"I am made an ass": Falstaff and the scatology of Windsor's polity.(Sir John Falstaff of the The Merry Wives of Windsor)(Critical essay)

This project begins with a familiar linguistic question: did early modern English locution allow for a pun between the words ass and arse? The OED says no; it points to an 1860 text as the first recorded instance of the pun, and it provides no etymological connection between the words. (1) A number of critics of early English literature, drama in particular, sense a pun nonetheless. For example, Gail Kern Paster, discerning a comic "scatological imperative" in A Midsummer Night's Dream footnotes the OED's claim that a "pun on bottom/ass ... is not present in Elizabethan locution," yet she proceeds to argue for a "somatic troping on Bottom's name" by tracing the logic of purgation that structures the ass-headed Bottom's love affair with Titania. (2) Likewise, in her essay on Shakespeare's use of the ass motif in Midsummer and The Comedy of Errors, Deborah Baker Wyrick allows the pun as a consequence of Renaissance pronunciation; for her, as for Paster, the pun is purely homonymic. (3) Perhaps the most emphatic assertion of the pun's presence in Shakespeare belongs to Frankie Rubenstein, who boldly proclaims in her Dictionary of Shakespeare's Sexual Puns and Their Significance, "Shakespeare never used 'arse'; like his contemporaries, he used 'ass' to pun on the ass that gets beaten with a stick and the arse that gets thumped sexually, the ass that bears a burden and the arse that bears or carries in intercourse." (4) Annabel Patterson agrees with Rubinstein's assessment, and she reads the translated Bottom as "a political allegory of status inversion and corporal punishment." (5) Finally, Mario DiGangi argues that the pun can be heard outside Shakespearean contexts in the homoerotic relation of masters to asses in seventeenth-century city comedies. (6)

Taking a cue from this critical consensus that early modern English locution did at least allow for a homonymic pun between ass and arse, I suggest that the pun reverberates within larger networks of wordplay that contribute to Falstaff's comic transformation into an ass at the end of The Merry Wives of Windsor. In comic terms, the ass is the butt of the joke: the object of humiliation whose etymological roots lie in the use of butt (from the Old French) to refer to a target or a hunter's mark. (7) The word butt is itself absent from The Merry Wives of Windsor, but the word ass is repeatedly present, wrapped up in a web of scatological humor that puns ass with arse and connects both words to Falstaff as the target or butt of ridicule. Costumed as Herne the Hunter in Windsor Forest, Falstaff becomes the butt of the jest, as he himself attests: "I do begin to perceive that I am made an ass" (5.5.115). (8) Building on scholarship that addresses the politics of the play's rich and suggestive wordplay, I contend that Falstaff's identification as an ass arises through the connotative and homonymic evocations of the play's many scatological jokes--humor that, as Paster shows, draws attention to the butt as the bodily nexus of shame. (9)

Of course, lacking etymological connections between ass and arse, it would be difficult to follow the signifying chain linking arse, ass, and butt in The Merry Wives of Windsor did we not approach the play with a contemporary sense of all three words' comic connections. The pun is arguably inaudible without the now familiar understanding that butts figure as subjects and objects of comic derision, that ass is now an acceptable Americanized Englishing of arse, and that ass, arse, and butt all denote the body's posterior, if not sometimes the rectum itself. As all three words can, in various situations, now substitute for one another, I approach The Merry Wives of Windsor to some extent anachronistically, hearing in Shakespeare's play the genesis of linguistic configurations that contemporary English speakers often take for granted. All three words, overcoding one another, I ultimately put to the service of the following idea: that insofar as the butt of a joke figures, in Susan Purdie's words, as the locus of "semantic excess," this excess is also somatically troped via the ass motif in Shakespeare's play. (10) Moreover, as Falstaff becomes the ass, I argue that he also becomes the anal foundation, or fundament, upon which Windsor's diverse polity--fractured by gender, class, and national differences--can cohere. (11) My reconsideration of Falstaff as the butt of Windsor's body politic might therefore be said to engage the scatological, comic politics of "ass-making," drawing attention to the fundamental role of the ass in Merry Wives and, potentially, other early modern comedies as well.

Falstaff's "Way of Waste"

According to Susan Purdie, comedy turns on the "abuse" of language. As a tool that shapes reality, language, or discourse, is to be mastered, and masters of language showcase their dominance through joking--through twisting language in such a way that their transgression simultaneously marks their knowledge of discursive rules. In relation to the audience and the teller of jokes, butts occupy what Purdie calls a "third position": displaced onto them are the proliferation of significations upon which jokes depend, and through them, or at their expense, discursive rules are reinforced. (12) In this and like theories about the butt's function in the comic triad, the position's anatomy and etymology go unaddressed, as if the butt simply nominated an unremarkable correlation between a shameful body part and a degraded other. The Merry Wives of Windsor stages the convoluted construction of this correlation, however. It foregrounds the processes of shaping and partitioning the body--both the individual body and the body politic--through language. Fittingly, the play has as its comic villain a knight whose body exceeds all bounds. Like the play's scatological wordplay, Falstaff's body is excessive, and both bespeak a social order in the making through consumption and purgation.

The Merry Wives of Windsor is awash with puns, a word that is itself an anachronism, a narrowing of what early modern English speakers called clenches: witty wordplay that includes and exceeds the punning formula of conjoining inconsonant signifieds under a single signifier. (13) To use the word pun, we must do so with the awareness that the particular linguistic play of punning is hard to pin down, and that to do so would foreclose the signifying connections that Shakespearean wordplay often suggests. Indeed, to begin tracing the signifying chain that emerges in retrospect of Falstaff's identification as an ass, it is necessary to turn first to another pun between waste and waist that Falstaff employs when he tells Pistol and Nim of his plan to woo Mistress Ford. The pun blurs the line between consumption and purgation--between what Falstaff has consumed, what he has turned into refuse, and where such refuse is located:

 
  FALSTAFF: My honest lads, I will tell you what I am about. 
  PISTOL: Two yards and more. 
  FALSTAFF: No quips now, Pistol. Indeed, I am in the waist two yards 
  about. But I am now about no waste; I am about thrift. Briefly, I do 
  mean to make love to Ford's wife. I spy entertainment in her. She 
  discourses, she carves, she gives the leer of invitation. I can 
  construe the action of her familiar style; and the hardest voice of 
  her behaviour, to be Englished rightly, is 'I am Sir John Falstaff's.' 
  (1.3.33-41)