Shakespeare

So Cobham wrote to the Master of the Revels, Edmund Tilney, who in turn passed on the complaint to Shakespeare’s company; Shakespeare was then obliged in the second part of the play to change the name of his comic hero, from Oldcastle to Falstaff, and publicly to disavow his original creation. It is not clear why in the beginning Shakespeare chose the name of Oldcastle. It has been suggested that Shakespeare’s “secret” Catholic sympathies led him to lampoon this Lollard and anti-Catholic. In his Church History Thomas Fuller writes of Shakespeare’s original use of Oldcastle, “but it matters as little what petulant Poets as what malicious Papists have written against him.” But it seems unlikely that any overt Catholic bias entered the play. The name of Oldcastle had already appeared in The Famous Victories of Henry the Fifth , and Shakespeare may simply have borrowed it without considering the connection with Cobham.

It was in any case changed, and not without a certain humiliation on Shakespeare’s part. In an epilogue to the second part of Henry IV he himself came upon the stage and announced that “for any thing I knowe Falstaffe shall die of a sweat, vnlesse already a be killd with your harde opinions; for Oldecastle died a Martyre, and this is not the man …” (3224-7). Then he danced, and afterwards knelt for the applause.

The connection was not wholly erased, however. In a letter to Robert Cecil the Earl of Essex gave out the news that a certain lady was “maryed to Sir Jo. Falstaff” -this was the Court nickname now given to Lord Cobham. The name of Oldcastle was also still associated with Henry IV , and in fact the Lord Chamberlain’s Men played for the Burgundian ambassador a play entitled Sir John Old Castell . Shakespeare’s inventions have a habit of lingering in the air.

Oldcastle, or Falstaff, is at the centre of the play. He is the presiding deity of the London taverns who takes the young Prince Hal, heir to the throne, within his paternal and capacious embrace; he is discomfited only when Hal, on becoming sovereign, repudiates him in bitter terms. Hal has been compared to Shakespeare in that respect, disowning such supposed drinking companions as Robert Greene and Thomas Nashe. It may be significant that Greene had a wife known as “Doll” and that Falstaff’s weakness is for a prostitute known as Doll Tere-Sheete, but this may be coincidental. In any case Falstaff is too large, too monumental, to be identified with anyone in life. He is as mythical as the Green Man.

He has become perhaps the most recognisable of all Shakespearian characters; he now appears in a thousand different contexts, from novel to grand opera. He became famous almost as soon as he appeared upon the stage. One poem notes “but let Falstaff come” and “you scarce shall have a roome” in the theatre, and another celebrates how long “Falstaff from cracking nuts hath kept the throng”: 4when Falstaff came on stage the audience were silent with anticipation. It was indeed the presence of Falstaff that rendered these plays so popular; the first part of Henry IV was reprinted more frequently than any other of Shakespeare’s plays. The first quarto edition was read so often and so widely that it survives only in fragments; there were three reprintings in the first year of publication.

The boisterous, extravagant, rhapsodical figure was at once recognised as a national type; he seemed to be as English as beef-pudding and beer, a great deflator of authority and pomposity, a drinker to excess, a rogue who concealed his crimes with wit and bravado. He is an enemy of seriousness in all of its forms, and thus represents one salient aspect of the English imagination. He is filled with good humour and good nature, even when he is leading conscripted soldiers to their certain death, and in that sense he is above mere censure; he is like one of the Homeric gods whose divinity is in no way impeded by their wilful behaviour. He is free from malice, free from self-consciousness; he is in fact free from everything. He is the thorn to the rose, the jester to the king, the shadow to the flame. His instinct for bawdry and subversion are part of his language that parodies the rhetoric of others and follows its own anarchic chain of associations; we have already seen how he translates “gravitie” into “gravie.” Whatever can be thought of, Falstaff says. Shakespeare took comedy as far as it can possibly go.

He was played by William Kempe, the pre-eminent clown in England, and Inigo Jones gives a fine contemporaneous description of “a Sir John fall staff” with “a roabe of russet Girt low … a great belley … great heade and balde” and “buskins to shew a great swollen leg.” 5He was great in every respect, therefore, and Kempe provided the perfect model of the comic fat man. The actor was also famous for his jigs, and so he would have set Falstaff dancing and singing on the stage. He is in any case conceived in great theatricality and, as William Hazlitt puts it, “he is an actor in himself almost as much as upon the stage.” 6

Inigo Jones’s coincidental spelling of “fall staff” makes a phallic pun not unlike those connected with shake-spear, and it has been suggested by the more analytical critics that in Falstaff Shakespeare is creating an alter ego through which all his unruly energy, all his defiance and instinct for subversion, can be channelled. Behind the face of Falstaff we can see Shakespeare smiling. Falstaff deflates the claims of history and of heroism on every level, even as his creator was writing plays about those subjects. How can the creator of Henry V also be the writer who revels in Falstaff’s unheroic antics upon the battlefield, with his parodies of martial ardour and even his parody of death itself? In that sense Falstaff is the essence of Shakespeare, cut free of all ideological and traditional notions. He and his creator go soaring into the empyrean, where there are no earthly values. It would of course be absurd and anachronistic to portray Shakespeare as a nihilist; nevertheless the dissolute and antinomian Falstaff is powerful and energetic because he has the power and energy of Shakespeare somewhere within him. It is also worth observing that in the first part of Henry IV there are certain words of Warwickshire dialect, among them “a micher” (one who sulks by straying from home), a “dowlas” and “God saue the mark” (from ancient Mercia, of which Warwickshire was a part). In a play concerned with fathers and with father figures, Shakespeare seems instinctively to revert to the language of his ancestors.

Hegel said that the great characters of Shakespeare are “free artists of themselves” engaged in fresh and perpetual self-invention; they are surprised by their own genius, just as Shakespeare was surprised when the words of Falstaff issued from his pen. He did not know where the words came from; he just knew that they came. It has become unfashionable in recent years to discuss Shakespeare’s characters as if they somehow had an independent existence, outside the boundaries of the play; but it was not unfashionable at the time. Falstaff and his comic colleagues proved so successful that they were brought back by Shakespeare, for an encore, in The Merry Wives of Windsor .

There is perhaps a further connection between Falstaff and Shakespeare. The relation of the fat knight to Prince Hal has often been taken as a comic version of the relationship between Shakespeare and the “young man” of the sonnets in which infatuation is succeeded by betrayal. The twin “act” of older and younger man in that sonnet sequence has also been related to Shakespeare’s longing for his dead son. These were some of the forces in his life that, in this period, propelled him towards a supreme poetic achievement.