Falstaff

Falstaff

by Robert Nye
Falstaff

Falstaff

by Robert Nye

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Overview

Winner of the Hawthornden Prize and the Guardian Fiction Prize

The most beloved comic figure in English literature decides that history hasn’t done him justice—it’s time for him to tell the whole unbuttoned story, his way. Irascible and still lecherous at eighty-one, Falstaff spins out these outrageously bawdy memoirs as an antidote to legend, and in the process manages to recreate his own. This splendidly written novel is a feast, opening wide the look and feel of another age and bringing Shakespeare’s Falstaff to life in a totally new way. Like Jack Falstaff himself, it’s sprawling, vivid, oversized—big as life. We return in an instant to an England that was ribald, violent, superstitious, coursing with high spirits and a fresh sense of national purpose. We see what history and the Bard of Avon overlooked or avoided: what really happened that celebrated night at the windmill when Falstaff and Justice Shallow heard the chimes at midnight; who really killed Hotspur; how many men fell at the Battle of Agincourt; what actually transpired at the coronation of Henry V ("Harry the Prig"); and just what it was that made the wives of Windsor so very merry.

Falstaff "tells all" about Prince Hal, John of Gaunt ("that maniac"), Pistol, Bardolph, Doll Tearsheet, and Jane Nightwork. At the same time, his racy narrative offers us a tapestry of the Middle Ages: the Black Death and May Day; an expedition to Ireland and a pilgrimage to the Holy Land; nights at the Boar’s Head; the splendor of London Bridge; and hundreds of other sights and sounds and people zestfully recalled between scabrous opinions and irreverent meditations—in sum, the very flavor of a great age. The voice is unmistakably Falstaff’s and his great drama swaggers, laughs, and shouts across every page.

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9781628720136
Publisher: Arcade
Publication date: 02/14/2012
Sold by: SIMON & SCHUSTER
Format: eBook
Pages: 464
File size: 1 MB

About the Author

Robert Nye is a novelist and poet who was born in London. His novels include Falstaff, Mrs. Shakespeare: The Complete Works, and The Voyage of the Destiny. He lives in Ireland.

Read an Excerpt

CHAPTER 1

About the begetting of Sir John Fastolf

New Year's Day

I was begotten on the giant of Cerne Abbas.

That will do. It's true. Start there.

Now introduce me:

John Fastolf - Jack to my familiars, John to my brothers and my sisters, Sir John to all Europe - Knight of the most noble Order of the Garter (once removed, but I'll come to that), Lord of Lasuze, Governor of Anjou and Maine, Captain of Le Mans, Grand Butler of Normandy, Baron of Silly-le-Guillem, Constable of Bordeaux, Lieutenant of Harfleur, Keeper of the Bastille of St Anthony in Paris, master of Caister Castle and Castle Combe, owner of the Boar's Head tavern, warrior and gentleman, hey diddle diddle and hey diddle dan, fill in the details later, all the titles, Thing of Thing, This of That, all the bloody rest of it, feedum fiddledum fee me, Fastolf, now telling you the true story of my life and the history of my valiant deeds, starting my telling today, the 25th day of March, New Year's Day of the year of our Lord 1459, which is I think the 37th year in the reign of his majesty King Henry the 6th, the prickless holy wonder, son of Harry the Prig, of Gadshill and Agincourt, and which is rather more certainly and much more vitally the 8ist year of my own great march to heaven.

That will be the longest sentence in the book. Don't worry. I don't like long sentences either.

My feet itch.

PRICK and PRIG.

Worcester, if you really don't know the difference you must be one or the other or both yourself.

Write down every word I say, just as I say it, or I assure you I will have your balls for full-stops.

Captain of the Palace of Rouen - I am the man who built the tower there, above the river Seine on the east side. Sometime Grand Master of the Household of John, Duke of Bedford, Regent of the Kingdom of France.

GADS hill, you marvellous bloody fool, an expedition as famous in its day as the one at Agincourt. I should know. I fought in both.

