‘Let the sky rain potatoes’

In his fantastical mood, Falstaff bids the sky perform miracles: ‘let [it] rain potatoes, let it thunder to the tune of Greensleeves’. At any moment, he can burst into snatches of ballads on King Arthur, or Robin Hood. Falstaff, Shakespeare’s quintessentially English figure, creates an aural environment that resonates not only with music, but more specifically with songs that conjure up ideas of England which are at once more elusive and more available by being in everyone’s ear, and in everyone’s mouth. This chapter examines the creation of a ‘sonic nationhood’ in Shakespeare’s plays through songs which had seeped into collective (musical) memory. In primarily oral societies, refrains, repetitions, and tunes acquire a key role in the mnemonic and sonic circulation of national narratives: their catchy brevity comes to emblematize the song, helping playwright and audience to remember. Shakespeare’s plays are particularly peppered with tune quotations from popular songs and ballads which reflect, suggest, and test national and local identities. Alternative stories are heard, literally, through music made and evoked. ‘Sonic nationhood’, therefore, does not complement but subtly qualifies official attitudes, while remaining elusive—just sound, depending as it does not on writing but on human memory. It is precisely this slipperiness which makes it hard for us today to listen back, though all the more exciting as well, when we give ear to the singers from the centre stage, or indeed the margins: the buffoons, the revellers, the Falstaffs.