Falstaff: Shakespeare’s Most Socially Discarded Character

We remember Falstaff on this, Shakespeare’s putative birthday, because we relate to him as a wayward form of kin, a relative in need of reforming, a character in whom we see aspects of our own dented personalities: the character who tells lies and his story whos and not much else, because Falstaff is not a man of action. He fails to carry out the Gadshill robbery plot planned in the first part of Henry IV, and instead, runs away from his assailants. Despite this, he is ready with a tall tale to impress his audience. But what else does Falstaff have to rely on but his capacity for consumption of dry white wine or ‘sack’, and then the gift of the gab?

But in 2021, as we approach Shakespeare’s putative birthday, there are more profound reasons why he is pertinent. a potentsocial misfortuneHis status is painfully precarious, depending upon the good grace and favour – as well as the good humour -- of his friend and associate, the future king of England, Prince Hal, soon to be Henry V. It is the two Henry IV plays these two plays that most firmly announces his character: his capacity for banter and word play, his role as the butt of jokes and sharp repartee, which often go too far. In the end, we align ourselves with the feckless Falstaff most endures in the imagination because of that unforgettable denunciation at the end of the second part of Henry IV by his former friend, the Prince, now King Henry V: “I know thee not old man, fall to thy prayers.” We feel for Falstaff because of his sudden loss of royal favour, his rapidly sinking social patronage. Publically rebuked and cast out from the social order.by his former friend, it is hard to imagine what else he could be feeling but a stinging sense of shame. We feel that shame with him.

Falstaff is the man of the current moment in a world asking us to reconsider who we are both publically and privately. Lockdown has forced us allsudden reversals in our mode of living and working; to face our shifting public and private reputations, our social standing. History seems to have been radically interrupted as we rush into rapid and jerry-rigged arrangements. Those of us fortunate enough to do so are now working, compressed narrow space of our laptop screen. But lockdown has exposed the harsh differences between those who can live through a laptop and those whose lives do not afford even the most basic necessities. By the end of June 2020, research from UK homeless charity Shelter showed thatand even with an eviction ban in place, 98,300 homeless households were living in temporary accommodation, a rise of 7% in just three months and 14% in a year. and were petitioning their local council for emergency housingMeanwhile a report this month in Time looked at how, , inin the United States, spread of Covid meant that the essential work of homeless charities was ended; soon after,the population began to die: not from the virus, but from lack of basic food and shelter. “There was not one indoor place to go from March until fall of 2020” said one regional charity worker Globally, Covid has dramatically exacerbated all the harsh inequalities we already knew were there.

How, I wonder, would Falstaff have fared during this extended period of lockdown? As a literary character, he experiences a dramatic reversal of fortune from the man in history to the character we meet in Shakespeare’s plays. Falstaff of history oppression. lso a courageous knight who served under Henry IV in France and Waleshis show of military courage. sfictional on; heand the future king of England,: , and one that resonates more intimately with our contemporary situation. Falstaff spends most of his time “fast asleep behind the arras,”; his sleeping arrangements, like his days, are chaotic and out of time; his place of abode is precarious and dependent upon pleading yet another favour with the Hostess of the tavern, Mistress Quickly, to whom he is shamefully indebted.

Falstaff’s story has a particular personal resonance with me. As such, he is the central character of my recent book, No Boys Play Here, the second part of a semi-autobiographical coming of age story. Aged 14, I adopted Falstaff as my outsider friend during a time when I was looking for a way out of my dysfunctional childhood home. In 1986, I was reading about Falstaff and his friend, Prince Hal, on top of Highdown Hill in West Sussex. My seaside town of Littlehampton was one of several southern English coastal towns falling into destitution during the Thatcher years. into the1980s, Littlehampton;: In some sense, my hometown was being banished from the national imagination, relegated to the side lines of history.

I grew up in an eccentric household that housed its own version of a monarch: this was my Aunt Di, who governed my childhood home with the same severity that actor Jeremy Irons gives to the role of Hal’s father, old King Henry IV, in the popular television dramatisation adapted by Richard Eyre, The Hollow Crown (2013). Irons’s King Henry reminds us just how much real tension there is between the authoritarian rule of the father-king and the chaotic lifestyle of his son and his dissolute friend. My struggle was also against a familial regime that threatened to swallow me up; a regime full of whim and seething chaos wrapped around a charismatic form of Christianity. In truth, this regime was a type of personality disorder, an extension of my aunt’s fluctuating moods; but perhaps a disturbed personality is what it takes to recruit followers. Certainly, she was very successful, particularly in the early years, at generating a cult following.

