Abstract
The Lollard martyr Sir John Oldcastle is best known to literary scholars as the model for Shakespeare’s Sir John Falstaff. The likeness between the militant religious leader and the irreverent, drunken knight is not, however, obvious. Oldcastle had become a prominent cultural figure in Elizabethan England, his trial and death recounted in Foxe’s Acts and Monuments, Stowe’s Annales, Holinshed’s Chronicles and elsewhere.1 For some, Oldcastle was a valiant, victimized martyr; for others, he was a devious, schismatic heretic and traitor, who betrayed his friend and king, Henry V.2 Yet within Shakespeare’s own time, audiences had no difficulty recognizing Falstaff as a caricature of Oldcastle. Falstaff appears to have been called ‘Oldcastle’ in early performances of 1 Henry IV;3 the name was subsequently changed in order to placate the outraged Lords Cobham, or to appease a disgruntled Protestant audience, who hailed Oldcastle as a hero, but even after ‘Oldcastle’ was re-dubbed ‘Falstaff’ extensive historical and literary evidence indicates that the public did not quickly forget the character’s original and ‘true’ identity.4 The name ‘Oldcastle’ was retained for private (including court) performances, and many seventeenth-century authors indicate that ‘Falstaff’ was widely understood as an alias for the Lollard martyr.5
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Notes
The present essay is a modified version of ‘Saints Alive! Falstaff, Martin Marprelate, and the Staging of Puritanism’, Shakespearean Quarterly, 46 (1995), pp. 47–75. The most thorough catalogue of sixteenth-century references to Oldcastle can be found in Alice-Lyle Scoufos, Shakespeare’s Typological Satire: A Study of the Falstaff—Oldcastle Problem (Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 1979 ).
See Scoufos, chapter 2. See also Gary Taylor, ‘The Fortunes of Oldcastle’, Shakespeare Survey 38 (1985), p. 91.
The name-change is often attributed to complaints by William Brooke, Lord Cobham; see Robert J. Fehrenbach, ‘When Lord Cobham and Edmund Tilney “were at odds”: Oldcastle, Falstaff, and the Date of 1 Henry IV’, Shakespeare Studies 18 (1986), pp. 87–101. Thomas Pendleton argues convincingly that the switch resulted from ‘the displeasure of a significant part of Shakespeare’s audience at his treatment of a hero of their religion’ (p. 68) in ‘“This is not the man”: On calling Falstaff Falstaff’, Analytical and Enumerative Bibliography 4 (1990).
Fehrenbach, p. 92. Fehrenbach agrees with S. Schoenbaum, Shakespeare: A Documentary Life ( Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975 ) that the name was simply a mistake (p. 144).
These include E.A.J. Honigmann, ‘Sir John Oldcastle: Shakespeare’s Martyr’, in ’Fanned and Winnowed Opinions’: Shakespearean Essays Presented to Harold Jenkins, ed. John W. Mahon and Thomas A. Pendleton ( London and New York: Methuen, 1987 ), pp. 118–32;
Mark Dominik, A Shakespearean Anomaly: Shakespeare’s Hand in ‘Sir John Oldcastle’ ( Beaverton, Oregon: Alioth Press, 1991 ), p. 5.
Elizabethan Puritans hailed Oldcastle as a proto-Puritan; as religious reformers traced the progress of their battle against the Antichrist, they frequently claimed Wyclif and his followers as the origin of their movement. Stephen Brachlow cites several examples of prominent Puritans who claimed a genealogy from the Lollards in The Communion of Saints: Radical Puritan and Separatist Ecclesiology 1580–1625 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988); see pp. 81, 89, 89n and 90. See also Anthony Milton, ‘The Church of England, Rome, and the True Church: The Demise of a Jacobean Consensus’, in The Early Stuart Church, ed. Kenneth Fincham (London: Macmillan, 1993), esp. pp. 191–2.
Harold Bloom, Ruin the Sacred Truths ( Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1987 ), p. 84.
See Charles Nicholl, A Cup of News: The Life of Thomas Nashe ( London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1984 ), p. 64.
