On a Passage from Shakespeare’s Henry IV Part 2

Shakespeare — Henry IV Part 2 — Act V, scene V

I know thee not, old man: fall to thy prayers;
How ill white hairs become a fool and jester!
I have long dream’d of such a kind of man,
So surfeit-swell’d, so old and so profane;
But, being awaked, 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.
Reply not to me with a fool-born jest:
Presume not that I am the thing I was;
For God doth know, so shall the world perceive,
That I have turn’d away my former self;
So will I those that kept me company.

“I know thee not old man.” Though I tried to think of this line to share with a friend as we sauntered about the petite Shakespeare Garden in the Brooklyn Botanical Gardens, I couldn’t summon it for a few minutes. And then it ejected from my mouth like a bolt from the blue and I shimmied, a reverberation from all that pathos — the jolt having made a new space in the central channel of my body. Why would the rememberance of this line produce a marvelous fit, something overelectric in the midst of a slog of ennui that I’d carried for months? It’s not only the sentiment, it’s the texture (Emerson: “I read for the lustres”), the six one-syllable words which could be all stressed or iambic — and how the simplicity of this icy rejection is then embossed with the next line: “How ill white hairs become a fool and jester!” Have I rejected or have I been rejected? But, of course. But by a non-lover? I believe so. Yet, mainly in our anodyne time, no one comes out with the bilious tart phrase and metaphorically slits the throat of another familiar — it’s all about pulling away, dissipating by degrees, burning the bridge out of view. Shakespeare writes into the scene.

It’s a moment that is the crux of the two plays — everything has been swimming toward this “confrontation,” the syllables of all the dialogue bend into this long, lancing speech of the new King’s. An inflection point — a bloodless rejection — no death, so it haunts more. I can’t help think of Orson Welles’s glistening, fattened face Falstaffed on 35mm film, as he kneels down and takes in the words as if from a giant, due to how Welles specially shot the scene in Chimes at Midnight. So perhaps a bit of film history plays in the background of this recollection, since I have multiple memories of reading the plays, the Welles, and now the summoning of the piercing line. Four or five strips of beauty playing over each other à la some hermetic Brakhage-like film. And that miasma of image and sound tells me, Yes and No, but also, Yes — I have rejected and I have been rejected, a doublet even involving only one person — a holy hurt that I’d thought to carry as a combined albatross and hairshirt, though I saw the other side of a new kingdom called Unconditional Love — and a sort of serum colored my blood to continue on, ranging over this randy earth.

It’s a rejection of age, too — “how ill white hairs become a fool and jester!” But surely the King tells Falstaff what he already knows? He delights in larding the earth and knows his weight lends him to death sooner and makes many jests toward that early doom. He is a fool and jester, but also the wisest man in the kingdom. He will go on, in Merry Wives of Windsor, but as Mark Van Doren writes, “Only the husk of Falstaff’s voice is here.” And then the powerful syntax builds after those two opening lines: “I have long dream’d of such a kind of man, / So surfeit-swell’d, so old and so profane”: “so-so-so.” Other rhymes and alliterations build up: “do despise my dream”; “hence” and “grace”; “grave doth gape”; “thrice wider”; “I am the thing I was.” The rythmn is in the heat of candor: it prickles, it dessicates, it kills spirit and heart. William Hazlitt: “His language is hieroglypical. It translates thoughts into visible images. It abounds in sudden transitions and elliptical expressions. This is the source of his mixed metaphors, which are only abbreviated forms of speech. These, however, give no pain from long custom. They have, in fact, become idioms in the language. They are the building, and not the scaffolding to thought.” The hieroglypical language of the passage behooves us to cast a cold eye on the scene, on the King, and on life itself because we know what it must be like for some, and truly, the many. “The grave doth gape” reminds me of the infamous poster of Jaws, with the shark’s mouth wide, that “sold” the film more than anything. These words are, per Hazlitt: “struck out at a heat, on the spur of the occasion, and have all the truth and vividness which arise from an actual impression of the objects. His epithets and single phrases are like sparkles, thrown off from an imagination, fired by the whirling rapidity of its own motion.” And as they are struck out they enter the theatregoer or the reader in a certain manner — a sweet contagion of sorts — they come as challengers, but also friends, to imbue and also to cross-examine: Have you had this experience? Maybe it had not been named, but now it is…? That is why the rejection is so supreme, and, of course, sovereign, and each time it occurs the hundreds of hearts watching shatter in one-hundred different ways because rejection is so basic and primal and it’s hard to get over it, but somehow, we do, unless we don’t. We constantly get rejected or reject and for Shakespeare to make a monument to rejection — a block of words (26 lines all told), hieroglyphical in kind, to bring over the mind as one brings healing hands around an anxiety-laden head, does everyone the ultimate service. Here is the feeling — this tragedy of spirit in the words of Hazlitt:

It has been said that tragedy purifies the affections by terror and pity. That is, it substitutes imaginary sympathy for mere selfishness. It gives us a high and permanent interest, beyond ourselves, in humanity as such. It raises the great, the remote, and the possible to an equality with the real, the little and the near. It makes man a partaker with his kind. It subdues and softens the stubbornness of his will. It teaches him that there are and have been others like himself, by showing him as in a glass what they have felt, thought, and done. It opens the chambers of the human heart. It leaves nothing indifferent to us that can affect our common nature. It excites our sensibility by exhibiting the passions wound up to the utmost pitch by the power of imagination or the temptation of circumstances; and corrects their fatal excesses in ourselves by pointing to the greater extent of sufferings and of crimes to which they have led others. Tragedy creates a balance of the affections. It makes us thoughtful spectators in the lists of life.

The king’s “former self” is forsaken, becoming the chimera one can’t live by anymore. It can’t be so simple that Falstaff getting rejected makes it easier for me to (or to hold off on rejecting) or is it? It feels loathsome to spray this prized speech with the retardant of self-help, but I’m through being too hard on myself — my “former self” met Shakespeare and his enigmas on a quite different heath. “If it’s ever spring again,” per Thomas Hardy (and it always is, until it isn’t), I’m here to remark more on love and forgiveness. The hard and the heavy have their place, but there is no doubt that Hazlitt is right about tragedy and if slimy afternoon talkshows existed in 1810 (they had the lecture circuit) Hazlitt would have told his audience the stakes in no uncertain terms — a much more enlightened Dr. Phil. We owe it to life to carry the language and lessons of Shakespeare in our wallets and purses (our heads), this is the way to generative humanity, not only optative. Are any fatal excesses corrected in myself when I know that what the king says about Falstaff is cold, but true? I don’t know, but I’m off into the next room to give my wife a hug.

From the in-progress book Passages, Sentences, and Lines

Others in the series — On Joseph McElroy, On Guy Davenport, On William Hazlitt