Falstaff’s Socratic Method: Is Falstaff an Authentic Sage?
In this article, I want to discuss some parallels between Plato’s Socrates and Shakespeare’s Sir John Falstaff. First, I will look at the trial (or “trial”) of each, and second I will look at how each analyzes honor and the underlying psychology of those views, particularly the relation between honor and envy.
Critics over the years such as Harold Bloom, Michael Platt, and others, have recognized parallels between Falstaff and Socrates, with Harold Bloom calling Falstaff an “authentic sage” and a “comic Socrates” while pointing out a number of affinities between the two (Bloom, 275). However, I think that the extent of the affinity hasn’t yet been fully excavated, and I want to attempt to uncover a bit more of it here.
First, a brief background of the characters.
Socrates and Falstaff: A brief primer
Socrates was an ancient Greek philosopher famously depicted in the dialogues of his follower Plato. In these dialogues, Socrates questions a wide range of people about their claimed knowledge of virtues such as courage, temperance, and the like, and ultimately reveals the emptiness of these claims while Socrates also claims ignorance of the virtue in question. With his namesake method, Socrates eventually outraged so many powerful Athenians that he was tried and sentenced to death by the people of Athens. His trial is recounted in Plato’s Apology.
Sir John Falstaff is a character in Shakespeare’s historical plays Henry IV Part 1 and 2, which depicts the transformation of 15th-century English heir-apparent Prince Hal from a rebellious tavern dweller to the patriotic king Henry V. Falstaff, a largely comic character who embodies a laundry list of vices, is Prince Hal’s primary companion during Hal’s rebellious period. When Hal returns to royal life and becomes king, he banishes Falstaff from his presence and Falstaff dies soon after. This banishment is foreshadowed in a roleplay put on by Hal and Falstaff during an important scene in Henry IV Part 1.
Part one: The trial
Questioning conventional values
Both Socrates and Falstaff question the conventional values of their time, and as a result, are charged with crimes (Socrates literally, Falstaff figuratively). So, let’s start with an example of this sort of value questioning. Here is Falstaff on honor:
Can honor set to a leg? No. Or an arm? No. Or take away the grief of a wound? No. Honor hath no skill in surgery, then? No. What is honor? A word. What is in that word “honor”? What is that “honor”? Air. A trim reckoning. Who hath it? He that died o’ Wednesday. Doth he feel it? No. Doth he hear it? No. ‘Tis insensible, then? Yea, to the dead. But will it not live with the living? No. Why? Detraction will not suffer it. Therefore, I’ll have none of it. Honor is a mere scutcheon. And so ends my catechism.
Shakespeare, Henry IV Part 1, 5.1.132-142
And here is Plato’s Socrates on honor:
[W]henever a man succeeds in satisfying that part of his nature—his covetousness of honor by envy, his love of victory by violence, his ill-temper by indulgence in anger, pursuing these ends without regard to consideration and reason […] (Republic 586c-d) are not the pleasures with which they dwell inevitably commingled with pains, phantoms of true pleasure, illusions of scene-painting, so colored by contrary juxtaposition as to seem intense in either kind, and to beget mad loves of themselves in senseless souls […]?
Plato, Republic, 586b-c
We can observe some similarities in these respective treatments of honor. Falstaff chronicles the physical torment that can beset the honor-seeker, while Socrates chronicles the inner torment. Falstaff identifies honor as “air” while Socrates identifies honor’s pleasures as “illusions.”
Interpellation and self-examination
This sort of willingness to question a conventional value like honor leads Hugh Grady to see in Falstaff an “ability to subvert ideological interpellation through theatricality (Grady, 613).” Interpellation is a concept introduced by 20th century philosopher Louis Althusser as an explanation for how dominant social institutions maintain social order and form human consciousness by transmitting their values to individuals. According to Althusser, it is by the process of interpellation that we come to be the who we are.
Falstaff, according to Grady, represents an undoing, or at least undermining, of this process and in so doing the freeing himself of the influence of dominant social structures. And what is the process of freeing oneself from the influence of interpellation but self-examination of the sort that Socratic advocates (as we will see below)? Hans-George Gadamer describes the motivation for Socratic self-examination as follows:
[T]he prevalent understanding of [the human] proves to be inadequate. The knowledge about justice [or any virtue] to which one lays claim in possessing it is a natural understanding of what is regularly shared by the modes of behavior that are accepted by the public as just. But each of these modes of behavior can nevertheless be bad, or the opposite mode of behavior can also be good. […] Thus such a natural understanding of arete [virtue] on the basis of what is common to behavior does not represent a real grasp of what arete is, insofar as one generally contents oneself with the appearance of what is accepted as just, brave, and so forth.
