Babble of Green Fields

By John Skow

FALSTAFF

by ROBERT NYE 452 pages. Little, Brown. $8.95.

Sir John Falstaff, fat rogue, globe of sinful continents, candle-mine, sweet beef, whoreson round man, is not a character who requires fleshing-out. Prince Hal's drinking chum can hardly be made rounder or thirstier. Nor does he present a puzzle: his belly is his biography. Nevertheless, Robert Nye, a British poet who lives in Scotland, has had the colossal cheek to come forward with this swollen, rumbustical bladder of a book, supposedly Falstaffs bragging last confessions.

Nye's counterfeit turns out to be exactly what it should be: grossly indelicate, boozily funny, unstoppable as a belch or a rush of sack to the kidneys. To say that it goes on being boozy and indelicate too long is to say, no doubt, that it is Falstaffian. The author's conceit is that Falstaff is now in his 80s. Busily dictating his memoirs, he passes on to a series of horrified clerks his digestive uproars, his sexual fantasies about his pubescent niece and his rages at his cook Macbeth ("Macbeth has murdered sleep, and my digestion"). Falstaff acknowledges that there was a report of his death at the Boar's Head Tavern in Eastcheap some years earlier but explains it as a harmless charade, staged with Mistress Quickly's help, to cool the passions of his creditors.

He is dictating in the year 1459, of course unaware that nearly a century and a half later an unscrupulous playwright, ravenous for material, will ransack his memoirs for the better parts of the three plays (The Merry Wives of Windsor and Henry IV, Parts I and II) in which he will appear as his roistering self. The ungrateful Shakespeare cast sturdy Falstaff as a buffoon instead of a wit, and a coward instead of a discreetly valorous realist. There were good explanations (ignored by Shakespeare) for each of his acts of apparent cowardice. Says Falstaff. Naturally a fighter of his experience and ferocity could have vanquished the disguised Prince Hal, when Hal stole his loot from him after the highway robbery lark (Henry IV, Part I) at Gadshill. But that would have destroyed the confidence of the next King of England, so Falstaff let Hal win. And as for stabbing dead Hotspur and claiming to have killed him in battle, well, Hotspur might not really have been dead. Why take chances? The worst libel of honest Falstaff occurs in Henry VI, Part I, a play written earlier than the Prince Hal histories and probably only partly by Shakespeare; here "Sir John Fastolfe" disgraces himself on the battlefield. Nye's Falstaff makes the incident honorable if not heroic.

Unthrifty Son. The playwright also appropriates the changing character of Prince Hal from Falstaffs history, virtually without alteration. When Bolingbroke, the nearly crowned Henry IV, sneers despairingly at "my unthrifty son ... young wanton and effeminate boy" in the fifth act of Richard II, he is no distance at all from Falstaffs characterization of the young Hal as "the lad who was twice sick in my hat." Hal's cold renunciation of Falstaff on coronation day in Henry V is-- begging the difference of a thy and a thee-- word for word the same in the play and the autobiography: "I know you not, old man. Fall to your prayers."

Readers further learn that Shakespeare stole from Falstaff in other dramas too. Hamlet's elegant admonition, "There are more things in Heaven and earth, Horatio,/ Than are dreamt of in your philosophy," was really first uttered by Falstaffs disreputable pal Bardolph to confuse a policeman in a bawdy house. And that as early as 1459, Falstaff was reflecting: "I think for Hal the whole world was a stage and all the men and women merely players."

So much for the Borrower of Avon. Falstaff calls himself an English Bacchus, and he is one -- word-drunk but still thirsty, sloshing his language about, banging his mug for more. He gossips, slanders, tells randy jokes ancient even in the 15th century and borrows stories when he runs out of his own. Henry IV, he announces, "was something of an in somniac, and his struggles to get to sleep weren't much assisted by his habit of wearing his crown in bed." He claims to have seen Joan of Arc disguised as a deer. He talks of a blustering poet, "all red and arrogant and full of spondees." He spins a long unlikelihood to illustrate a proverb made up on the spot: "The Devil is most likely to strike when you have your trousers down." Oops! Bad taste? Upon my soul, mop it up. Yes.

Soul! "I should say that my soul was about the size of Spain, though in a better spiritual condition ..." Hey, Mistress Quickly! Another round for Robert Nye and his fat friend!

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