Andreas Marber

“The Prince has broken his heart”
-the roaring tragi-comedy of Falstaff


We know the fat Knight Falstaff as the laughing stock from operas, operettas and comedies: he surrenders himself to wine and women, he’s the hero of inglorious misadventure. In contrast, the Falstaff whose story Shakespeare wove into Henry IV and Henry V is a veritable monster. Drunken, corrupt, dishonest, cowardly: a miserable travesty of human existence. And even more astounding is his company: the young Prince Henry, heir to the throne of an England plagued by civil war. The odd couple quarrels and makes up, they curse each other and yet wake up the next morning in the same bed. The King forces the Prince to go to war, where the young man actually proves himself – but only to resume his old life with Falstaff after the war is over. Even Falstaff can’t entirely escape the war, and if he can’t avoid it, at least he can make some money from it. The King dies, Falstaff considers himself the protégé of the new King and thinks his fortune is made – but the King sends him to the devil: he doesn’t recognise him. And Falstaff dies because “the Prince has broken his heart”. A touching end to a scandalous and enigmatic friendship.
It’s a comedy and a farce: Falstaff’s personality and his girth are violent, his humour and his narcissism merciless. The only obligation he feels is to himself, and ethical principles fall by the wayside. What draws them together? Why is this man, for whom a whole kingdom is waiting, charmed by evil? The odd couple doesn’t understand it either: “What is it that so attracts me to him?” Falstaff asks himself when he sees that he has been betrayed by the Prince – while the Prince tries to use cruel games and cynical words to drive away the bad moods that beset him in Falstaff’s absence. And this is where it all falls down and tragedy emerges: Falstaff, only half intelligent but completely convinced of his own genius, tries to use the Prince to climb the social ladder. In doing so, he misses the fact that it is really the Prince who is using him to enhance his mediocre intellect and to cultivate his immature emotions.
The comedy Falstaff has six actors. Falstaff slips into the role of Henry IV – first in jest when, with the Prince, he rehearses a severe lecture which the wayward son is expecting to receive in the palace, and then in all seriousness when he wages war as the King and finally dies, cursing the heir to the throne, and thus anticipating his own sad death. The others play the rest of the roles required of Falstaff’s drama until the hero’s downfall: civil servants, soldiers, rebels, musicians, prostitutes – the whole mediaeval world which Shakespeare uses to portray a timeless, obnoxious, loveable monster, a repulsive, enchanting, sensual, insatiable anti-human, whose miserable death is nevertheless, and completely unexpectedly, sad.