DATING THE PLAY

  The evidence: Oldcastle revisited

  Henry IV, Part Two was entered in the Stationers’ Register on 23 August 1600. It was written and performed considerably earlier than that, but establishing probable dates requires a return to the matter of Sir John Oldcastle as a cause of controversy in Part One. What is undisputed is that when Shakespeare wrote the first Henry IV play Falstaff was called Oldcastle, and the character was played by that name during early performances. There is little agreement, however, about whether the change in name was forced by the Cobham family, who were collateral descendants of Oldcastle, and specifically by the 10th Lord Cobham, William Brooke, who became Lord Chamberlain and therefore would have been in a position to instruct the Master of the Revels, Edmund Tilney, to censor the play; or was necessitated by an outpouring of sentiment by reformers against parodying as a figure of Rabelaisian excess a Lollard who, thanks to writers such as Bale and Foxe, was now seen as a martyr to the Protestant cause; or was made by Shakespeare himself, in anticipation of objections likely to be forthcoming after Brooke was named Lord Chamberlain.94

  Evidence suggests that Oldcastle’s name was changed to Falstaff at some point in late 1596 or early 1597. William Brooke had been appointed Lord Chamberlain on 8 August 1596 following the death of the previous holder of that office, Henry Carey, on 23 July. Since it is unlikely that Shakespeare, as a practical man of the theatre, would have deliberately set out to offend the Lord Chamberlain by parodying his illustrious ancestor as a comic degenerate, Part One had probably been licensed by Edmund Tilney prior to Henry Carey’s death and possibly performed at The Theatre in Shoreditch before the London Privy Council closed the playhouses on 22 July, since ‘by drawing of much people together increase of sicknes [was] feared’.95 In early summer, it could not have been anticipated that Henry Carey, Lord Hunsdon, would die, nor that Lord Cobham would succeed him; therefore, offending the Lord Chamberlain would not have been an issue. Even if Tilney licensed the play after Brooke’s appointment, he might not have anticipated objection; for while he was probably aware that the Cobhams were collateral descendants of Oldcastle, in 1594 he had licensed Famous Victories, in which Oldcastle was a drinking companion of the Prince, without protest from the Brooke family. Thus he could reasonably have assumed that Henry IV would give no more offence than the earlier play (Dutton, Mastering, 104, cited by Gibson, 102).

  In fact, however, a letter written by Richard James in 1633– 4 and attached to the manuscript edition of Thomas Hoccleve’s ‘The legend and defence of ye Noble knight and Martyr Sir Jhon [sic] Oldcastel’ confirms that the Cobham family did indeed take umbrage at Shakespeare’s mockery of their ancestor:

  That in Shakespeares first shewe of Harry ye fift, ye person with which he vntertook to play a buffone was not Falstaffe, but Sr Jhon Oldcastle, and that offence beinge worthily taken by personages descended from his title … the poet was putt to make an ignorant shifte of abusing Sr Jhon Falstaffe or Fastolphe, a man not inferior of virtue though not so famous in pietie as the other.96

  Such evidence has led some to argue that Lord Cobham shared the London Privy Council’s Puritan antipathy to theatre and therefore demanded that the name be changed;97 others to argue that Shakespeare had misgauged the degree to which his ‘identification of a hypocritical fat “misleader of youth” with a revered Lollard martyr [had] deeply offended many Protestants’, an offence that William Brooke in his position as Lord Chamberlain, forced by public opinion, could hardly ignore;98 and still others to argue that Brooke, far from being antipathetic to players, was in fact their advocate and censored the use of Oldcastle’s name only to protect them from an anti-theatrical prejudice which might have jeopardized their freedom to perform.99 While a case can be made for each of these positions, the evidence – apart from the letter by Richard James – is slim to nonexistent. Recently James M. Gibson has sifted through other evidence which, while circumstantial, cumulatively suggests when and why Oldcastle’s name may have been changed and, coincidentally, offers credible dates for performances of both Henry IV plays.

