Organización del aparato instrumental de la metodología y su modo

It is not just the powerful female voice that Shakespeare portrays as unnatural. Another unnatural motif is the male mother tongue, represented by Falstaff’s claim that ‘I have a whole school of tongues in this belly of mine’ (IV.3.18-20, 2 Henry IV, 1598). Shakespeare transexualises the mother tongue, pushing an idea that is

delimited as female onto a male character.74 The ‘mother tongue’ as distinctly female is inverted, where the unique ability to birth language, to pass it on biologically and physically through the mother is appropriated as something male.75 Falstaff’s educated tongues sit in his belly, suggested by his ‘school’ of tongues. They are figured as natural, mother tongues, yet they are inherently unnatural, even monstrous, given the plurality of tongues and his inability to birth them.76

Falstaff says:

I have a whole school of tongues in this belly

of mine, and not a tongue of them all speaks any other word but my name. And had I but a belly of any indifferency, I were simply the most active fellow

in Europe. My womb, my womb, my womb undoes me. (IV.3.18-22) His linguistic excessiveness is signified by his large belly, suggesting he is a slovenly, greedy consumer of far too much food and even more alcohol. Yet his lightness with language, his verbal speed, jars with his heavy, lumbering belly and his description as ‘this huge hill of flesh’ (1 Henry IV II.4.285). He disguises his

74 _{For a discussion of the male mother see Suzanne Penuel, ‘Male Mothering and The Tempest’ in} Performing Maternity in Early Modern England, eds. Kathryn Moncrief and Kathryn McPherson, (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), 115-30.

75 _{Valerie Traub reads Falstaff’s reference to his womb biologically as defined specifically by its}

uniquely female ability to reproduce. See ‘Prince Hal’s Falstaff: Positioning Psychoanalysis and the Female Reproductive Body’, Shakespeare Quarterly, Vol. 40, No. 4, (Winter, 1989), 456-474.

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For an early modern exploration of the triangulation between ‘lingua’, ‘tongue’ and ‘language’ in drama, see Thomas Tomkis’s Lingua (1607). Nurturing Falstaff’s own tongues, especially regarding his reference to his ‘school’ of tongues, suggests the tongues could be foreign languages, increasing Falstaff’s volubility through his multilingualism. There is a collision between the mother tongue, foreign tongues, linguistic difference and error.

quick-wit and pregnancy of linguistic meaning with his rotund shape, dissimulating his identity. He appears as a mother of tongues, playing on the ‘mother’s tongue’ and the mother tongue. Perhaps the many tongues that are inside him are foreign tongues cultivated by ‘schooling’, further mangling the image of the natural mother tongue.77

Presentation of Falstaff in this way expresses male desire to control and father the mother tongue. Falstaff, as one of Shakespeare’s characters most adept in handling words, represents this conflict between women as the carrier of the language and men who wish to authorise it.

Falstaff claims that he gestates multiple tongues which contribute to his linguistic ability. Yet his speech is often cryptic. He says of his belly full of tongues: ‘not a tongue of them all speaks any other word but my name’ (IV.3.19-20, 2 Henry IV). The meaning of this is obscure; his speech at this point is difficult to interpret and verges on incoherence. Perhaps the tongues that speak nothing but his name refer to his unrestrained egoism, his inexorable need to channel his powers into nothing other than the service of his base desires. This would make sense of his subsequent remark that he would be ‘the most active fellow in Europe’ if his belly was

indifferent, presumably to his desire for food, drink and self-preferment. His laxity of linguistic meaning mirrors his morality: his dangerous wandering tongue and his leading Prince Henry astray. As Hal says, ‘these humble considerations make me out of love with my greatness’ (II.2.11-2). His time in Eastcheap and his lowly

companions are his ‘humble’ surroundings, as in his own words, he transforms from ‘a prince to a prentice’ (II.2.174). He looks forward to a time after his gaming with Falstaff, saying ‘So, when this loose behaviour I throw off’ (1 Henry IV, I.2.208). His behaviour and language are ‘loose’, containing associations of being

77 _{Or perhaps they are different ways of speaking, various forms of address, to different characters –}

unrestrained, dangerous and restless. There is certainly no portcullis or bridle controlling Falstaff’s tongue, his dissidence drawing in Hal and threatening Kingly succession; he has ‘misled the youthful prince’ (I.2.144).

Shakespeare conceptually ties language to pregnancy, where Falstaff is breeding tongues in his own womb. ‘Womb’ in the early modern period held several senses, one being ‘uterus’, another being ‘stomach’, the latter meaning subsequently lost.78 Colin MacCabe argues that the use of ‘womb’ here contributes to the

subversive power of Falstaff’s character and that ‘we should not be surprised at Falstaff’s consequent sexual ambiguity’.79

Peter Barry disagrees on the fundamental ground that a word cannot mean two things at once, even when it historically

supports two different readings. Although a word ‘may have two or more “available” meanings, when used the context usually eliminates all but one of them.’80

But recourse to the context offered either by language or Falstaff’s character only complicates the attempt to determine a single meaning between stomach and uterus where, as MacCabe argues, Falstaff represents not just a threat to political

representation but to representation itself because his dialogue is so frequently obscure.81

Regarding the context, the interpretation of womb as either stomach or uterus turns upon whether Falstaff’s innards digest or breed. The nurturing ‘school’ of tongues connotes children and education, hinting at a parental rather than consuming

78 _{See OED at ˂www.oed.com˃ [accessed 20 July 2011].}

79 _{Colin MacCabe, Theoretical Essays: Film, Linguistics, Literature (Manchester: Manchester}

University Press, 1985), p. 116. Feminist criticism has laid claim to this speech. Patricia Parker names Falstaff as a ‘fat lady’ (Literary Fat Ladies, p. 20). She reads Falstaff’s ‘belly’ full of tongues as making him more feminine rather than the mother tongue more masculine: the breeding and nurturing of language, of ‘tongues’, as being claimed by men. See Parker, Literary Fat Ladies, pp. 20-2. Valerie Traub notes that the large amount of references draw attention to Falstaff’s belly which becomes ‘increasingly feminized’. See Valerie Traub, Desire and Anxiety (London: Routledge, 1992), p. 57.

80 _{Peter Barry, ‘The Limitations of Stylistics’ in Essays in Criticism, Vol. 38, No. 3, (July 1988), 175-}

89, p. 176. As a method of reading, Barry’s approach seems fundamentally unable to deal with ambiguity; he can only eradicate it.

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function. Thus the womb is the thing that ‘undoes’ his masculinity. As a grossly fat character, whose body ‘lards the lean earth as he walks along’ (II.2.109),his belly is a visual pun on pregnancy, supporting the reading that his reference to his own womb is a feminised stomach capable of growing and birthing, rather than a seat of gluttony.82 Falstaff’s paternalism—as a substitute father figure towards Hal—is extended in a maternal sense by engendering his own offspring, which are tongues and language rather children.83 Shakespeare’s representation of the mother tongue – here meaning Falstaff’s mothering of his bellyful of tongues – overturns the common assumption that it describes natural and native language: it is unnatural, plural, foreign and educated.