ABSTRACT
Still, in the “play extempore,” Hal revives a pedagogical possibility for academic drama from within Falstaff’s dismissive critique that yet draws on the knight’s preference for the immediately present and instinctive over abstract ideals or received assumptions. Hal’s idea of playing suggests less the demonstration of learnedness intended by rote actions and careful enunciation than the purposeful deployment of knowledge gained through experience. Rather than cultivate the formal qualities of practiced academic productions, Hal pursues the improvisational and experiential talents developed in revelry, thus turning Falstaff’s habitual vein to deliberate cultivation. Hal’s preference for practicing a full social role, in addition,
reflects changing priorities within some forms of academic theater, especially at the Inns of Court near the turn of the seventeenth century. The organized festivities of Inns students certainly incorporated the traditional rhetorical practices of the academic drama performed at other educational institutions. But the young lawyers starkly changed the comparative emphasis from recitation to response and brought into their productions a large swath of material life.4 Inns revelers broadened the forms of communication to include clothing, pageantry, deportment, and of course improvisations, just as they varied the circumstances under which typical rhetorical skills were to be practiced. The often lavish festivities undertaken in extended revels at the Inns, Douglas Lanier observes, amounted to “a kind of cultural dress rehearsal, in which the revelers strove to (re)produce, often before an audience of actual notables, the ceremonial texture of courtly society, its oratorical style, visual spectacle, ritualized actions, and management of diplomatic challenges.”5 At their most elaborate, however, the revels demonstrated much more than the students’ readiness for court life. The sustained emphasis on what is contingent and alterable, combined with the frequent invocation of material life beyond the court, showcased the students’ connections to increasingly alternative sources of prestige, profit, and power.