  If William Brooke took offence at the unflattering portrayal of his ancestor and instructed Tilney to order Shakespeare’s company to change Oldcastle’s name, he must have done so between 8 August, when he became Lord Chamberlain, and his death on 6 March 1597, and probably before 24 January, the day on which he withdrew from the court to mourn the death of his daughter Elizabeth at his Blackfriars house, after which he would not have attended theatrical performances.100 He is unlikely to have seen a public performance of Part One when the company returned to London in October for a short season at the Swan, for no evidence survives that he had any interest in attending plays and, at the age of seventy, he had accepted the position of Lord Chamberlain only reluctantly. It is possible, then, to narrow the dates of his seeing Part One to four court performances during the Christmas festivities, when the Lord Chamberlain’s Men (now known as Lord Hunsdon’s Men, in honour of the late Lord Chamberlain), the only company invited to play at court, performed on 26 and 27 December 1596 and on 1 and 6 January 1597.101

  Gibson introduces two additional pieces of evidence that help to fix the date of a court performance of Part One as 26 December. The first is an undated letter to Brooke from Edward Jones, the Queen’s secretary for the French language, which refers to a court performance of an unnamed ‘play on Sunday night’ at which Brooke presided as Lord Chamberlain: the only one on a Sunday at which he could have presided was on 26 December. At that performance, Jones describes an incident in which Lord Cobham severely rebuked him, unjustly in his opinion, for having moved through the hall to where his pregnant wife was sitting ‘to aske her how she did & not to stay there’. Jones protests to Lord Cobham, ‘lifting up your staffe at me, [you] called me sirra and bide me get me lower saucy fellowe besides other wordes of disgrace’. Jones’s keen humiliation is reflected in his repeated use of the word ‘disgrace’ along with ‘wronge’, ‘displeasure’ and ‘skorne’.102 Other factors may have contributed to the strength of Jones’s indignation: he was allied with the Essex and Southampton faction against the Cobhams, and William Brooke had recently been awarded the lucrative wardship of Jones’s stepson (McKeen, 652–3, and P.W. White, 67). But apparently Cobham overreacted to a trivial breach of decorum – if there was any breach at all – so egregiously that he disrupted the performance of the play. Paul Whitfield White speculates that the performance itself, more than Jones’s faux pas, may have incited Cobham’s anger: ‘we cannot be sure of the play in question that night, but it is noteworthy that the one Shakespearean work repeatedly assigned to this winter season, The First Part of Henry IV, depicted in its earliest productions Cobham’s Lollard ancestor, Sir John Oldcastle, second Lord Cobham, as a degenerate buffoon. If indeed 1 Henry IV was performed that eventful Sunday evening, then the Lord Chamberlain clearly had another reason to be indignant’ (71).

  The second piece of evidence that Brooke may have been angered more by the performance than by Edward Jones comes from a letter by Master of the Revels Edmund Tilney, dated 25 January (probably 1599 or 1600),103 in which he recounts that a couple of years earlier, ‘I receuid diuerss braue letters from ye last Lord Chamberlayn When he & I were att odds. In which letter he peromptoryly Chardgeth me yat I dealt badly & malliciusly with hyme’. Though the cause of Cobham’s having written such letters is unclear, it seems to Tilney unwarranted; and thus Robert J. Fehrenbach reasonably asks, ‘What could more offend, more embarrass this Lord Chamberlain – who feared both family shame and being thought “unapt” by his Queen – than for one of his ancestors to be caricatured before the Court and the Queen by those he was to regulate? Such an event would have been considered by Cobham as the cruelest of jokes, with him the butt’ (95).

  None of this, of course, is proof that a court performance of Part One during the Christmas festivities in 1596 caused offence to Lord Cobham, but the circumstantial evidence for his intervention is strong. Only the Lord Chamberlain’s Men performed at court during the Christmas and Shrovetide festivities of 1596 –7; Edward Jones affirms that Lord Cobham presided over a Sunday performance, and that performance could only have been on 26 December; something during that performance provoked Cobham to be uncharacteristically angry with Jones; and something happened around that same time to put Cobham at odds with his Master of the Revels, Edmund Tilney, resulting in a barrage of angry letters. White, in his analysis of Jones’s letter, and Fehrenbach, in his analysis of Tilney’s, reach similar conclusions about the probable cause, and Gibson makes their coincidence explicit, arguing that a plausible – perhaps the most plausible – ‘explanation of the evidence here at the epicentre of the Cobham controversy is the perceived, albeit unintentional, personal insult to William Brooke and his family on 26 December 1596 during a performance at Court of the uncensored 1 Henry IV featuring the comic hero Sir John Oldcastle, a performance presided over by a humiliated, angry, and powerful old man, who lashed out at Edward Jones with his white rod and lashed out at Edmund Tilney with “diuerss braue letters” ’ (106).