Everything the way I tell it, in the order I give it to you, none of your literature. When a man has scaled as many ramparts and breached as many maidenheads as I have, he doesn't need to make a sentence bob and curtsey.

Bless me, father. Bugger all. Whoops. We're off then.

It was a fig tree they lay under, my father and my mother, my father under the fig tree and my mother under my father, and the fig tree growing on the giant's sex.

A dark religious wayfarer - my uncle Hugh used to say Wiclif himself, hot down from Oxford, not yet a heretic but riding a lollardy donkey and preaching in the churchyards after Mass -this wandering Wiclif comes along shouting that the giant is the Devil's work. He recognised him no doubt as a survivor of that race descended from the 33 wicked daughters of Diocletian. He sweats in the sun with hammer and boards, disgust and nails, and builds himself a pulpit on the giant's stalk, for the purpose of delivering a sermon against it.

'Gentlemen of Dorset,' Wiclif thunders, 'I stand here on the worst part of our human nature.'

It is ten yards long, the cock of the giant of Cerne Abbas. The giant himself is a hillside high. His outline is a white chalk-filled trench as wide as my arm and two feet deep. His inside is complete in every part - ribs, nipples, eyebrows, belly-button. In his right hand he carries a knobbled club pointing up to the clouds. His left hand saws the air as he steps westward. His member is magnificently erect. Nearby is the abbey founded by St Augustine, with the silver spring that gushed up at his wink.

Don't imagine that this forked radish Wiclif got red in the face preaching to sheep. Every seven years the giant is scoured, to keep his art safe from the grass. Some that live in those valleys have an inherited obligation to repair and cleanse him. If they didn't, in time he would turn green like the rest of the hill and be forgotten. It was at the festival of the scouring that Wiclif criticised the giant's erection, and there was a good-sized crowd to listen to his opinions, after they had wrestled for silver buckles and jumped in sacks and raced for cheeses rolled down the giant's legs.

'It should be covered,' Wiclif complains.

'Cover the giant?' A great laugh goes up in the sun. 'How could you cover it?'

Wiclif considers, calling to mind his education, and then he announces: 'In Greek times, the statues were given fig leaves to hide what should not be seen by shamefast eyes.'

'Extraordinary big fig leaf you'll- need here,' points out some Pythagoras of the hedgerows.

Wiclif said: 'Let it be a fig tree then!'

And, lo, there was a fig tree. Wiclif 's disciples planted one when the greasy pole had been taken down and the seven-year scouring was over. That is why in those days, before they were called Lollards, some called his people Figgers. They dug diligently, these flesh-abhorring Figgers, and they planted their fig tree on the wick of the Cerne giant, with a purpose to obscure the terrible splendour of him from the eyes of virgins passing on the road through the valley below.

Now, life being what it is, the villagers of Cerne Abbas found that fig tree a useful and appropriate addition to their giant's attributes. In summer it was cool and shady to lie under, and a man and a woman could be secret there. In winter, it kept some of the rain off.

Glasses, glasses, is the only drinking. Tell Macbeth he can pawn or smash the plate.

My mother was a well-known wearer-out of husbands. (This is not criticism. I do not criticise. I observe.) She had been married three times before she met my father, joined to fellows of substance too, none of your Johns of Gaunt - men of pepper, ginger, cloves, my ghostly fathers, who did not fail to make me for a lack of kidneys. Yet knock as they might, I did not answer. Ferret as they did in her sweet little moss-grown coney patch, there was never a scut of a child.

Put it away, Worcester. You'll never get to heaven doing that.

My father was a man of iron will. He had a red beard and eyes like caves. He married my mother sensibly for the triple joy of her widowhood, the three estates, but he was concerned - as an English country gentleman and an epitome of the chivalric virtues - with the making of a son.

