A Table of Green Fields

Falstaffian lucubrations

[George Cruikshank’s engraving: ‘The Death of Falstaff’ (1858)]

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I love the phrase ‘a Table of green fields’. Indeed, I have inserted it more than once into my fiction. I talk a little about why I love it below, but first: the context.

Falstaff, such a powerful presence in Henry IV Part 1 and Henry IV Part 2, appears in this, the final play in the Henriad sequence, only offstage. Having cultivated young Prince Hal during his roisterdoister years, and expecting preferment when Hal became king, Falstaff is, famously, turned away by the new monarch at his coronation (‘I know thee not, old man: fall to thy prayers; How ill white hairs become a fool and jester!’) He dies: of a broken heart, if we are sentimental; of his age, and unhealthy habits: drink, lechery, gluttony, if we are more realistic.

In Henry V the young king is busy readying his military expedition to France; Falstaff’s former crew (as I believe the idiom is, nowadays) is readying to go to war with him: Ensign Pistol, the Hostess (Mistress Quickly as was, whom Pistol has now married), Nim, Bardolph and Boy. Before they depart, Falstaff’s death is reported by the Hostess. To the suggestion that the wicked old knight might have gone to hell, she insists that he has gone ‘to Arthur’s bosom’— a little comic business, this, by which she has confused ‘Abraham’s Bosom’, as per Luke 16:19, with the legendary King Arthur.

The Hostess’s description of Falstaff’s end follows Renaissance medical opinion: deriving ultimately from Hippocrates, and described in, amongst others, Peter Lowe’s Whole Course of Chirurgerie (1597) and Thomas Lupton’s A Thousand Notable Things of Sundrie Sortes (1578): that a dying patient is most likely to expire between midnight and one in the morning, that he will fidget and babble, that he will change colour, that he will grow cold. Lupton says: ‘if the Forehead of the Sick wax red, and his Left Eye become little, and the corner of his Eye run, and his Brows fall down, and his Nose wax sharp cold; if he turn to the wall, if his Ears be cold; … if he will pull straws, or the clothes off his bed, or if he pick often his Nostrils with his fingers, and if he weak much, these are most certain tokens of death.’ [9.5] ‘Sharp cold’, there, means very cold; bt the Hostess’s ‘sharp as a pen’ must describe the look of a face that’s haggard and drawn (which literally means ‘pulled’, i.e. downwards) a nose reduced to skin and cartilage, which is much more clearly defined.

This is important because it bears on the textual crux that follows: a Table of greene fields. This looks wrong, and editors of Shakespeare have amended it. Which is to say: mostly, they have. There are scholars who defend the original reading. But most think this is, in effect, a typo. Whichever individual in the printing house set up the Folio text in type, reading off a manuscript, perhaps one not very legibly written, ran his finger along the line and misread the actual word as Table. What did he misread? Matters are complicated by the fact that the Hostess sometimes uses ‘a’ to mean ‘a’, and sometimes to mean ‘he’.

Lewis Theobald’s 1733 edition of Shakespeare’s works amends Table to babled, giving us: ‘his nose was as sharp as a pen and [he] babbled of green fields’. Most later editions follow Theobald. It makes sense of the line: just as a sharp nose is a sign of impending death, so is random babbling. There is pathos in this, too: though venal, selfish, cowardly, gluttonous, Falstaff is an English knight, and at the end, his mind wandering, he reverts to a sentimental expression of love for the English countryside.

Is Theobald’s emendation correct? Did Shakespeare write ‘a babled’ and the compositor, setting his difficult handwriting into type, put ‘a Table’? Could be.

Gary Taylor’s Oxford edition of Henry V includes an entire essay on what he calls ‘the most famous of Shakespearian cruces’. He starts by ‘disregarding the heap of conjectural nonsense it has spawned’ and boils the editorial options down to four. One is that the Folio reading is correct, and Shakespeare actually wrote ‘his nose was as sharp as a pen and a Table of greene fields’, which the compositor correctly set up in type. Two is to amend not ‘Table’ but ‘and’, changing the line to ‘his nose was as sharp as a pen on a Table of green fields’. Three is to amend ‘Table’ to ‘talked’, and four is Theobald’s emendation.

