`If Sack and Sugar Be a Fault'

“If sack and sugar be a fault, God help the wicked! If to be old and merry be a sin, then many an old host that I know is damned: if to be fat be to be hated, then Pharaoh's lean kine are to be loved. No, my good lord; banish Peto, banish Bardolph, banish Poins; but for sweet Jack Falstaff, kind Jack Falstaff, true Jack Falstaff, valiant Jack Falstaff, and therefore more valiant, being, as he is, old Jack Falstaff, banish not him thy Harry's company, banish not him thy Harry's company: banish plump Jack, and banish all the world!”

Banish not Falstaff, indeed. It can’t be done. Without looking we see him daily walking and arguing with Don Quixote, Emma Bovary and Bellow’s Tommy Wilhelm – fictional characters so real and familiar they supplant some of their flesh-and-blood cousins. The lines above are from Henry IV, Part I, one of Orson Welles’ sources for Chimes at Midnight. I’ve watched it again just 16 months after the last time, which I wrote about here. It’s becoming one of my favorite films, certainly my favorite among Welles’, and much of this has to do with the character of Falstaff. I’m surprised how much I like him. He’s a prideful coward and liar, and endlessly sympathetic, perhaps because he’s big and round enough to remind us sooner or later of ourselves. Shakespeare almost dares us to like him, a dare made more difficult for a contemporary audience by Falstaff’s dimensions. We like our heroes steroidal or lean, not spherical.

I’m reading The Arts (1937) by the Dutch-American writer-illustrator Hendrik Willem Van Loon, who was much loved by Guy Davenport. The book is staggeringly ambitious – at 680 pages, of Falstaffian proportions -- and carries a formidable subtitle: The Story of Painting and Sculpture and Music as Well as All the So-Called Minor Arts from the Days of the Caveman Until the Present Time. Van Loon’s manner is not scholarly. He is confiding, intimate, conversational and gossipy, so I was not surprised to find this in his chapter on the Baroque:

“The period of the Baroque was the ideal age for fat people. Perhaps it would be better to call them heavy. For most of these men led very active lives. The extra weight they carried about with them was not an evidence of physical laziness. It was the result of heavy living, heavy eating, heavy drinking, of deep slumbers after heavy meals. All of which contributed to make this an ideal age for the portrait painter.”

This is Falstaff-as-burgher, veneered with respectability. Falstaff contains multitudes. So does Les Murray, the ample-figured Australian poet who celebrated his 70th birthday on Oct. 17. Watching Chimes at Midnight again reminded me of the final line of Fredy Neptune, Murray’s wonderful novel-in-verse. He might be speaking of Falstaff:

“But there’s too much in life: you can’t describe it.”