence, like a robe pontifical –
Ne’er seen but wondered at – and so my state,
Seldom but sumptuous, showed like a feast
And won by rareness such solemnity. (3.2.50-9)
Hotspur’s morality play
HOTSPUR. Shall it for shame be spoken in these days,
Or fill up chronicles in time to come,
That men of your nobility and power
Did gage them both in an unjust behalf,
As both of you, God pardon it, have done:
To put down Richard, that sweet lovely rose,
An plant this thorn, this canker, Bolingbroke?
And shall it in more shame be further spoken
That you are fooled, discarded and shook off
By him for whom these shames ye underwent?
No; yet time serves wherein you may redeem
Your banished honours, and restore yourselves
Into the good thoughts of the world again… (1.3.168-80)
Falstaff as figure of pathos?
KING HENRY V. I know thee not, old man. Fall to thy prayers.
How ill white hairs become a fool and jester!
I have long dreamt of such a kind of man,
So surfeit-swelled, so old and so profane;
But being awake, I do despise my dream.
Make less thy body hence, and more thy grace.
Leave gormandizing; know the grave doth gape
For thee thrice wider than for other men. (Part Two, 5.5.45-52)
Hal verbally (and perhaps literally) ‘kills’ Falstaff by stripping him
of his festive timelessness and locating him within (towards the end
of) a human lifespan.
Double-meaning of ‘old’: ‘Old Jack Falstaff ’ is enduring,
established, always renewed, representative of ‘all the world’; ‘old
man’ is near death.
Henry IV as saturnalia?
C. L. Barber:
‘The implications of the saturnalian attitude are more drastically and
inclusively expressed here than anywhere else, because here misrule is
presented along with rule and along with the tensions that challenge rule.
Shakespeare dramatizes not only holiday but also the need for holiday and
the need to limit holiday.’ (1972: 192)
PRINCE HARRY. If all the year were playing holidays, / To sport would be as
tedious as to work (1.2.201-2)
PRINCE HARRY. What, is it a time to jest and dally now? (5.3.55)
‘My own view… is that the dynamic relation of comedy and serious
action is saturnalian rather than satiric, that the misrule works, through
the whole dramatic rhythm, to consolidate rule.’ (Barber 1972: 205)
Henry IV as saturnalia?
For Terry Eagleton, carnival is
a licensed affair in every sense, a permissible rupture of
hegemony, a contained popular blow-off as disturbing and
relatively ineffectual as a revolutionary work of art (1981: 148).
In this version of carnival, argues Baz Kershaw,
the prevailing order is strengthened, for at the end of the
carnivalesque day the revellers return to a living whose rules
are set by the dominant ideologies, with energies dissipated
and their sense of the liberality of the regime re-animated.
The temporary transgression of a hierarchical normality is a
strategy for reinforcing it in the long run. (1992: 73)
Henry IV as subversive?
Play-acting as means of adopting other identities – and
their accompanying world-views…
‘All spectators perceived in this environment that their
own identities and moral codes existed in relation to
opposites and alternatives. No one mode of organizing
experience … had any overriding validity, any fixed
hierarchical precedence, within the physical ambit of the
playhouse.’ (Wiles 2005: 93)
Everything in relief; mockery not so much invalidation
as recontextualisation of a particular set of values?
Henry IV as subversive?
For Bakhtin, carnival offers something very different:
‘the chance to have a new outlook on the world, to
realize the relative nature of all that exists, and to enter
a completely new order of things’ (1965: 34).
‘Carnival with all its images, indecencies, and curses
affirms the people’s immortal, indestructible character.
In the world of carnival the awareness of the people’s
immortality is combined with the realization that
established authority and truth are relative.’ (Bakhtin
1965: 256)
References
Bakhtin, M. (1965) Rabelais and His World, trans. H. Iswolsky,
Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Barber, C. L. (1972) Shakespeare’s Festive Comedy: A Study of Form and its
Relation to Social Custom, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Bristol, M. D. (1983) ‘Carnival and the Institutions of Theatre in
Elizabethan England’, ELH, 50: 4, 637-654.
Eagleton, T. (1986) William Shakespeare, London: Basil Blackwell.
Gurr, A. (2002) Playgoing in Shakespeare’s London (2nd ed.), Cambridge:
C. U. P.
Kershaw, B. (1992) The Politics of Performance: Radical theatre as cultural
intervention, London: Routledge.
References
Laroque, F. (2002) ‘Popular Festivity’ in Leggatt, A. [ed.] The
Cambridge Companion to Shakespearean Comedy, Cambridge: C. U. P.,
pp. 64-78.
Palmer, D. J [ed.] (1984) Comedy: Developments in Criticism, London:
Macmillan.
Rackin, P. (1991) Stages of History: Shakespeare’s English Chronicles,
London: Routledge.
Weimann, R. (1987) Shakespeare and the Popular Tradition in the
Theater: Studies in the Social Dimension of Dramatic Form and Function,
Baltimore/London: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Wiles, D. (2005) Shakespeare’s Clown: Actor and Text in the Elizabethan
Playhouse, Cambridge: C. U. P.