'And Being Fap, Sir'

The first performance of Shakespeare I saw on the stage, as part of a seventh-grade field trip, was The Merry Wives of Windsor. It was probably judged safely kid-friendly, despite the presence of Falstaff, because the school assumed we wouldn’t understand a word of it. My sole memory is a lot of drunken bustling about the stage. It’s not a play I read very often and the plot is hardly worth mentioning. Even Falstaff disappoints. In his Lectures on Shakespeare (ed. Arthur Kirsch, 2000), Auden devotes a single paragraph to the play and describes it as “very dull.”

 

The saving grace, at least occasionally, is the language. The banter of Falstaff and his cronies – Bardolph, Pistol and Nym – is colorful. In the play’s first scene, Slender accuses them of getting him drunk and robbing him after he passes out. Bardolph replies, “Why, sir, for my part I say the gentleman had drunk himself out of his five sentences,” to which Sir Hugh Evans responds: “It is his five senses: fie, what the ignorance is!” Back to Bardolph: “And being fap, sir, was, as they say, cashiered; and so conclusions passed the careires.”

 

Fap I guessed at and confirmed with Dr. Johnson’s Dictionary, which cites Bardolph’s usage and defines it as: “Fuddled; drunk.” The OED declares the word obsolete and gets quickly to the point: “drunk, intoxicated.” Only one other citation is given: “Whilst getting daily fap with ale, / How can he daily hope—to wear a tail?” The source is Psyche; Or, The Soul: a Poem in Seven Cantos (1818) by John Brown (1754-1832).

 

I’ve always sensed a sadness in Shakespeare’s understanding of Falstaff. He’s more than a clown, more than a villain. In his essay “The Prince’s Dog” (The Dyer’s Hand, 1962), Auden writes of Falstaff and his companions:

 

“The drunk is unlovely to look at, intolerable to listen to, and his self-pity is contemptible. Nevertheless, as not merely a worldly failure but also a willful failure, he is a disturbing image for the sober citizen. His refusal to accept the realities of this world, babyish as it may be, compels us to take another look at this world and reflect upon our motives for accepting it. The drunkard’s suffering may be self-inflicted, but it is real suffering and reminds us of all the suffering in this world which we prefer not to think about because, from the moment we accepted the world, we acquired our share of responsibility for everything that happens in it.”

 

Auden is the sort of critic I most value. Without implying that your understanding of a given work or character is wrong, he suggests another way of looking at the matter.