As a teen I read of Falstaff’s dismissal by his former friend, Hal; I read of old King Henry IV’s shame over his son’s unseemly behaviour; and I knew that soon someone would be out on their ear and it might be me. I had to act quick before someone else did, and so I signed myself into the care of local authorities and became a child of the state. Looking back now it was a rather extreme thing for a fourteen-year-old child to do, but it was an emergency measure and the only thing then I could think to do to extract myself from a mad form of controlled chaos. I dismissed myself before I was dismissed.

At the heart of Falstaff’s own cruel dismissal is a sense of shame at his excessive size, his pure bulk, the embarrassing amount of space he takes up. “Make less thy body hence, and more thy grace,” says King Henry to his friend.

But there is something more at stake here than just Falstaff’s wide girth. At an early age I understood Falstaff functioned as a symbol for those parts our society would rather ignore; those parts of family life and our own life we’d prefer to hide behind the arras and cover with a curtain. In telling my own story, I am pulling back the arras which covers that recess of social shame. The men in my family all met with shameful or ignominious endings: they were thrown out onto the streets, or to the local doss house. My wrathful aunt wanted no men around. Her personality has become a way for me to think more broadly about those parts of contemporary society that shame us, those dismissed parts. No Boys Play Here take Falstaff as a figure for those left behind; those who have failed to find a foothold on the social ladder: men without salaries and homes; discarded men turning back into children. These are men ill-equipped to meet the demands of a society run through software updates and slick technologies; my father had trained to be a nurse but had hurt his back on a building site as a young man and so was never able to transfer fully into a professional life. He survived life and his own pain by drinking, until drink and his own despair devoured him, for being a man. My Uncle James, who lived with us for a while, followed a similar, if more muddled trajectory

As a child, growing up in a home without men, I often wondered where men, in particular, slept. On the seafront, it seemed, when I went looking, clutching a can of lager for warmth and good cheer. Men, as I understood them, were homeless and dispossessed because they had no means of growing up; no reliable forms of work, or social and cultural infrastructure to hold them in place;., and died as a result of excess alcohol and perhaps some nasty drunken fighting. I learned as a child that men drink, and they fight, and their drunken fighting is a hopeless attempt at playing someone brave: someone seen.

Shakespeare’s Falstaff doesn’t fight; indeed, during the battle of Shrewsbury as Shakespeare tells it, he lies down on the ground and conceals himself. Falstaff is never expected to play hero; out on the fringe he plays the coward, which in the realm of military battle, is something less than human.

In my reading of him, Falstaff is both rejected father figure and rejected child; in his demeanour and relationship to others, he fluctuates across the age spectrum and fails to find a foothold – a stable home - at either end. I see Falstaff still living with us today. Spatial deprivation and low-quality housing was the reality of my childhood, but it is also the reality of many children in England today which has left 585,000 children in danger of becoming homeless: children hovering in poor quality, temporary accommodation (The Children’s Commissioner report, 21 August, 2019). Children have been dumped and left inunfurnished office blocks in the middle of industrial estates with their desperate single mothers; children stuck behind that dark arras. As a child, growing up in a home without men, I often wondered where men slept, Men, as I understood them, were homeless and dispossessed because they had no means of growing up; no reliable forms of work, on social and cultural infrastructure to hold them in place; and so, they remained as children.