Having heard well of the giant's child-inspiring powers, my father takes my mother by the hand and leads her up to him the night before their wedding. It had been a hot day, the hottest day that any man could remember, the skylarks swooning in the sticky air, milk turning sour in the cows' udders. At the end of that hottest day now it is suddenly Midsummer Eve and the giant stands out bold and wonderful and monstrous on his long green Dorset hill, the moon at the full above his knobbled club. My father lays my mother down on the giant's thistle, in the modest shade of Mr Wiclif s burgeoning fig tree.

'Dear heart,' says he, taking off his spurs and his liripipe hat, 'I shall require an heir.'

If ever widow woman blushed then my mother blushed hot when she saw my father unbuttoned above her in the moonlight. 'My womb,' says she, 'is empty.'

My father engages the key in the lock. It is well-oiled. He turns and enters and makes himself at home.

'I have been told,' he says'
My father goes on, without need of saying.

It is sixty yards if it is an inch from the top to the toe of the giant of Cerne Abbas. The creature's club alone must be every bit of forty yards.

'O Gog,' says my mother eventually. 'O Gog, O Gog, O Gog.'

'I do believe,' says my father, 'Magog.'

Now, in the moment of my conception, as a star falls into my mother's left eye, as the wind catches its breath, as the little hills skip for joy, and the moon hides her face behind a cloud - a bit of local history. When St Augustine came calling in those parts the people of Cerne tied a tail to his coat and whipped him out of their valley. The saint was furious. He got down on his knees and prayed to God to give tails to all the children that were born in Dorset. 'Right,' said the Omnipotence. This went on, tails, tails, tails, tails, until the folk regretted their pagan manners. When they expressed their regret, St Austin came back and founded the abbey, calling it Cernal because he was soon seeing his visions there - from the Latin, cerno, I see, and the Hebrew, £/, God.

That's enough history. I prefer mystery.

The sun at my making was in the sign of Libra near Venus. The moon was in Capricorn. My conceptual Jupiter, so they tell me, is on Joan of Arc's Saturn, and my Mars up her Uranus.

CHAPTER 2

About a genealogy refused

All Fools Day

You see this fig then? My family tree has figs on it. As I was explaining eight days ago, before my autobiography was interrupted by alcohol. O times, O manners. Well never get through hell at this rate. Courage, I'm eating the fig now. I've eaten them all my life. By the bushel I used to roll the little demons down my throat, before. entering the lists of love. Half a dozen do these days. My niece Miranda comes this afternoon.

Your fig, being your ficus has other properties than that sly service noticed by Pliny. Mashed, by all means, a bowl of figs works wonders in the bowels, and there's nothing like a brace of them for inspiriting a generous fart. Fig puddings on Palm Sundays. Fig-sue on Good Friday - ale, sliced figs, bread and nutmeg boiled together and supped hot like soup. Fine discharging stuff. But I'm not talking about Ajax. I am talking about Aphrodite. I am talking about your fat plum-purplish Queen Fig, your ripe and autumn forky fig, gone out to turn gold in the sun along the wall, then cherished in silk and pulled and squeezed and sleeked by a young girl's fingers. A boon to the weary warrior. Pliny himself says that the milky juice of the fig leaf and the fig stem raises blisters. It's the raising capacities and capabilities of the purple fig itself that interests me. The fat wild swelling fig, my hero. Sacred to Bacchus. Anno mundi 4483 - there was a fig tree overshadowing Romulus and Remus, where they sucked on the mother wolfs mammets.