The first option here requires us to understand table not as an item of furniture (the word’s meaning today) but as picture or image, which used to be one of its meanings (think tablet, or tableau). The meaning would then be ‘his nose was cold and its picture, the way it looked, was as green as a field’; or perhaps ‘his nose was cold, and his “Table”, that is, his image, his face, turned green’. Taylor dismisses this reading as too strained and improbable. He also dismisses the second possibility (John Payne Collier’s nineteenth-century edition of Shakespeare chose this emendation) as senseless: ‘why should a pen “on a table of green fields” be sharper than an ordinary pen? why should a pen be lying on a picture of green fields? We would expect a pen to lie upon an ordinary writing table, or upon a notebook (another contemporary sense of table) but these reasonable expectations produce nonsense’. Of the other two possibilities, Taylor thinks either could be correct, but he chooses ‘babbled’ as ‘more unusual’ than talked, as ‘the more precise, the more evocative, and thereby the more Shakespearian.’ Lots of other editors of Shakespeare have gone done the same, though the Folger edition prefers ‘talked’:

Babbled does indeed make a lovely line, though it doesn’t seem likely as an emendation. However scrabbly Shakespeare’s handwriting (if indeed it was from Shakespeare’s manuscript that the play was set) it strains credulity that a compositor would mistake a b for a capital T — or a terminal d for an e. The usual gradient, as it were, of textual emendation assumes a compositor reading an unusual word in the manuscript and altering it, subconsciously, as he transfers it to type, to make more sense. This emendation requires that the reverse happened: the compositor altered the comprehensible talked or babbled to the nonsensical Table.

It seems to me there are more options than the four Taylor identifies, but I hesitate to add to Taylor’s big heap of conjectural nonsense. More, there are more than textual reasons for disliking the emendation — for turning the line into, as I said, a focus of sentimental patriotism, for softening and banalising the character of Falstaff himself. Linda Charnes puts it well, with a pop at Harold Bloom’s ‘Shakespeare literally invented the modern human’ argument:

Falstaff’s death is reported to the audience second hand, which generates a doubled nostalgia, a further sentimentalizing of an already sentimental moment. At this important juncture in the Henriad — the story of the death of Falstaff-the words “a’ babbled of green fields” supply the play with ex actly the kind of sentimentalism that nation-building in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries will both manufacture and feed upon. Theobald’s emendation seems natural to us because, although the Henriad’s chronology predates the British empire, the political strategy of its concluding play, Henry V, is so clearly one of nationalist boosterism: “Cry ‘God for Harry England, and Saint George!”’ For Theobald, Falstaff’s babbling of green fields would have had the added stamp of medical authority. For successive generations of editors, for whom nostalgia has now be come second nature, the emendation fits nicely with the audience’s desire to sentimentalize Falstaff’s exit from the Henriad. Wrapped in nostalgia’s fuzzy embrace, Falstaff is retroactively enshrined as the source of joie de vivre, bon hommie, and liberal largesse. No longer Falstaff the thief, glutton, coward, braggart, corpse-mangler, liar, drunkard, and lecher, Theobald’s Falstaff becomes an icon of all that is most worth celebrating about “the human”. Through the eyes of nostalgia, as we gaze backward from a modern world shaped by imperialisms (British, French, and American), we see Harold Bloom’s Falstaff-midwived by Theobald-being born well in advance of Bloom’s own historical moment. [Linda Charnes, ‘Anticipating Nostalgia: Finding Temporal Logic in a Textual Anomaly’, Textual Cultures, 4:1 (2009), 79–80]