Gadamer, Plato’s Dialectical Ethics, 54-55
Socrates, like Falstaff, understands that the values we learn by way of something like interpellation are not a reliable guide for living well, because the modes of behavior that interpellation reinforces are not infallibly good. Therefore, we benefit from being critical of these modes of behavior and their underlying justifications. We do this through self-examination or ‘the examined life.’
The examined life
Now let’s move on to the trials of Socrates and Falstaff. Here I want to draw attention to a number of parallels between the roleplay between Falstaff and Hal in Henry IV Part 1 and of Socrates’s defense in Plato’s Apology.
While defending himself at trial, Socrates declares:
[T]o talk every day about virtue and the other things about which you hear me talking and examining myself and others is the greatest good to man, for the unexamined life is not worth living.
Plato, Apology, 38a
For Socrates, the examined life consists in discussing virtue every day, particularly with his Socratic method of examination as discussed above.
Now, let’s turn to Act 2, Scene 4 of Henry IV, Part 1, where, in a tavern Prince Hal is summoned to visit his father, King Henry IV. Falstaff knows the king disapproves of Hal’s current lifestyle, and this leads to the following exchange:
FALSTAFF: Well, thou wilt be horribly chid tomorrow
when thou comest to thy father. If thou love me,
practice an answer.PRINCE: Do thou stand for my father and examine me
Shakespeare, Henry IV Part 1, 2.4.385–88
on the particulars of my life?
Hal apparently knows that when Falstaff asks him to practice an answer to his father, this is Falstaff’s exhortation to examine his life. This seems to me like a deliberate echo of Socrates’ exhortation to the people of Athens to examine theirs, as quoted above.
The echo of Socrates becomes louder when the roleplay begins and Falstaff, acting as the king, speaks of virtue three times in quick succession (“there is a virtuous man whom I have often noted in thy company” […]” I see virtue in his looks” […] “there is virtue in that Falstaff”(1H4 2.4.432–44), thereby making the question of Falstaff’s virtue the de facto topic of the roleplay and reminding us of Socrates’ exhortation to “talk every day about virtue.”
After this, at Hal’s insistence, Hal and Falstaff switch roles, with Falstaff taking the role of Prince Hal while Hal acts as the king. Prince Hal then unleashes a torrent of verbal assaults on Falstaff, his playfulness seeming to take a dark turn into serious and hateful negative judgment as he criticizes Falstaff’s age, weight, and his indulgence in food and drink, among other things, and finally condemns Falstaff as, “That villainous abominable misleader of youth, Falstaff, that old white-bearded satan,” (1H4 2.4.479–80) evoking the charges brought against Socrates by the Athenian State that he “corrupts the youth and does not believe in the gods the state believes in (Apology 24b; Platt 180).”
Falstaff responds to Hal’s charges with a profession of ignorance about the harm of which he has been accused:
FALSTAFF, as prince: But to say I know more harm in him [Falstaff]
Shakespeare, Henry IV Part 1, 2.4.483–84
than in myself were to say more than I know.
This, I think, can be read as a further echo of Socrates. W. K. C. Guthrie explains that for Plato’s Socrates, “virtue is nothing less than the knowledge of good and evil, […] or in more Socratic and less biblical language, the truly beneficial from the useless or harmful (Guthrie, 261, 174; see, for example, Crito 49c).”
Through this lens, we can read Falstaff’s disavowal of knowledge of harm in response to Hal’s charges against him as equivalent to Socrates’ disavowal of knowledge of virtue at his trial (“I myself should be vain and put on airs, if I understood these things [the virtues]; but I do not understand them (Apology, 20c).”
Following his latent expression of Socratic ignorance, Falstaff goes on to put up a defense against the charges by Hal (who might be seen as the personified State), just as Socrates defends himself from State charges at his trial. Falstaff concludes:
That he [Falstaff] is old, the more the pity; his white hairs do
Shakespeare, Henry IV Part 1, 2.4.485–98
witness it. But that he is, saving your reverence, a
whoremaster, that I utterly deny. If sack [wine] 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 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 they Harry’s company, banish not him thy
Harry’s company. Banish plump Jack, and banish
all the world.