Talking of figs and thistles, when I was a young man I used to wake up in the morning with a cock like a sword, like an iron bar. I couldn't push it down with two hands. Two strong wives couldn't push it down with four hands - Mrs Ford and her friend, they tried. I was delighting the both of them, sweet ladies, of Windsor. We made merry in an enormous linen-basket full of their underwear, the three of us, and all round the roots of the old oak in Windsor Park. Mrs Ford's friend had a bum like a melon. She liked me to bugger her while she sucked her neighbour's titties. Then she would have me futter Mrs Ford, while the two of them wriggled about poking their fingers up each other's arses. And so on. They couldn't get enough of it. They had to have their servants burn my buttocks with tapers to make me stop, but that only made my man the hotter and I swear I turned into a bull, a stag, a pagan god of the hunt to satisfy the pair of them. Lord, I went at it with a whopping will! I rogered and rammed and ploughed them until they thought the sky was raining potatoes and thundering to the tune of Greensleeves. When they flagged, I fed them eringoes, little candied roots of sea-holly, useful in their amatorious properties for ladies whose desires outreach their abilities. My merry mistresses divided me - a haunch each. The muscle in the middle did for both. That midsummer night by the Herne Oak they must have had more luxury from me than their husbands had given them in all the years of their married bliss. I took them in turn, until the starlight and moonshine ran out. All the same, in the morning, even after that most extreme and thirsty intercourse - like a sword, Worcester, like an iron bar! I couldn't push it down with both hands, no matter how I tried. Even in France, when I was raising hell and raping up the Meuse and bringing great joy to all the burghers' wives in the garrisons we took, and when I was captain of Conde Norean and it was my duty to satisfy seven French matrons a night still, in those dandled days, I couldn't get my cock down with both hands. But this is why I've had you call Friar Brackley. Father, I've a confession to make. A moment of truth. An instant of self-knowledge in an aging soul. Just yesterday, at the end of our New Year revels, I woke up in the morning and took stock of my stick and you know what? I realised that now I can push it down with both hands. Indeed, I'll tell you the truth, I can just about push it down with one hand. That's why I've called for you. A simple question. Worcester knows I mean it:

Father, do you think 'I'm getting stronger}
As to the other sort of family tree, I have one, as good as any now in England, somewhat superior to the shrub Plantagenet if you want to know, but I don't intend to include much here on that subject. Chaps who seek dignity in genealogy are bandits. A man is the shape that fills his own suit, not his father's, or his father's, fathers. At the same time I would lie if I came pretending to have made my way single-handed in this naughty world. We Fastolfs have a history of substance.

My great great great great grandfather Fastolf is in Domesday Book, Page 777. You will find there written against our name that he held freely from King William the Conqueror the church in the borough of Stamford, County Lincoln. Not that my people came in with the Conqueror. We were here already. We were the chief directors of the work of the tower of Nimrod, We were with Arthur at Mons Badon. We had a seat of sorts at the Round Table. William of Normandy's companions were a low form of life in any case - the dregs of Burgundy and Flanders and the sweepings of the prisons of the Rhine - and many a family now claiming descent from them just advertises its cheap heart by the connection. The Conqueror! He even had to drill holes in his boats after crossing the channel, to prevent his army from going home again. William himself was a bastard. His mother was a tanner's daughter called Arlotta. You knew that? Bet you didn't know that his father, Robert the Devil, the last Duke of Normandy, saw this Arlotta washing her drawers in a stream one day when he was on his way home from the hunt, and that our William was conceived when the Duke jumped into the water to help her. Later, when Robert the Devil popped off on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, his cronies told him he shouldn't leave his lands without a ruler. Robert answered: 'But I have a little bastard who, please God, will grow bigger.' Robert the Devil was stung by a gnat at the Holy Sepulchre, and never came back. God must have been pleased, because his little bastard grew up to be a big bastard.

Gurth Fastolf my ancestor fought for King Harold. The story that he obtained the Big Bastard's favour by leading a miscellany of Saxons in the wrong direction to wit, over a cliff on an escarpment near Dover, at the time of the skirmish at Hastings -is absolutely without foundation. It is, in short, a lie put about by envious neighbours whose talents were never so complex as to catch the eye of William's wife Matilda, a dumpy woman but not beneath my great great great great granddad's notice. Those stupid Saxons rushed forward impetuously in the dark, as was their way, uttering unintelligible remarks, while the first of the Fastolfs was consulting a map a little to the north.

