COMEDY

THE BODY 85offshoots: the open mouth, the genital organs, the breasts, thephallus, the potbelly, the nose. The body discloses its essence as aprinciple of growth which exceeds its own limits only incopulation, pregnancy, child-birth, the throes of death, eating,drinking or defecation.(Bahktin, 1984:26)The grotesque is therefore a vivid celebration of inter-connectedness,growth beyond death and the continuity of existence, where the body istriply significant as a representation of ideal community, theembodiment of festivity, and interpenetration and connection of thehuman body with the universe. Once expressed in these terms, it is clearwhy some critics have accused Bakhtin of a ‘romanticization andheroization of the body’ (Critchley, 2002:51).A modified example of Rabelaisian grotesque would beShakespeare’s Sir John Falstaff, a figure for whom the celebration ofcorporeality always takes place within the context of a direct challengefrom the disciplines of order and self-control. Falstaff is often thoughtof as a representative of carnival, his Eastcheap antics standing incontrast to the statesmen and soldiers of the rest of the play; 1 Henry IV,by thus giving its reprehensible characters a dramatic status equal to itsaristocratic ones, can be viewed as ‘the first play in English to findmajor imaginative stimulus in the disreputable’ (Rhodes, 1980:99).Falstaff, a liar, a glutton, a coward, and the consort of prostitutes andthieves, is a symbol of degeneracy and perpetual leisure. In a passagewhere Prince Hal mimics his father’s displeasure, we can see howFalstaff is imagined as a parade of meats:There is a devil haunts thee in the likeness of an old fat man; a tunof man is thy companion. Why dost thou converse with that trunkof humours, that bolting-hutch of beastliness, that swollen parcelof dropsies, that huge bombard of sack, that stuffed cloak-bag ofguts, that roasted Manningtree ox with the pudding in his belly…(Shakespeare, 1989:2.5.407–413)Falstaff s body is a distempered creation stitched together from organs,fluids, and edibles: ‘In each image,’ writes Neil Rhodes, ‘Falstaff is…abarrel of diseases or a horn of plenty which can be exchanged andreplenished at any moment’ (Rhodes, 1980:109). For Anne Barton thisconstantly changing grotesque makes Falstaff a hero, the descendant ofa long line of characters who ‘detest war and the ideals of military glory’: