Shakespearean Character

Language in Performance

Jelena Marelj, Jonathan Hope, Lynne Magnusson, Michael Witmore

• Publisher: The Arden Shakespeare
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781350175006
• eBook ISBN: 9781350061392
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism of Shakespeare
• Index: Literature

Why do we continue to experience many of Shakespeare's dramatic characters as real people with personal histories, individual personalities, and psychological depth? What is it that makes Falstaff seem to jump off the page, and what gives Hamlet his complexity? Shakespearean Character: Language in Performance examines how the extraordinary lifelikeness of some of Shakespeare's most enigmatic and self-conscious characters is produced through language. Using theories drawn from linguistic pragmatics, this book claims that our impression of characters as real people is an effect arising from characters' pragmatic use of language in combination with the historical and textual meanings that Shakespeare conveys to his audience by dramatic and meta-dramatic means. Challenging the notion of interiority attributed to Shakespeare's characters by many contemporary critics, theatre professionals, and audiences, the book demonstrates that dramatic characters possess anteriority which gives us the impression that they exist outside of- and prior to- the play-texts as real people. Jelena Marelj's study examines five linguistically self-conscious characters drawn from the genres of history, tragedy and comedy, which continue to be subjects of extensive critical debate: Falstaff, Cleopatra, Henry V, Katherine from The Taming of the Shrew, and Hamlet. She shows that by inferring Shakespeare's intentions through his characters' verbal exchanges and the discourses of the play, the audience becomes emotionally involved with or repulsed by characters and it is this emotional response that makes these characters strikingly memorable and intimately human. Shakespearean Character will equip readers for further work on the genealogy of Shakespearean character, including minor characters, stock characters, and allegorical characters.

1

Gricean Implicature and Falstaff’s Roundness in 1 Henry IV

In the preface to his annotated edition of Shakespeare’s plays, a mildly bemused Samuel Johnson expressed his difficulty in delineating Falstaff: ‘But Falstaff unimitated, unimitable Falstaff, how shall I describe thee? Thou compound of sense and vice; of sense which may be admired but not esteemed, of vice which may be despised, but hardly detested.’¹ So strongly had Falstaff affected Johnson that he felt compelled to pose his question to the character himself, as if Falstaff were a real person who could respond. Because Falstaff contradicts himself, he exceeds Johnson’s rational attempt to comprehend him yet it is this contradiction – which turns on Falstaff’s virtuous and vicious behaviour – that, as Johnson suggests, grants Falstaff his ‘unimitable’ complexity as a real person. Johnson’s commentary invites the inference that Falstaff possesses a psychological reality which exceeds words and evades our attempt to logically grasp him.

Johnson’s outcry is symptomatic of both past and present critical attempts to define the expansive parameters of the multifaceted and contradictory Falstaff. Falstaff’s fatness, manifested by his bulging belly which exceeds his bodily frame, is a metonymy for the roundness or psychological reality that critics have attributed to him.² Exemplifying the tendency to read plump Jack as a real person with an inner self is Maurice Morgann’s 1777 essay, which connects the antitheses of sense and vice noted by Johnson specifically to Falstaff’s courage and cowardice. Attempting to vindicate Falstaff from claims of ‘constitutional cowardice’, Morgann advanced that Shakespeare ‘contrived to make ſecret Impreſſions upon us of [Falstaff’s] Courage’.³ Morgann attributes Falstaff’s roundness as a character – what he calls Falstaff’s ‘diſtinct and ſeparate ſubſiſtence’ – not to our rational conception of Falstaff’s cowardice but to our instinctual ‘Impression’ of Falstaff’s courage which, he deems, ‘belonged to his conſtitution, and was manifeſt in the conduct and practice of his whole life’.⁴ Morgann asserts that cowardice ‘is not the Impreſſion, which the whole character of Falſtaff is calculated to make’ since it is merely the external or ‘seen’ part of this character and is relative to the unseen or sensed aspect of Falstaff’s courage, which lies ‘within’ and can only be inferred ‘from general principles, from latent motives, and from policies not avowed’.⁵ Although Morgann implies that the totality of Falstaff’s character is comprised of his external cowardice and his inferred courage, he nevertheless locates the source of Falstaff’s roundness in an occluded interiority which the audience must infer. Morgann observes that in spite of Falstaff’s resistance to rational conceptualization and verbal explanation, he nevertheless produces in the reader or audience an impression of roundness that is grasped intuitively.⁶

While early character critics from Corbyn Morris to E. K. Chambers treated Falstaff as a real person, it was only in 2001 that Richard A. Levin took up Morgann’s quest in an attempt to uncover what exactly Falstaff’s verbally unarticulated ‘latent motives and policies not avowed’ are. In claiming that Falstaff is a schemer with Machiavellian shadings who uses the ‘device’ of covert or ‘secret scheming’, Levin clearly structures his reading on the binary of exteriority/interiority that undergirds Morgann’s visible part/invisible whole theory of Falstaff: he assumes that Falstaff’s public self-presentation through language has recourse to a private self with hidden motives.⁷ What is more, he labels Falstaff a schemer and groups him with a host of minor Shakespearean characters who embody this character type. Although Levin lays out in his Appendix the various rhetorical modes or ‘oblique prompts’ adopted by schemers, such as a rhetoric of court compliment, popular allusions and equivocation, he divorces these rhetorical modes from dramatic speakers’ pragmatic use of them in their interactions with other characters.⁸ Even though Levin sets out to explain Falstaff’s quiddity of being, he ends up reducing Falstaff to a character type and flattens out his roundness or psychological complexity.

Although Shakespeare’s Falstaff is one of the most lauded characters in critical history, there is a repeated failure to explain the character effect of his roundness – the impression that he both transcends and exists prior to the play-text – on audiences and readers alike. Twentieth-century critics like Levin, who map specific character types onto Falstaff in an effort to trace his lineage back to historical and literary antecedents, fall short of accounting for the surplus meanings that Falstaff produces as a character. While the jovial knight certainly embodies the character types of a medieval Riot or Vice figure, a Plautine miles gloriosus, the braggadocio of Italian comedy, the parodic inversion of a Puritan and the Lord of Misrule in Saturnalian revelry, the sum total of these types does not amount to his roundness since they downplay Falstaff’s idiosyncratic lineaments as a character by reducing him to a dramatic function with only allegorical value in the Henriad.⁹ Both source study and character-type studies of Falstaff fail to acknowledge the fact that Falstaff not only adopts various dramatic roles but also exceeds them to his advantage.

Even critics who acknowledge Falstaff’s agency and his ability to transcend his dramatic roles nevertheless adopt an essentializing view of Falstaff as an actor or, as Mark Van Doren states, a ‘universal mimic’ or ‘parodist [and] artist’ with a separate essence who is paradoxically ‘so much himself because he is never himself’.¹⁰ Falstaff’s idiosyncrasy is assumed to be lodged beneath the fictional roles he inhabits, ‘buried under heaps of talk delivered from a hundred assumed personalities, a hundred fictitious identities’.¹¹ Twentieth-century critics who have noted this paradox have overlooked how Falstaff makes use of the various discourses woven throughout his speech. Roy Battenhouse, for instance, suggests that Falstaff’s parodic use of biblical allusion reveals that he is a ‘holy fool’ at the core and intimates ‘the hidden truth about his inner and real self’.¹² Kristen Poole, claiming that Falstaff’s verbal satire of extreme Puritanism is also satirized by Shakespeare, provides a New Historicist reading that renders Falstaff both a social representation of Puritanism and an instrument of Puritan discourse.¹³ Agreeing with Poole that Falstaff is an agential subject of speech who mocks others, Harry J. Berger additionally asserts that Falstaff’s mockeries are self-directed. However, despite portraying Falstaff as a speaker, Berger does not explore how Falstaff uses language but instead demonstrates that his self-representation as both the Puritanical subject and object of his own speech marks his self-audition and endows him with self-consciousness: ‘to imagine Falstaff as subject is to imagine the speaker … performing like the actor (but not as an actor) in that he presents his representation of himself as the object he interprets, and in that he continuously audits and monitors this performance’.¹⁴

What Berger, Poole, Battenhouse and other twentieth-century critics neglect in looking beyond Falstaff’s language to an a priori animating agent is Falstaff’s linguistic agency or how he pragmatically uses language to communicate with others. For all of the attention granted to Falstaff’s language in the last decades of the twentieth century, whether it be identifying the copious discourses operating in his speech or noting the linguistic traits that render his speech distinctive – such as his conditional pseudo-promises, puns, lies or hyperbolic Puritan rhetoric replete with repetition and biblical allusions – critics have failed to acknowledge that Falstaff is not a reified essence with absolute agency that can be expressed through speech but rather a speaker with verbal agency who produces contextually relevant meanings in his speech. Overflowing with surplus meaning, Falstaff’s utterances surpass the semantic or conventional meaning of his words to suggest more than he explicitly says.

