Honor, Power, and Falstaff

Honor is a mere scutcheon. And so ends my catechism.
Falstaff in Henry IV Part 1, Act V, Scene 1

The Renaissance was a time of great change, among the most famous being the invention of the printing press, the discovery of the Americas, and the fragmentation of the church. Less famously but equaling in its significance, the Renaissance was a time when the very definition of political sovereignty changed. Renaissance man found himself liberated from fealty to other men only to be enslaved to a new master, the nation-state.

Before the Renaissance, medieval monarchies ruled by claiming a supreme justice from above while exercising brute force from below. From above, they claimed the righteousness of their rule as an appointment from God. Below them was a warrior class that owed them their allegiance and exercised their military powers in the name of the monarch and his appointing God. As in any political system, the brute force of the physical world was masked and manipulated by the righteousness that was claimed from the nonphysical.

The monarch’s feudal system consisted of a hierarchy of vassals below him that were held together through an honor code known as chivalry. Chivalry demanded that a knight live a life of honor where he owed his warrior skills to the knight above him in the hierarchy, with the king and his appointing god sitting at the top of this pyramid of honor and allegiance. Real world arms were structured into political power by the obligation of the lesser of God’s agents to those of greater appointment. Chivalric honor was the fidelity a warrior held to this obligation.

Medieval feudalism provided a certain level of stability to the European continent for several centuries before finally succumbing to the nation-state and its advancing weaponry in the Renaissance. The vast majority of the population worked as simple farmers who, because of the protection provided by the king and his honor-bound knights, were able to sow, cultivate, and harvest crops from land titled to another. The system may have been unfair and stagnating, but it did provide a stability that was necessary to support the continent’s significant population. The honor of the king and his knights provided the law and order that was necessary to support cultivation and the investment in land and labor that cultivation demanded.

But the changes of the Renaissance would demand a new form of armed protection and this new form of armed protection would require a new form of honor. The rural villages of the medieval periods were growing into towns where trade supported a greater division of labor and the greater division of labor created a new class of wealthy people. Merchants grew rich and powerful without having the honor that held the knights of incumbent wealth together.

Regardless of their growing wealth, the citizens of the cities were not vassals of any knight in the feudal system and therefore owed their honor and allegiance to no member of the warrior class. If they were to be obligated subjects of the monarch it would have to be through a new system of honor. If the king was to maintain his power over the region of land that was his sovereignty, he would have to exact the fidelity of the townspeople who owned no one their fealty and to whom chivalry was nothing more than a romantic notion in the tales of old.

During the Renaissance, as cities grew in size, monarchs held onto political power by claiming that the every resident of the kingdom, regardless of class, was a citizen of the king’s newly discovered nation-state and owed his honor thereto. While the nation-state’s knights might remain believers in the honor of chivalry, their more populous countrymen would owe their allegiance directly to the king through the new form of honor called patriotism. Chivalry’s hold grew weaker and the number of the chivalrous grew relatively smaller as patriotism and allegiance to the nation-state grew stronger and eventually replaced an older romantic notion with a newer one. Europe became, during the Renaissance, a whole continent of people willing to become warriors because of the enslaving burden of a new form of honor.

This change in the honor system that kept monarchy alive (although perhaps becoming less absolute) is aptly dramatized in Shakespeare’s historical plays. In Henry IV Part I, the king of England is haunted by his own violation of God’s selection process by his betrayal of his predecessor, Richard II. Henry’s divine right only existed because of a not-so-divine succession. The very plot of the play is based upon the growing disloyalty of the king’s vassals as they question the king’s divine right of rule and demand their own desserts as once-loyal Englishmen. Prince Harry earns his right of succession through his maturing competence and heroism rather than as a result of birth alone. This play, taking place in the early years of the Renaissance, shows a weakening dependence of the king and his vassals upon the assigned justice from above or the promised chivalry from below. England was becoming a nation-state.

In Henry V, the once Prince Harry calls upon a new form of honor to inspire men into armed conflict. The new king of England rallies his men into battle at Agincourt by appealing, not to their chivalry, but to their membership in a class of men known as Englishmen. On the eve of his greatest battle he appeals to patriotism rather than the medieval sense of honor.

However, throughout this period of changing senses of honor, Shakespeare gives us a man who, to the subject of honor, is certainly an outside observer. Falstaff, the consummate rogue, lives a life that is anything but honorable, but he does serve as an observer of the honor of his more noble friends and enemies. To Falstaff, both the lion’s honor of the fallen Hotspur and the fox’s honor of the clever Prince Harry are nothing but words and do not provide the practical skill of a surgeon nor the wine of a good innkeeper. Hostpur’s warrior honor was proved folly on the fields of Shrewsbury, just as the nation-states’ patriotic honor would later prove to be folly in the courts of Nuremburg.

So was Falstaff right in finding folly in honor? The honor of a chivalric knight is perhaps folly; the honor of Nuremburg is perhaps also folly; but honor itself can be wise. The honor that guides men into fruitful cooperation rather than the brutish application of force over one another is not folly.

Within the walled towns of Renaissance Europe, another code of honor was growing that would someday elevate man beyond the bounds of the Renaissance, produce an industrial revolution, and justify a new form of government’s ideal of the pursuit of individual happiness. The medieval merchant’s honor requires no weapons, draws no blood, and only demands that each man be given the liberty to trade and communicate with anyone who can be trusted to provide him with the greatest comparative advantage. The honor needed to make trades and thereby voluntarily cooperate with other men is the honor that only one who, like Falstaff, “takes purses by the moon and the seven stars” can find folly with.