  If in fact Cobham was irate that Tilney had neglected to remove the offensive material from the play before licensing it, he would presumably have demanded that the name Oldcastle be changed; and Tilney would have responded quickly, perhaps in January 1597, requiring the Lord Chamberlain’s Men to make suitable revisions not only to Part One but also to Part Two, which by that time – six months or more after Part One had been licensed – was certainly well under way, and which, upon completion, he would be asked to license. The survival of ‘Old.’ as a vestigial speech prefix at 1.2.121 in the Quarto of Part Two seems to confirm that work on the play was already in progress before censorship occurred, as does a stage direction for sir Iohn Russel to enter at the top of 2.2, a name changed to Bardolfe in the Folio and in subsequent editions but which appeared regularly (though spelled ‘Rossill’) in quartos of Part One – ‘strong presumptive evidence’, according to Humphreys, ‘that Shakespeare had got at least into Act II of Part 2 before rechristening his characters’ (xv–xvi).104 It is also likely that Shakespeare, while purging the name Oldcastle from Part Two, slyly included two implicit references to the enforced change: first, in the Lord Chief Justice’s withering reply to Falstaff, ‘Do you set down your name in the scroll of youth, that are written down old with all the characters of age?’ (1.2.179 –81; italics added); and second, in Poins’s ridicule of Falstaff’s beginning a letter by proclaiming his title, ‘John Falstaff, Knight’: ‘Every man must know that,’ mocks Poins, ‘as oft as he has occasion to name himself’ (2.2.107–9). Such lines gain satiric point if they are read as allusions to the censoring of a name.105

  Further to ‘assuage the anger of William Brooke’ (Gibson, 112), Tilney may also have required a transcript to be made of Part One to demonstrate that changes had been carried out and all offensive references to the Cobhams’ ancestor eliminated. This transcript would have served as the basis for the Quarto edition entered in the Stationers’ Register on 25 February 1597/8 and published later that year.106 There is evidence, too, that whoever prepared the fair copy for Part One also prepared a transcript of Part Two; for while the idiosyncratic 1600 Quarto of Part Two appears to have been printed from a theatrical playbook based on Shakespeare’s untidy holograph, the text underlying the Folio edition, in which speech prefixes and stage directions have been regularized, corrections made and the whole given ‘a certain degree of literary finish’ (Shaaber, Variorum, 513), has marked affinities with the Quarto text of Part One. Alice Walker was the first to claim their kinship. ‘The text with which this Folio play appears to me to have most in common is the 1 Henry IV Quarto, which similarly seems to preserve a full score of the play … and suffers noticeably from the same pedantry in language as the Folio 2 Henry IV’ she writes. ‘The manuscript which was collated with a copy of the 2 Henry IV quarto to serve as Folio copy was a companion piece to the manuscript from which the 1 Henry IV quarto was printed, the work of the same hand and roughly of the same date’.107 John Jowett agrees with Walker that ‘a single scribe prepared literary transcripts of the two Henry IV plays’ (TxC, 331). What occasioned these transcripts has remained a mystery for many scholars, but Gibson’s conjecture has a persuasive logic: Tilney’s requirement that all offending Oldcastle references be removed from both parts of Henry IV would have been sufficient cause for anomalous ‘literary’ copies of the two plays to have been made. George Walton Williams provides a succinct answer to the critical question, ‘Why should there have been fair copies of two sets of foul papers that were made neither for the Folio nor for a prompt book? Fortunately, an answer for the two Henry IV plays and for them only is available: the fair copy of both parts might have been prepared to prove to Oldcastle’s angry posterity that their ancestor had been removed from both plays’ (‘Text’, 179).