Pragmatics can help account for the range of meanings produced by Falstaff in an interactive context with his interlocutors.¹⁵ H. P. Grice’s theory of conversational implicature, in particular, sheds light on how audiences and critics infer what Falstaff suggests beyond what he explicitly states, and provides a tangible way to account for the excess meanings that underwrite our impression of his roundness in 1 Henry IV. I argue that Falstaff’s conversational implicatures in his exchanges with Hal allow him to uphold his scripted roles as allegorical Vice, braggart, thief, hedonist and Puritan, while simultaneously allowing him to transcend these roles by mocking the illegitimacy and hypocrisy of Hal and the Lancastrian dynasty through his own self-mockery. This mockery or indirect critique of the Lancastrians – which is suggested by Falstaff’s puns, wordplay and appositional asides – intersects with moments of meta-theatricality and visual representation in the play to invite the audience to infer that Falstaff transcends as well as exists prior to the play-text. The tectonic jostling between Falstaff’s comic self-inflation and self-deflation facilitated by his conversational implicatures creates the distinctively buoyant energy or exuberance that gives him his roundness as a character. What emerges is a character who is much more critical of Hal and the ruling Bolingbrokes than critics allow. Framing Falstaff’s speech in pragmatic terms annuls neither source study nor the character-type approach to Falstaff. Instead, it acknowledges that the literary and dramatic types that Falstaff invokes in his speech and actions contribute to his lifelikeness as a character by virtue of what he does with language. A Gricean approach to Falstaff’s speech can thus illuminate how Falstaff carefully treads the interface between subverting and upholding the Machiavellian power structure of the play’s Lancastrian plot to negotiate his place within it by continually (re)crafting his linguistic performances; it can also explain how Falstaff fulfils the audience’s expectations of his vainglorious braggartism while unpredictably exceeding them at the same time. Falstaff’s roundness, as I will demonstrate, is an effect of his linguistic performances in a theatrical context.

Gricean implicature and unspoken meaning

Falstaff initiates his opening conversation with Hal by asking him for the time: ‘Now, Hal, what time of day is it, lad?’ (1.2.1).¹⁶ Instead of logically answering Falstaff with the precise time, Hal launches into a caustic critique of his fat companion:

Thou art so fat-witted with drinking of old sack, and unbuttoning thee after supper, and sleeping upon benches after noon, that thou hast forgotten to demand that truly which thou wouldst truly know. What a devil hast thou to do with the time of the day? Unless hours were cups of sack, and minutes capons, and clocks the tongues of bawds, and dials the signs of leaping-houses, and the blessed sun himself a fair hot wench in flame-coloured taffeta, I see no reason why thou shouldst be so superfluous to demand the time of day.

(2–11)

Hal’s indirect and excessive response, which clearly marks his refusal to cooperatively uphold the conversation, triggers the audience to look for an additional meaning to his words. Hal’s response produces a conversational implicature.

According to language philosopher H. P. Grice, conversational implicatures are performative utterances or indirect speech acts produced by speakers when they wish to imply a meaning beyond the merely grammatical or semantic meaning of their words. A conversational implicature is an intentional and responsive act performed by a rational agent or speaker in conversation with an interlocutor; the speaker utters a clause or a sentence whose implied (or implicated) meaning differs from its semantic (or conventional) meaning. Stemming from the verb ‘to imply’, implicature is, to use Wayne Davis’s more explicit formulation, ‘the act of meaning or implying something by saying something else’, where the meaning implied occurs in addition to, and not instead of, what is said.¹⁷ A conversational implicature thus signals an additional meaning that is independent of, and differs from, the semantic meaning of the utterance, yet a meaning that is nevertheless contextually sensitive and variable since it depends on the discursive features of the conversation.

A conversational implicature occurs when a speaker forgoes what Grice calls the ‘Cooperative Principle’ structuring the bi-directional exchange between interlocutors. This Cooperative Principle governs conversational exchanges and requires speaker adherence if participants are to communicate efficiently and achieve their conversational goals. A conversation, notes Grice, always has ‘a common purpose or set of purposes, or at least a mutually accepted direction’ that is recognized by its speakers, even though these speakers’ conversational goals may differ from the ‘common purpose’ of the exchange or even conflict with it.¹⁸ Grice expresses his Cooperative Principle by the axiom ‘make your conversational contribution such as is required, at the stage at which it occurs, by the accepted purpose or direction of the talk exchange in which you are engaged’, and identifies four maxims or universally held assumptions to which speakers are expected to adhere in their exchanges: the maxim of quantity (‘make your contribution as informative as is required [for the current purposes of the exchange]’); the maxim of quality (‘try to make your contribution one that is true’), which Grice breaks down into two smaller maxims, ‘do not say what you believe to be false’ and ‘do not say that for which you lack adequate evidence’; the maxim of relation (‘be relevant’); and the maxim of manner (‘be perspicuous’), which is further broken down into various maxims: ‘avoid obscurity of expression’, ‘avoid ambiguity’, ‘be brief’ and ‘be orderly’.¹⁹ The speaker’s intentional transgression or infringement of these maxims creates a conversational implicature but only if the speaker adheres to the Cooperative Principle. Once conversational maxims are infringed, violated, opted out of, suspended or ‘flouted’ by a speaker, or if a speaker ‘blatantly fail[s] to fulfill’ a maxim, the hearer is forced to infer or rationally deduce the speaker’s implied meaning by taking into account the semantic meaning of the speaker’s words, the speaker’s (non)conformity to the Cooperative Principle and its maxims, linguistic and other utterance contexts, and shared background knowledge.²⁰ In Grice’s model of conversation, the speaker intends for and expects the hearer to recognize an implicature and to thereby contemplate what the speaker had in mind in uttering it. However, the speaker’s intention in producing the implicature does not necessarily need to be recognized by the hearer. In spite of the hearer’s potential failure to detect or comprehend the conversational implicature, the implicature nevertheless exists and effectively signals that the speaker’s implied message has intentionally been ‘made [] available’ to the hearer or audience for uptake.²¹ Meaning in a verbal exchange, for Grice, is a cooperative and interactive process between speaker and hearer that rests not only on the semantically intelligible utterance of words but also on their pragmatic import as registered and inferred by an audience of hearers.