Falstaff’s defense here can be read as Socratic, too. In Aristotle’s terminology this can be seen as a peirastic argument, or an attempt to refute an interlocutor’s argument not by introducing one’s own beliefs from which to argue but instead by drawing out the implications of the interlocutor’s argument to expose its deficiencies. Aristotle traced peirastic argument to Socrates precisely because Socrates disavowed any knowledge of virtue on which basis he could credibly introduce his own beliefs on the topic. Therefore, the only method of refutation available to Socrates was peirastic argument (Vlastos, 94–95).
The absurd implication of Hal’s accusations that Falstaff draws out here is that if Hal truly believes these characteristics of Falstaff’s are individually condemnable, then as common as they are Hal has essentially condemned the entire human race. To illustrate this point, let’s take a quick look at the contemporary U.S. as an example: about 74% of adults are overweight, about 17% are over age 65, and about 17% engage in binge drinking. While there will certainly be some demographic overlap, it also seems the case that not many will be spared from Hal’s judgments. It turns out that “Banish plump Jack, banish all the world” is not so far from the truth.
Therefore, amid all of the wit, Falstaff undermines the credibility of Hal’s charges in Socratic fashion, using only the implications of Hals’ own argument, much like Socrates undermines the charges brought against him by his accuser Meletus by peirastic argument in the Apology (24c–28a). (There, Socrates gets Meletus to admit to believing that Socrates alone corrupts the youth of Athens, and then from there gets him to admit the highly implausible belief that everyone in Athens but Socrates makes the youth better.)
Part two: Honor, envy, and overflowing generosity
Honor as a competitive good
Now I want to return to Socrates’ treatment of honor quoted above and note the implied relationship he draws there between honor and envy: “[W]henever a man succeeds in satisfying that part of his nature—his covetousness of honor by envy […] (Republic 586b).”
For Plato’s Socrates, envy and the pursuit of honor are intimately related (Herrmann, 76), owing to the fact that reputational goods such as honor are competitive goods, or goods that cannot be shared without loss (Shaw, 173–74). Therefore, when one covets a reputational good such as honor, one is likely to feel envy as a pained longing for the honor that one believes one lacks and also – and perhaps more importantly – as a desire to prevent others from sharing in the honor that one believes one has (Dickie, 382). There simply isn’t enough honor to go around – honor for one person means dishonor for another. Therefore, if one seeks honor, it means one also seeks to keep it from others.
This relationship between honor and envy is made clear by Shakespeare in the very first scene of Henry IV Part 1, where King Henry IV learns of a recent victory in battle by the young Harry “Hotspur” Percy, a competitor for honor with Henry IV’s son Prince Hal, and says:
Yea, there thou mak’st me sad, and mak’st me sin
Shakespeare, Henry IV Part 1, 1.1.77–85
In envy that my Lord Northumberland
Should be the father to so blest a son,
A son who is the theme of Honor’s tongue […]
Whilst I, by looking on the praise of him,
See riot and dishonor stain the brow
Of my young Harry. (1H4 1.1.77–85)
Henry IV is envious of Hotspur because Hotspur has won for himself honor in battle, and this additionally causes Henry to be pained at the relative dishonor of his own son, who is out palling around with the disreputable Falstaff.
But Hotspur, the very “theme of Honor’s tongue” according to Henry IV, also suffers envy from his covetousness of honor. He speaks of his desire to “pluck up drowned honor by the locks / So he that doth redeem her thence might wear / Without corrival all her dignities (1H4 1.3.210–212).” Despite the honor he has already won for himself, at least in Henry IV’s view, Hotspur is not satisfied. The competitive nature of the desire for honor is laid bare when Hotspur speaks of wanting honor all for himself, without rival.
This singularity to which the desire for honor points is also made apparent by Prince Hal, who warns Hotspur, “think not, Percy / To share with me in glory anymore. / Two stars keep not their motion in one sphere / Nor can one England brook a double reign (1H4 5.4.64–67).” Hal understands that in feudal England, honor culminates in the glory of the king – a glory for one person alone.