“Make less thy body hence,” takes on a particular significance in an era of austerity when chronic lack of food and shelter have become dire national and international emergencies. Across the world, Falstaff’s hungry body still lives with us. Take one startlingly statistic from the U.K: last year, during the first six months of the pandemic, leading food aid charity the Trussell Trust reported a 47 per cent increase in the number of emergency food parcels needed, Misfortunate Falstaff has spawned several creative afterlives. Robert Nye’s fictitious autobiography, Falstaff (1976), is a creative rampage against that hulking bulk of a character who Nye sees begotten on the figure of the giant Cerne Abbas, a Neolithic monument inscribed on top of a Dorset hill. Nye’s Falstaff is certainly not making less his body, and this experimental novel, hurtling through a series of bawdy and ludicrous adventures, makes Falstaff a relative of Joyce’s Leopold Bloom: another man firmly fixated on and in his body. Nye’s point is that the character of Falstaff has left indelible cultural marks; despite his infamous acts of cowardice, we like to tell and retell stories of the fat knight who chooses to feign death and lie on the ground during the Battle of Shrewsbury, July 21, 1403, while those around him give up the ghost for the sake of honour. “To die is to be a counterfeit” argues Falstaff, for to choose anything but life is not to be true to life (1 Henry, V, iv). To choose death is to be no man at all, and so Falstaff continues to live, as an excessive consumer of life’s force. In Giuseppe Verdi’s opera, he is the fat knight from The Merry Wives of Windsor mixed with the drunken coward of Henry IV, who seduces women because he needs their funds to keep him stocked with pickled herring and sherry. Food and drink are Falstaff’s currency and his bank is his belly; but it is women who bankroll him and they can never meet his needs. Falstaff’s appetite is insatiable: for food, drink, sex, for carfrom October to December 2020 there was a 61% increase in the rise of foodbank use; during the start of the pandemic almost (The Trussell Trust, 14 Sept, 2020). Feeding America, a national foodbank charity, estimates that, by the end of 2020, (Independent, 25 Nov, 2020). In place of reliable state welfare, we seem to have returned to an era of charitable handouts: a culture of patrons, benefactors and donors, of volunteers

There were no men in my childhood home and so I wondered where men slept. On the seafront, it seemed, when I went looking, clutching a can of lager for warmth and good cheer. As the Thatcher years rolled in, my seaside town became increasingly deprived and dissolute; as the remnants of the middle class moved out, the one private school in the centre of town closed down: Rosemead, a pretty school with a rose garden surrounded by a flintstonesomething more internal to us: a part ofourselves we’d rather hide from; elements of our personalities that have surfaced during this period of repeated lockdowns. Solitary living, or at least living without much social context, has led to some painful self-realisations: that we rely on social habits – the pub, the restaurant, the social drink, the social call – to survive ourselves. Without the drinking, gormandizing Falstaff somewhere among us, we seem to fall into strange and often dysfunctional habits.

Lockdown has brought chaos to daily routines and knocked us off our perches. Teenagers and students without in-person teaching have been, in some sense, ‘fast asleep behind the arras’, as Falstaff is, snoring until midday reports Prince Hal. Falstaff is also the embodiment of shameful habits, those parts of ourselves we wrap in half-truths and lies: our propensity to rely on food and drink as comforts. One of three of us increased our alcohol consumption last year (Cambridge Independent, 31, Dec, 2020). Shame is the social world boring holes of judgment through our private lives; those inner recesses we pull the curtain over hoping no one will see. Falstaff spends much of his time prone, drunk and asleep; in some sense he is sleeping off his shame. As a society we seem to be sleeping through our shame . And so, I keep returning to this image of the arras, this concealed space. It is a useful metaphor for that gap which separates one aspect of ourselves from another – our social self, so reduced by the pandemic -- and the self behind closed doors. Which now is more functional?

After more than a year of global lockdowns, most of us long to rehabilitate our social self. A recent Netflix retelling of Shakespeare’s history plays, The King (2019) has Falstaff rather incredibly reincarnated as a hero. Actor Joel Edgerton’s Falstaff begins as an indolent, drunken thief, but soon elevates himself to the role of Prince Hal’s close advisor, and then army captain, after Hal becomes king. His rise is positively meteoric compared to Shakespeare’s slack and feckless thief who fails even to carry out the plan to rob on Gadshill. Edgerton’s Falstaff is a far cry from the figure of bulky, cumbersome shame that looms across the screen in the 1965 production, Chimes at Midnight, directed by and starring Orson Welles. Welles is a sly trickster but clearly a character filled with self-loathing, unable to find a place for himself in a world built on brutal military codes. During the frenetic battle scenes at Shrewsbury, Falstaff wanders around looking for a place to hide in a world; the speed and ferocity of the charging soldiers wielding their hard-edged swords makes the soft, rotund body of Falstaff seems painfully vulnerable: displaced, homeless, a nobody locked out of recorded history. His only solution is to opt out of battle: to lie down on the ground and pretend none of this is happening; to conceal himself from the fight that would no doubt end him. It is a coward’s choice, but it is familiar to all of us in a world that has been radically, perhaps irrevocably, interrupted.

Falstaff is a reflection of a social state, a failed social self; but more universally, he is also

Sally BayleyMay 18, 2026essays, falstaff, shakespeare, Sally BayleyComment