Conversational implicatures are often motivated and justified by their interlocutors’ reciprocal need to maintain ‘face’ and may thus occur within a politeness framework. Influenced by sociologist Erving Goffman’s pioneering use of the term, the concept of ‘face’ underlies Penelope Brown and Stephen Levinson’s linguistic theory of politeness and is defined as both the speaker’s and the hearer’s ‘public self-image’, which they cooperatively strive to uphold in a verbal exchange.²² Brown and Levinson assert that a speaker’s ‘face’ is comprised of two components: negative face wants or desires, such as his or her right to ‘freedom of action and freedom from imposition’, and positive face wants or desires, or his or her need to be ‘appreciated and approved of’ or ‘ratified, understood … liked or admired’ by others.²³ Given that ‘face’ is highly vulnerable and can be easily damaged in social interaction, interlocutors must cooperate in upholding, fulfilling or ‘attending to’ each other’s face wants – in recognition of each other’s need to do so – by deploying politeness strategies to mitigate face threats that inhere in social interaction. These politeness strategies are speech acts that work to save ‘face’ or minimize face-threatening acts (FTAs) and are divided into positive and negative politeness strategies. Positive politeness strategies, which signal the speaker’s intimacy with and appreciation for the hearer’s wants and serve to enhance the hearer’s self-esteem, include expressing interest, approval or sympathy with the hearer, using in-group identity markers or forms of address, seeking agreement or joking to put the hearer at ease.²⁴ Negative politeness strategies are used in the case of high-risk FTAs to protect the hearer’s face from imposition: the use of linguistic formality, honorifics, impersonal passives, and linguistic or non-linguistic acts of deference, for instance, are all ‘avoidance-based’ strategies which reassure the hearer that the speaker ‘recognizes and respects the addressee’s negative-face wants and will not (or will only minimally) interfere with the addressee’s freedom of action’.²⁵ In addition to these positive and negative strategies, the speaker may also opt to use ‘off-record’ strategies or indirect linguistic utterances to merely hint at his or her intended meaning without making it explicit. This hinted meaning, as Brown and Levinson note, is ‘either more general … or actually different from what one means (intends to be understood)’ and thus requires the hearer to ‘make some inference to recover what was in fact intended’.²⁶ These off-record strategies, which include the use of metaphor, irony, rhetorical questions, understatements/overstatements, contradictions and tautologies, violate Grice’s maxim of quality and create implicatures that invite inference.²⁷ Falstaff uses these off-record strategies to politely disguise his critique and to maintain his and Hal’s face.

About face: Falstaff’s conversational implicatures

In his opening conversation with Hal in 1.2, Falstaff’s request for political immunity is framed as an implicature that serves to maintain Hal’s negative face as well as his own positive face. However, the request also exists in ironic service to Falstaff’s self-mockery, as Falstaff mocks his self-glorification as a braggart and a thief in order to mock the Lancastrians; Falstaff implies his ridicule of Hal and the illegitimate reign of the Lancastrian dynasty by shamelessly promoting and praising himself as a...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents 
• Acknowledgements
• Series Editors’ Preface
• Introduction: Re-Characterizing Shakespearean Character
• 1. Gricean Implicature and Falstaff’s Roundness in 1 Henry IV
• 2. Reported Speech and Cleopatra’s Sexual Charisma
• 3. Pragma-Rhetoric and Henry V’s Moral Ambivalence
• 4. Kate’s Defiant Obedience in The Taming of the Shrew
• Coda: Questioning Anteriority: Hamlet’s Undecidability and Pragmatic Failure
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Imprint