The Battle of Hastings was unfair in any case. William had a secret weapon - a hair from the head of St Peter. The Pope sent it to him. The fact that at the same time His Holiness excommunicated Harold and the entire English Army didn't help matters either.

Pass me my memory powder. It's on the shelf behind you.

April Fool you, Worcester! April bloody gob! April noddy! Don't cry - you'll make the ink run. Cheer up. I've sent Hanson and Nanton to the Friars Minor, to ask for a look at their book called The Life of Eve's Mother.

The famous Willy Griskin was a Fastolf too. Griskin. It's a little pig. Will's father was taxed out of existence, and he left young Will this pigling as his patrimony. Of course the boy's contemporaries laughed. The Knight of the Griskin, they called him, Little Willy Gris. So Will sold his pig and emigrated on the proceeds. In France, despite the French, he advanced himself on the back of that pigling money until he was in a position to marry a marriable woman - the widow of a banker. He was rolling in it now, and the more money he made the more the world loved him. This did not escape his notice. Sitting brooding on the fact, he had one room in his house painted and decorated by an artist called Nicholas Pisano. Will kept the key of this room on a chain which he wore about his neck, and he never let anyone in there ever, not even his wife. It was his habit, by the way, to give that lucky lady a groat every time they had marriage joys. It was his habit also, whenever he came home from seeing great men, to neglect all other business and go straight to his secret chamber. He'd stay there for hours and then come out to his family with a philosophical smile. Everyone burned to know what was in the room. His wife begged him to show them. At last, thoroughly beseiged, Will Fastolf unlocked the door. The walls of the room were white and the floor was white, but on the ceiling of the room was painted a picture of a pigling and a little boy leading it by a string, and the words written:

Willy Gris, Willy Gris- Think what you was, and what you is!

(Continues…)



Excerpted from "Falstaff"
by .
Copyright © 2011 Robert Nye.
Excerpted by permission of Skyhorse Publishing.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

