should not depart without a song

From Knight of the Burning Pestle by Francis Beaumont, here is Old Merrythought (singing, as he does throughout the play):

‘Tis mirth that fills the veins with blood,                                                                          More than wine, or sleep, or food;                                                                                           Let each man keep his heart at ease,                                                                                    No man dies of that disease.                                                                                                       He that would his body keep                                                                                                From diseases, must not weep;                                                                                                But whoever laughs and sings,                                                                                              Never he his body brings                                                                                                            Into fevers, gouts or rheums,                                                                                                      Or lingeringly his lungs consumes,                                                                                           Or meets with aches in the bone,                                                                                             Or catarrhs, or griping stone,                                                                                                    But contented lives for aye;                                                                                                      The more he laughs, the more he may. (Act II, 433-66)

Good as his word, Old Merrythought sings his way through the play as it goes variously around him, singing out and making merry even against the scolding of his wife and his own dwindling fortunes.  The production at the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse in London in 2014 had Paul Rider not only singing Merrythought, but also dancing him through the production, which was an astonishing feat in a wonderful production of this play.  A bit of a spoiler to say that it all turns out well for Merrythought anyway, albeit that isn’t so surprising in a comedy.

Yet, when we look at “real life” (and if anyone can explain that distinction to me, you are certainly welcome to try–for I have come to believe that the best bits of stories really do tend to be built out of our own experiences anyway), we all seem to know these figures.  We all know those who pay no mind to seeming misfortune, appearing able to shrug or even laugh off life’s grimmer threats, and frequently these folks seem to turn out alright in the end.  When we do encounter them, it is difficult not to view these eternal optimists with a kind of wry admiration.  Marvelous work, if you can get it, right?  Marvelous, if you can get it right.

Of course, there is a distinction between living “for aye” as Merrythought puts it, and the kind of merrymaking associated with dissipation and dissolution.  In the Bible,  Moses meets God (Yahweh) in the form of a burning bush on a mountaintop, and in this encounter, God tells Moses, “I am that I am”. (KJV, Exodus 3:14)  God seemingly defines or delineates himself as the very state of being, as “is”-ness, as creation itself.  Living for assent, for agreement, for the very quality of yesness asserts a kind of affirmation of being that resonates well with creation or being.

Contrast this assertion of being with the ideas expressed by Shakespeare’s famous reveller, Falstaff:

A good sherris sack hath a two-fold
operation in it. It ascends me into the brain;
dries me there all the foolish and dull and curdy
vapours which environ it; makes it apprehensive,
quick, forgetive, full of nimble fiery and
delectable shapes, which, delivered o’er to the
voice, the tongue, which is the birth, becomes
excellent wit. The second property of your
excellent sherris is, the warming of the blood;
which, before cold and settled, left the liver
white and pale, which is the badge of pusillanimity
and cowardice; but the sherris warms it and makes
it course from the inwards to the parts extreme:
it illumineth the face, which as a beacon gives
warning to all the rest of this little kingdom,
man, to arm; and then the vital commoners and
inland petty spirits muster me all to their captain,
the heart, who, great and puffed up with this
retinue, doth any deed of courage; and this valour
comes of sherris. So that skill in the weapon is
nothing without sack, for that sets it a-work; and
learning a mere hoard of gold kept by a devil, till
sack commences it and sets it in act and use.
Hereof comes it that Prince Harry is valiant; for
the cold blood he did naturally inherit of his
father, he hath, like lean, sterile and bare land,
manured, husbanded and tilled with excellent
endeavour of drinking good and good store of fertile
sherris, that he is become very hot and valiant. If
I had a thousand sons, the first humane principle I
would teach them should be, to forswear thin
potations and to addict themselves to sack. (2 Henry IV, 4.3.71-102)

Falstaff is like T.S. Eliot’s “Hollow Men”, his headpiece filled with sack instead of straw.  Scarecrow propped up against the cold wind, burning with a tenuous fire fueled from outside of himself, his courage and ‘heat’ arising from a source outside of his own being, the inconstant companion of liquid courage.  To Falstaff “honour” is “a word”.  It is “air”.* For Falstaff seems to revel largely to run away, To him, affirmations remain elusive and illusory, empty as the promises of politicians or lawyers.

For all his wickedness, lying, stealing, conniving, the mighty pain at Falstaff’s core urges us to forgive him to some degree, or at least, if we think of our human kin, to lean towards forgiveness.  For who has not known others in such pain?  And who among us can easily judge them for what that pain might have made them do?  How it might have made them act?  Should anyone then pontificate about right and wrong, or controlling one’s behaviour and one’s attitudes, it brings to mind the question of whether or not the judge has encountered that kind pain, the pain not only of tremendous loss, but of the dizzying loss of self and all the world, that makes the world we thought we knew spin away into the dark corners of disarray and absence.

Of course, Merrythought eagerly embraces mirth over the seductions of wine, sleep, and food, choosing laughter and song instead of sack.  Yet, although he is enormously entertaining in the play, we also tend to find him a bit implausible.  His character interest springs at least partly from the fact that he maintains his good humour more staunchly than it is readily believable that most people could.  We tend to like him, and even admire his perseverance, but many people tend to sympathise and even identify more with Falstaff, especially if they perceive some glimmer of the kind of pain that it seems must have sometime knocked him off his compass.

But perhaps Falstaff was always a bit askew?  He might argue that he follows scripture, after all.  The Bible does say, “Let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we shall die” (Isaiah 22:13) and variants of these ideas abound not only in the Bible but in many other places as well.  In “To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time”,  Robert Herrick wrote:

• see 1 Henry IV,  5.1.130-42.