Wit as a cooperative good
Socrates contrasts competitive goods such as honor with cooperative goods, or goods that one can share without loss and that therefore need not spark any envy (Shaw, 175). These are goods of the mind. For example, if you ask me if I know any good jokes, I can share one with you without losing it myself. Cooperative goods that are put to use in the pursuit of competitive goods, such as a ‘trade secret’ that is protected for its financial value, is therefore still a competitive good (Shaw, 173). So, for a good to be truly cooperative, one must be able to share it freely without fear of loss.
Cooperative goods are especially important for Socrates because for him the foundation of true love and friendship is freedom from envy (Phaedrus 253b–c, 256e–257a). Freedom from envy is not merely the negation of envy, but its contrary state – a state of “overflowing generosity of spirit,” of wanting others to enjoy the goods that oneself enjoys (Dickie, 381). This is made possible by valuing cooperative goods above competitive goods. Doing this enables one to freely share the greatest goods that one has, as if they overflow out of oneself.
Socrates demonstrates this overflowing generosity of spirit linked with freedom from envy all throughout Plato’s dialogues, though a particularly relevant example comes from the Theaetetus, where Socrates describes his function for his interlocutors (his conversational partners) as a midwife who freely helps to give birth to their wisdom (Theaetetus 138e). In Shakespearean language, we might say that Socrates is not only wise himself but the cause of wisdom in other men (Platt, 180).
This, I think, is how we can interpret Falstaff’s claim, “I am not / only witty in myself, but the cause that wit is in / other men (2H4 1.2.10–12).” As Bloom puts it, “[m]aking others wittier is Falstaff’s enterprise. Not only witty in himself, he is the cause of Hal’s wit as well (Bloom, 275).” Falstaff not only tolerates but enjoys when Prince Hal and others make witty jokes at his expense. This generosity likely would not be possible if he were covetous of honor or other reputational goods. If that were the case, jokes made at his expense might actually cost him. Instead, he revels in them.
Numerous critics have recognized this quality of generosity in Falstaff. A.C. Bradley describes how Falstaff “makes himself out more ludicrous than he is, in order that he and others may laugh (Bradley, 68).” Van Doren says, “And we have not failed to note that magnanimity which after all has been from the beginning the groundwork of his humor (Van Doren, 133).” Walter Raleigh says, “it was part of Falstaff’s magnanimity that disgrace had never made the smallest difference to him (Raleigh, 22).” Samuel Johnson describes Falstaff’s “unfailing power of exciting laughter, which is the more freely indulged as his wit is not of the splendid or ambitious kind but consists in easy escapes and sallies of levity, which make sport but raises no envy (Johnson, 3).” Corbyn Morris claims he “possesses generosity, cheerfulness, alacrity, invention, frolic, and fancy superior to all other men (Morris, 9).” And on.
Now, I don’t want to deny that Falstaff is greedy for wealth at times. The particularly egregious act of leading his soldiers into battle at Shrewsbury without having adequately equipped them, as was his responsibility with the provisions given to him from the royal treasury, is not something to try to explain away (nor is, really, any of his activity involving money). But for the sake of brevity, I also don’t want to dive into these issues here. So I’ll suffice to say on traditional lines that Falstaff has some great qualities and some lamentable ones.
My purpose here is just to suggest that Falstaff does seem to live a life free from envy, a life in which he shares his greatest good – his wit – with ‘overflowing generosity.’ Shakespeare may have intended to suggest, like Plato does through Socrates, that this quality of overflowing generosity is rooted in a freedom from envy intrinsically linked with his deconstruction of the desire for honor.
In conclusion
It appears to me that Shakespeare intentionally echoes Plato’s Socrates in a number of important ways in the character of Falstaff. In this article, we’ve explored how Falstaff uses something like the Socratic method during a roleplay with Prince Hal, which culminates in his reducing to absurdity Hal’s hateful charges against him. We’ve also seen how Falstaff’s rejection of the reputational good of honor may be linked with an envy-free generosity of spirit that Socrates views as the basis of true love and friendship, at least as it relates to Falstaff’s generous sharing of wit, if not his greed for wealth. This, if true, may help to explain how Falstaff, despite doing many questionable or offensive things throughout the two Henry IV plays, has nevertheless remained an audience favorite for centuries (as I was writing this article, Falstaff was even voted the fan favorite Shakespeare character in a reddit.com poll).