  What conclusion, then, can be drawn about the dates of the composition and first performance of Part Two? One may speculate with reasonable confidence that the play was completed within a year of Part One, and perhaps as early as January or February 1597, when, before licensing, it would have been subject to the same censorship that caused Oldcastle to be renamed in Part One. One may speculate with a bit less confidence that Part Two was one of the two Shrovetide plays scheduled for presentation at court on 6 or 8 February,108 and further, that following William Brooke’s angry response to a court performance of Part One at Christmas, Tilney ‘required the addition of a disclaimer to the Epilogue’ of Part Two (Gibson, 112), to be spoken after every performance, to the effect that Falstaff is in no way meant to represent the famous Protestant martyr Sir John Oldcastle.

  The Epilogue(s)

  The effect of the Oldcastle controversy on Part Two is attested to by the vexed state of the play’s Epilogue, which, as printed in Q and F, is unusually long and in some ways incoherent. If the Epilogue is in fact a compilation of two different epilogues, one written for a court performance, the other for public performances, and each addressing the uproar caused by a court performance of Part One, then the Epilogue as printed makes much more sense and adds to the hypothesis that Part Two was performed not long after Tilney censored the plays.

  The Epilogue is unusual because it is written in prose and is uncommonly long. Its length may be explained, however, by the fact that it has two discrete parts that were probably composed at different times and in response to different circumstances, and these parts are uncomfortably merged in Q and F. The first part (Epil.1–17) is unconventional for an epilogue. It may have been written for a performance at court, possibly during Shrovetide 1597, and, unusually, seems to have been spoken not by an actor in the play but by Shakespeare in his own person, who confesses that the speech ‘is of my own making’ (5), apologizes for an unidentified play that was ‘displeasing’ to the audience (9), and hopes that this one, featuring the newly rechristened Falstaff, will make amends. The unprecedented decision for the playwright himself to speak the Epilogue would have made little sense unless the apology for a previous offence was deemed sufficiently important, as the use of Oldcastle’s name clearly was.

  As James Shapiro notes, however, the initial social deference of the speaker – the curtsy, the begging of pardon (1–3) – gives way to a novel idea that playwright and audience are participants in a business transaction, a ‘venture’ (7, 11) in which he is the debtor (15), they his ‘creditors’ (12) and the play itself an investment (Shapiro, 34 –5). These mercantile images recall not only those used by the rebel leaders in the opening scene and by Falstaff throughout the play, but also the venture capitalism dramatized in The Merchant of Venice, which was probably performed in the same season.109 If this sequel to the offending Henry IV, Part One fails to please, the Epilogue warns, the playwright will ‘break’ – go bankrupt – and the playgoers therefore will ‘lose’ (Epil.12). The business of playgoing thus unites Shakespeare and the audience in a joint-stock company wherein, he advises them, their duty is to remit and his, to ‘promise … infinitely’ (15 –16) – no servitude for him. He maintains this self-assurance even when kneeling before them at the end, a traditional way for an actor to submit to the audience’s judgement; for, he says, he kneels only ‘to pray for the Queen’ (17), not to beg for their applause.110 His deference to royalty brings this unusual authorial apologia to a fitting conclusion.111

  It is unlikely that the second and third sections of the Epilogue (18–34) would have followed the first. Together forming a coherent unit, they were probably written for public performances and spoken by Falstaff, who, having managed to evade the authorities who were carrying him to the Fleet, rushes back onto the stage to beg the audience for acquittal. As Shapiro notes, Shakespeare’s epilogues ‘tend to straddle fictional and real worlds’ (34), and Falstaff’s return would ingeniously have raised the question of whether the actor was still speaking in character. That question would have been answered in part by the actor’s clever revelation of his own identity when he asks to be commanded ‘to use [his] legs’ (Epil.19), for Will Kemp – the likeliest candidate to have played Falstaff – was a dancer whose jigs were popular with Elizabethan audiences. Kemp’s subsequent reference to dancing ‘out of your debt’ as but ‘light payment’ (20) puns in typical fashion on Falstaff’s failure to repay the thousand pounds he has borrowed from Shallow – actor and role once again conflated; and he proceeds to appeal for the playgoers’ forgiveness with a captatio beneuolentiae which, much like the epilogue in As You Like It, plays humorously on the battle between the sexes. The dance Kemp has promised occurs at the end, for he indicates that when his legs are weary, he will bid the audience good night (33– 4), having given them ‘satisfaction’ (21) with a jig.