The Meanings of Comedy* - Shakespeare Navigators

40 THE SPIRIT OF COMEDY
"shadow" self of the old unscrupulous Bolingbroke, and he contesses
to Hal:
. . . God knolvs, my son,
By what by-paths and indirect crookt rvays
I met this crown; and I m1'self knon'rvell
How troublesome it sat upon my head . .
Henry cannot wear the rol'al garments easily because he has come to
his throne by the unholy ctlnning of the opportunist. Richard's blood
will not out, and like a tragic guilt it stains the grace of Henry's
rule. Yet Bolingbroke cannot drop the mask. So Hal's heritage is
tainted, and the Lancastrian line must be purged. This false righteousness
can be washed away only by rites acted hilariously on
Gadshill, where Hal connives at another, baser thievery that is detecteda
parody of his father's practice. In the depths of bohemia, amid
whores, parasites, and cowards, a realm where Falstaff is king and
priest, young Hal is initiated into the company of Fools and Rogues.
Falstaff asks the ruthless question: "What is honor" The Lancastrians
must answer before they are legitimate kings. With all the
lewdness of the comedian Falstaff reduces to absurdity the lineage
of Bolingbroke when he jests at the parentage of young Harry and
knows him to be his father's son only by a villainous hanging lip,
which proclaims him honestly begot. In this pit of degradation Hal
cleanses himself and his line from the policy of his ancestors, and
by coming out from behind the fagade of Lancastrian pompousness
he proves that he is, indeed legitimately, the heir apparent. By stooping
to Doll Tearsheet, Flarry makes himself eligible to woo Kate of
France. Falstaff is at once devil and priest, coward and hero, tempter
and scapegoat, and essentially the satyr who lives ineradicably behind
the fagade of every culture. Without his ribaldry, his drunken wisdom,
Britain cannot be redeemed.
III. Tse Gursps oF TrrE Courc HBno
Hence the range of comic action is far wider than Bergson supposed
when he remarked that the comic is something mechanical
encrusted on what is living and that the comic hero is dehumanized
because he makes only gestures, automatic motions, which look ridiculous
when they are "interrupted." Bergson, perhaps following Stendhal's
notion that we remain untouched by the plight of the comic figure,
saw him from only one angle, treating him as if he lvere a toy manikin
which, wound up, is geared to execute the same motion wherever
he is put. Bergson's comic hero is only a caricature of a man. Yet