It isn’t long ago that #ShakespeareSunday visited Eastcheap (link).

We hoped to ‘party like it’s 1599’, but found ourselves at the poignant moment when the laughing stopped:

Falstaff: Banish not him thy Harry’s company […]

Hal: I do. I will. ¹

It wasn’t a threat.

It was a promise – simple words delivered unequivocally like a pronouncement of doom. The relationship between the young prince and the ‘villainous misleader of youth‘ was never the same again.  They began travelling a road which was always going to end with this week’s quotation. 

My choice might seem a little obvious for a ‘Fathers’ theme.

‘I know thee not, old man.’

A son rejects a father figure.

A prince abandons an old friend.

A king chooses duty over affection.

But I think there’s something far more interesting going on here than we might see at first glance.

Rejection hurts. But what about obsolescence?

Falstaff doesn’t simply lose Hal. He realises that the future he imagined doesn’t exist. The role he had hoped to occupy has vanished. The king has no use for him. 

Falstaff is redundant.

Suddenly, it becomes a pattern – an anxiety – we see elsewhere in the plays.

Lear relinquishes power, but he badly wants to remain important, relevant, in the lives of his children. The world has other ideas. 

I think there’s an interesting contrast with Hamlet: his father remains powerful even after his death. The old king refuses to disappear, whereas Falstaff suddenly realises he might as well be invisible.

And the plays are littered with fathers becoming redundant because their daughters marry. Cordelia addresses this tension in her commentary on her married sisters’ hyperbolic declarations of love for their father. Desdemona specifically tells her father that her duty has transferred to her husband, Othello (and we never hear from Brabantio again).

Perhaps of them all, Prospero has the healthiest approach – at least at the end of the play? It’s an inevitable consequence of his plan that Ferdinand usurps his importance to Miranda, but Prospero abjures his books, leaves the island, and seems ready to adjust and accept the new direction (perhaps the new freedom?) his life takes – with, of course, the audience’s ‘indulgence‘.

Most of us will never lose a kingdom. But many of us will, sooner or later, lose our usefulness, and what could quite often be the central role in our lives.

Parents discover that they no longer need to tend to a child’s grazed knee. Taxiing them around, rescuing them from scrapes (in my case dealing with huge spiders), being the first port of call for advice about adult life – all these things have a season. And then they don’t. So we circle back to Falstaff: and this is part of the reason why his redundancy stings so badly. 

In the image, we don’t see hatred, or conflict. We see that awful moment of understanding. Falstaff realises that Hal’s future holds no place for him. That Hal’s words in the riotous Eastcheap tavern were something he should have paid heed to.

Just before going electric in 1965, Bob Dylan warned that “the times they are a-changin’” and that we’d better start swimming or sink like a stone.²

Shakespeare’s great rogues, kings, and fathers spend much of their time discovering the same thing.

Falstaff’s tragedy isn’t that he is thrown into the water.

It’s that he never quite believed the tide would turn. He sinks.

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1. all quotations from Shakespeare’s plays this week are taken from htpps://www.opensourceshakespeare.org ↩︎
2. Bob Dylan, The Times They Are A-Changin’, (1964) ↩︎