As Harold Goddard puts it:
Curiously, there is no more convincing testimony to this double nature of the man [Falstaff] than that offered by those who are most persistent in pointing out his depravity. In the very process of committing the old sinner to perdition they reveal that they have been unable to resist his seductiveness. Professor [Elmer] Stoll, for instance, dedicates twenty-six sections of a long and learned essay to the annihilation of the Falstaff that his congenial lovers love. And then he begins his twenty-seventh and last section with the words: “And yet people like Falstaff!” […] Before his next paragraph is over, Stoll has called Falstaff “the very spirit of comradeship,” “the king of companions,” and “the prince of good fellows.”
Goddard, Henry IV, 111, in H. Bloom (ed.) Falstaff (Major Literary Characters)
This “very spirit of camaraderie” that causes Falstaff to be “the king of companions,” I contend, is the capacity for true friendship founded in freedom from envy, which leads him to freely share his greatest gift – his wit – with others, to inspire them to exercise their wit in turn, to delight even (or especially?) when the wit he inspires is directed at his own weaknesses, and then, if his friends’ jokes about him take a dark turn toward hatefulness, as Hal’s appear to do during their roleplay, to deftly reduce that hate to absurdity and get on with the play.
References
Bloom, H (1998). Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human. Riverhead Books.
Bradley (1992). The Rejection of Falstaff. In H. Bloom (Ed.), Falstaff (Major Literary Characters) (1st ed., pp. 94–109). Chelsea House Publishing. https://archive.org/details/falstaff00bloo
Dickie, M (1993). The Place of Phtonos in the Argument of Plato’s Phaedrus. In Rosen, R. and Ferrel, J (Eds.) Nomodeiktes: Greek Studies in Honor of Martin Ostwald (1st ed., pp. 379–196). University of Michigan Press
Gadamer, H. G. (1931). Plato’s Dialectical Ethics Phenomenological Interpretations Relating to the Philebus. R. Wallace (Trans. 1991). Yale University Press
Goddard, H. (1992). Henry IV. In H. Bloom (Ed.), Falstaff (Major Literary Characters) (1st ed., pp. 110–123). Chelsea House Publishing.
Grady, H. (2001). Falstaff: Subjectivity between the Carnival and the Aesthetic. The Modern Language Review, 96(3), 609–623. https://doi.org/10.2307/3736733
Guthrie, W (1975). A History of Greek Philosophy, Vol. IV: Plato, the Man and His Dialogues, Early Period. Cambridge University Press. https://archive.org/details/w.-k.-c.-guthrie-a-history-of-greek-philosophy-4/W.-K.-C.%20Guthrie%20-%20A%20History%20of%20Greek%20Philosophy%204/mode/1up
Herrmann, F. (2003). φθόνος in the world of Plato’s Timaeus. In Konstan, D. and Rutter, N. (Eds.) Envy, Spite, and Jealousy: The Rivalrous Emotions in Ancient Greece. Edinburgh University Press.
Johnson, S (1992). Critical Extracts. In H. Bloom (Ed.), Falstaff (Major Literary Characters) (1st ed., p. 9). Chelsea House Publishing.
Morris, C. (1992). Critical Extracts. In H. Bloom (Ed.), Falstaff (Major Literary Characters) (1st ed., p. 7). Chelsea House Publishing.
Plato (1967). Plato in Twelve Volumes, W.R.M. Lamb, Trans). Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press; London, William Heinemann Ltd. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.
Platt, M. (1992). Falstaff in the Valley of the Shadow of Death in Falstaff. In H. Bloom (Ed.), Falstaff (Major Literary Characters) (1st ed., pp. 171–202). Chelsea House Publishing.
Raleigh (1992). Critical Extracts. In H. Bloom (Ed.), Falstaff (Major Literary Characters) (1st ed., p. 20). Chelsea House Publishing.
Shakespeare, W. (n.d.) Henry IV Parts 1 and 2 (B. Mowat, P. Werstine, M. Poston, and R. Niles, eds.). The Folger Shakespeare. https://www.folger.edu/explore/shakespeares-works/henry-iv-part-1/read/
Shaw, C. (2015). Plato’s Anti-Hedonism and the Protagoras. Cambridge University Press.
Vlastos, G. (1991). Socrates: Ironist and Moral Philosopher. Cambridge University Press.