I said at the beginning of this that I love the line ‘a table of green fields’. But I don’t love it because it makes sense in context: it doesn’t. I question the idea that ‘making logical sense’ is the Shakespearian criterion — the premise that an editor’s job is to revise and alter Shakespeare until it makes consecutive, logical, semantic sense. This results in a smoothening, a blandifying, of the texture of Shakespeare. The point of Shakespeare is to make poetic sense, not to adhere to some vision of logical consistency. When McCartney, composing ‘Hey Jude’, put-in ‘the movement you need is on your shoulder’, as a lyrical placeholder, he assured Lennon that he would change it later. Lennon told him to keep it, and was right to do so. The sense it makes is poetic, not semantic and logical.

For an Elizabethan table might mean picture, or notebook (tablet), but it also meant, well, table, the item of furniture, and that’s how I read it, here. A table of green fields becomes a miniaturisation of the actual green fields of England; a tabletop version of the landscape — a modular rendering of reality, which is what drama, and poetry, are. This is to connect with Henry V’s prologue, which is precisely about the mismatch between big reality and the small representation of reality provided by the theatre:

O For a Muse of Fire, that would ascend
The brightest Heauen of Inuention:
A Kingdome for a Stage, Princes to Act,
And Monarchs to behold the swelling Scene.
Then should the Warlike Harry, like himselfe,
Assume the Port of Mars, and at his heeles
( Leasht in, like Hounds) should Famine, Sword, and Fire
Crouch for employment. But pardon, Gentles all:
The flat vnraysed Spirits, that hath dar’d,
On this vnworthy Scaffold, to bring forth
So great an Obiect. Can this Cock-Pit hold
The vastie fields of France? Or may we cramme
Within this Woodden O. the very Caskes
That did affright the Ayre at Agincourt?

The stage is flat, a scaffold, a cock-pit, and famously — this being the Globe theatre — ‘this wooden O’: the world’s ‘O’-shaped vastness is doubly reduced, to the round walls of Shakespeare’s Southwark playhouse, and, here, to the typography of the letter O, smaller again. This flat scaffold is a table, and after Falstaff’s death is related its scene shifts to, precisely, the green fields of France. ‘Wouldn’t it be great,’ the prologue says, ‘if we could stage the actual invasion of France, with kingdoms instead of this flat table, and princes instead of actors. But this is not possible: so instead ‘let us, Cyphers to this great Accompt,/On your imaginarie Forces worke’. We are only actors not kings and princes; this is only a flat wooden surface, not palaces, taverns, green fields. But imagination can transform the table to the field, the commoner to king. This is entirely Falstaff’s domain: the scene in Henry IV where he plays at being king, with a cushion on his head instead of a crown, holding court in the Boar’s Head Tavern. He is a player, in several senses of that word, including the modern street meaning. In Henry IV Part 2 the Hostess demands payment of the money he owes her.

Falstaff: What is the grosse summe that I owe thee?

Hostess: Marry (if thou wer’t an honest man) thy selfe, & the mony too. Thou didst sweare to mee vpon a parcell gilt Goblet, sitting in my Dolphin-chamber at the round table, by a sea-cole fire, on Wednesday in Whitson week, when the Prince broke thy head for lik’ning him to a singing man of Windsor; Thou didst sweare to me then (as I was washing thy wound) to marry me, and make mee my Lady thy wife. Canst yu deny it? [Henry IV Part 2, 2.1.687f]

The round-table brings us back to Arthur — whom Falstaff certainly is not (he is not a king, he is not a noble and chivalric knight), but whom he in a sense models, whom he plays — apes, mocks. He offers to marry the Hostess not actually to do so, but to get out of paying his bill, and indeed to get her to lend him thirty shillings.

This process of miniaturisation, of modular reduction of reality, fascinates me as the fundamental process of art as such: representation, imagination, play. Shakespeare’s pen is sharp in reducing gigantic reality into small compass; in staging green fields upon a table.