Table of Contents

I About the begetting of Sir John Fastolf,
II About a genealogy refused,
III About the birth of Sir John Fastolf,
IV About the games of Sir John Fastolf when he was young,
V About the tutor Ravenstone & the whip,
VI About Sir John FastolPs mother & the amorous vision,
VII About Pope Joan (Mary Fastolf's tale),
VIII About the Duke of Hell,
IX About the number 100 & other numbers,
X Sir John Fastolf's invocation of Clio' Muse of History,
XI About Sir John Fastolf's belly & his rat,
XII About an indignity suffered by Sir John Fastolf at the hands of the Duchess of Norfolk,
XIII About a menu,
XIV How Sir John Fastolf went to war & about the sea fight at Slugs,
XV About the sea fight continued, & how Sir John Fastolf made his name terrible to the enemy,
XVI Sir John Fastolf's cursing of the cook,
XVII How Sir John Fastolf was apprenticed monk,
XVIII About Badby & the barrel,
XIX About the death of Sir John Fastolf's father,
XX How Sir John Fastolf undressed himself of his suit of virgin white,
XXI How Sir John Fastolf came to London, & his praise of London Bridge,
XXII The art of farting: an aside of Sir John Fastolf's,
XXIII About King Brokenanus & his 24 sainted sons & daughters,
XXIV About St George's Day & Flagellants & the Earthly Paradise,
XXV How Sir John Fastolf broke Skogan's head,
XXVI A parallel adventure: Mr Robert Shallow v. Mr Sampson Stockfish,
XXVII About swinge-bucklers & bona-robas,
XXVIII About some more figs,
XXIX About great events in the wide world,
XXX Sir John Fastolf's humble address to his readers,
XXXI Lord Grey of Ruthin to the Prince of Wales,
XXXII Sir John Fastolf's commentary on this exercise in the art of royal arse-licking,
XXXIII Sir John Fastolf's praise of May Day,
XXXIV About Mrs Nightwork & the night at the windmill,
XXXV About correspondences,
XXXVI About the best meal which Sir John Fastolf never ate,
XXXVII About 4 princes & 24 islands,
XXXVIII Sir John Fastolf's farewell,
XXXIX Sir John Fastolf's permission for his translation,
XL About Sir John Fastolf's prick,
XLI How Sir John Fastolf fell in love with a lady of London,
XLII How Sir John Fastolf went to Ireland in company with Prince Thomas,
XLII I How Sir John Fastolf conducted the militia at the siege of Kildare,
XLIV About leprechauns & St Boniface,
XLV About Sir John Fastolf's nose & other noses,
XLVI About Sir John Fastolf's soul,
XLVII About a base attack upon Sir John Fastolf,
XLVI About honour & onions,
XLIX How Sir John Fastolf came back to London,
L About heroes,
LI About Prince Hal,
LII About some other villains,
LIII About the preparations for the Battle of Gadshill,
LIV How the Battle of Gadshill was won: 1st version,
LV How the Battle of Gadshill was won: 2nd version,
LVI How the Battle of Gadshill was won: 3rd version,
LVII Sir John Fastolf's review of the action, strategy, & tactics of the Battle of Gadshill,
LVIII About a play at the Boar's Head tavern,
LIX About the picking of Sir John Fastoll's pocket,
LX About the Hotspur & Mr Glendower, with an interruption,
LXI Bardolph's tale,
LXII About the holy number,
LXIII About some things beyond numbers,
LXIV About the march to Coventry,
LXV About the Battle of Shrewsbury,
LXVI Who killed Hotspur?,
LXVII About St Swithin, Mrs Quickly, & the Lord Chief Justice,
LXVIII About Doll Tearsheet & a night at the Boar's Head,
LXIX How Sir John Fastolf went to war again,
LXX Why Sir John Fastolf went to war again,
LXXI About glory & a double Gloucester cheese,
LXXII About the death of the Leper King,
LXXIII How Pistol brought the good news from Jerusalem to Paradise,
LXXIV About the coronation of King Henry the 5th,
LXXV Sir John Fastolf's review of his banishment,
LXXVI About the marrying of Sir John Fastolf,
LXXVII Mrs Quickly's account of the nuptials of Sir John Fastolf,
LXXVIII How Sir John Fastolf went on a pilgrimage to the Holy Land (1st Note by Stephen Scrope),
LXXIX About some merry tricks of Sir John Fastoll's,
LXXX About Bartholomew Fair,
LXXXI How Sir John Fastolf went as a nun to a nunnery (2nd Note by Stephen Scrope),
LXXXII Pistol's tale,
LXXXIII About the siege of Harfleur,
LXXXIV About Bardolph's execution,
LXXXV About the Battle of Agincourt,
LXXXVI How the King came back in triumph to London,
LXXXVII How Sir John Fastolf drank the elixir of life,
LXXXVI II About divers minor charges, costs & wages owing to Sir John Fastolf (3rd Note by Stephen Scrope),
LXXXIX How Sir John Fastolf went to the wars again, & about the siege of Rouen,
XC How Sir John Fastolf was made Captain of the Bastille, & about the marriage of King Henry the 5th & the Princess Katharine (4th Note by Stephen Scrope),
XCI About the capture of Meaux, & the death of King Henry the 5th,
XCII How Sir John Fastolf was installed a Knight of the Garter,
XCIII A fancy of Sir John Fastolf's concerning the marriage of Joan of Arc & the Marshal Gilles de Retz,
XCIV Sir John Fastolf's great Bill of Claims against the Crown (With Notes by Stephen Scrope),
XCV About the Battle of the Herrings,
XCVI An inventory of Caister Castle (Compiled by Stephen Scrope),
XCVII About the reverse at Patay, & the fall of France,
XCVIII The Last Will & Testament of Sir John Fastolf,
XCIX Sir John Fastoll's confession to Friar Brackley,
C About the death of Sir John Fastolf (7th Note by Stephen Scrope),

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