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Analysing Drama - Preliminary Matters
Task C - Our answer
There are certainly things that can be explained with foregrounding theory.
First of all, we can use the notion of internal deviation to explain the
staggering character of what is happening here in general terms. Hal's
behaviour throughout the plays so far has matched Falstaff's close and
friendly attitude towards him. So his behaviour here is internally deviant
in the text and so markedly foregrounded.
Next, parallelism and deviation can be used to account for some of the
effects in Falstaff's line. He uses three vocatives, or terms of address
in addressing Henry, and they are all grammatically parallel to one another,
consisting of 'my + noun'. These all help to indicate the close relationship
(repetition of 'my') he feels he has with his old friend, and two of the
phrases are also semantically deviant. Jove is an alternative name for
the most powerful Roman god, Jupiter, and so 'my Jove' cannot literally
be true and we can infer that it hyperbolically expresses Falstaff's strong
commitment to Hal as the king's subject. 'My heart' is also semantically
deviant, and this time the allusion is clearly to the strongly-felt personal
and emotional attachment he has to Hal. So the three parallel address
terms express different aspects of Falstaff's attitude to his friend,
a viewpoint which soon turns out to be false one.
But there are other things which need to be explained in these three
lines:
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When Falstaff says 'I speak to you' he is suggesting a power relationship
whereby he is in control, not 'his Hal', (when Mick's mother used
to say 'I am speaking to you Michael', he definitely used to sit up
and took notice, and we are pretty sure you would have done the same
when your parents said the same sort of thing!). If you are in a powerful
position in a conversation you expect others to take notice when you
talk. We need to understand how power works in conversations (we will
begin to look at conversational power on the next page of this topic).
And we need to understand how 'I speak to you' means 'take notice
of me (we will look at the 'meaning between the lines in topic 12).
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When Henry calls Falstaff an old man he is clearly being rude to
him, and when he says that his white hairs ill become a fool and jester
he is being doubly rude. Falstaff is apparently so old that he cannot
even make a reasonable fool. We will look at politess and impoliteness
in Topic 12.
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When Henry tells Falstaff to fall to his prayers he is being impolite
in a different way. Instead of saying that he does not like Falstaff,
he orders him to do something. We will look briefly at speech acts,
and particularly the speech act of commanding later in this topic.
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Finally, the content of the command used is to tell Falstaff to get
on his knees and pray. Note that in order to understand this properly
we have to understand something about the schematic background knowledge
we bring along to texts in order to understand them. In this case,
we know from our background knowledge that medieval kings had enormous
power, including the ability to imprison or execute subjects at will.
So when Henry tells Falstaff to fall to his prayers he appears to
be ordering him to pray in order avert the imminent possibility of
something very unpleasant happening to him in the near future. We
will explore how we bring schematic knowledge to texts to help us
understand them in Topic 13.
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