Chapter 26 - Trust

Summary

This chapter identifies and anatomizes a cruel rite of friendship. In 1 Henry IV, Hal bullies Falstaff by inducing him to fail. Yet the play frames Hal’s comic brutality as an expression of fondness. Because Hal understands Falstaff’s failures as occasions for self-display, he also sees them as opportunities to savor what is distinctive about his friend’s personality. Hal also interprets Falstaff’s ineptitude as evidence of stuckness and thus of the durability of his character. For his part, Falstaff’s readiness to perform shamelessness seems to lower the stakes of his ongoing humiliation; he is habituated to helplessness. The chapter concludes by considering some of the reasons for which Shakespeare might have chosen to narrate the development of trust against the contrastive background of ethical obligation. In a speculative mode, I suggest that any ethical program that does not prioritize the leveling of hierarchy over the inculcation of virtue — any ethical program that is not also (and, indeed, primarily) a politics — will inevitably remain bound up with social subordination. As long as virtue is not the object of collective negotiation but rather an imposition from on high, it will encourage confused and abusive responses such as Hal’s bid for solidarity in wildness. It is telling that Shakespeare locates the resistance to virtue even in the very person who benefits most from the values it reproduces.