William Pierce, An Historical Introduction to the Marprelate Tracts ( London: Archibald Constable, 1908 ), p. 152.
See Leland H. Carlson, Martin Marprelate, Gentleman: Master Job Throkmorton Laid Open in his Colors ( San Marino: The Huntington Library, printed by Kingsport Press, 1981 ). Whether or not Throkmorton was the direct author of some (or even all) of the Tracts, he was involved in their production, and his own writings have been deemed ‘para-Martinist’ (Collinson, Elizabethan Puritan movement, p. 395). J. Dover Wilson also advanced his own theory of authorship for the Marprelate tracts, suggesting that Martin was Sir Roger Williams; see Martin Marprelate and Shakespeare’s Fluellen: A New Theory of the Authorship of the Marprelate Tracts ( London: Alexander Moring Limited, 1912 ).
This and all references to the Marprelate tracts come from William Pierce, ed., The Marprelate Tracts 1588, 1589 ( London: James Clarke & Co., 1911 ). I shall be using the abbreviation MT in citations; here, MT 17.
Neil Rhodes, Elizabethan Grotesque ( London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1980 ), p. 4. Rhodes discusses Shakespeare’s debt to the ‘Nasheian grotesque’, in 1 & 2 Henry IV (p. 5), but as Nicholl writes, ‘Of all the anti-Martinists it was Nashe who took most readily to Martin’s polemic “vein,” caught its effervescence and bite, revelled in its ranging freedom’ (p. 76). The ‘Nasheian grotesque’ was thus indirectly inherited from Marprelate himself.
Ronald B. McKerrow, ed., The Works of Thomas Nashe, Vols 1 and 3 (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1958 ) Vol. 3; here, 3: 342 and 374. McKerrow lists The Almond under ‘Doubtful Works’, but Nicholl describes this text as ‘the one anti-Martinist pamphlet accepted as entirely his’, while establishing a collaborative relationship with Robert Greene for the authorship of the Pasquill tracts, with Nashe as the ‘news-hound’ and Greene as the author (pp. 71–3, esp. p. 72).
Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. Hélène Iswolsky (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984 ), p. 26.
Naseeb Shaheen, Biblical Reference in Shakespeare’s History Plays ( Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1989 ), p. 137.
S.L. Bethell, ‘The Comic Elements in Shakespeare’s Histories’, Anglia 71 (1952), p. 99.
H. Mutschmann and K. Wentersdorf Shakespeare and Catholicism ( New York: Sheed and Ward, 1952 ), p. 347; see pp. 345–9 for a discussion of Falstaff’s status as a Puritan. Bethell also discusses Falstaff’s ‘Puritan’ dialogue (pp. 94, 98–9).
Christopher Baker, ‘The Christian Context of Falstaff’s “Finer End”’, Explorations in Renaissance Culture 12 (1986), pp. 72, 76; Goldberg, p. 77; Honigmann, p. 127.
For Nasheian allusions, see Rhodes, pp. 92, 93–5; J. Dover Wilson, The First Part of the History of Henry IV ( Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1946 ), pp. 191–6.
Evelyn Tribble, Margins and Marginality: The Printed Page in Early Modern England ( Charlottsville and London: University Press of Virginia, 1993 ), p. 109.
Peter Stallybrass and Allon White, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression ( Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1986 ) has been especially influential in its brilliant analyses of the symbolic power of the poles of ‘high’ and ‘low’.
Valerie Traub, Desire and Anxiety: Circulations of Sexuality in Shakespearean Drama ( London: Routledge, 1992 ), pp. 53–8.
Patrick Collinson, ‘The Theatre Constructs Puritanism’, in The Theatrical City: Culture, Theatre, and Politics in London, ed. David L. Smith, Richard Strier, and David Bevington ( Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995 ).
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Poole, K. (1998). Facing Puritanism: Falstaff, Martin Marprelate and the Grotesque Puritan. In: Knowles, R. (eds) Shakespeare and Carnival. Early Modern Literature in History. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230000810_6
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