33 The political criticism introduced by Greenblatt, called the new historicism in North America, coincided with the rise of an even more ideologically inflected criticism called cultural materialism in the UK. Works such as Jonathan Dollimore’s Radical Tragedy (1984), John Drakakis’s Alternative Shakespeares (1985), Graham Holderness’s Shakespeare’s History (1985) and Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield’s Political Shakespeare (1985), in which Greenblatt’s essay first appeared, analysed the plays in terms of class conflict, economic relations and the nature of power – the very things that were of interest to Bogdanov.

  34 For particularly astute cultural materialist analyses of the two Henry IV plays, see Howard & Rackin, 160 –85, and Rackin, passim.

  35 Who first played Falstaff is unclear, and evidence is slender. David Wiles makes a good case for Will Kemp (116 –35), the famous comedian who played clown roles for the Chamberlain’s Men in the 1590s and was noted for his dancing, which may suggest that he spoke the Epilogue as well. King, however, suggests that principal actors in Elizabethan theatre companies played the major roles and were not necessarily typecast (62–3). Thus John Heminge has been proposed as a likely candidate to play Falstaff (Winter, 330 –1). But Kastan makes a stronger case for Thomas Pope (1H4, 78–9), who also played clown roles for the company and quite possibly acted Buffone in Jonson’s Every Man Out of His Humour, a role not unlike that of Falstaff, a ‘prophane Iester’ addicted to sack (Jonson, 3.423– 4). Kastan argues that even if Kemp originated the role of Falstaff, Pope is likely to have taken it over when Kemp left the company in 1599, with John Lowin, who joined the company in 1603, assuming the role from Pope.

  36 See ‘An Essay of Dramatick Poesie’ in Dryden, 62.

  37 Winter puts the paradox of Falstaff’s attractiveness as follows: he ‘is a hardened reprobate, an inveterate sinner, a selfish worldling, an insensate, gross old man, who lives – and thrives! – in our unmitigated and continuous censure… . But he possesses such force of character, such power of mind, such humor, experience, worldly wisdom, shrewd sagacity, illimitable animal spirits, keen discernment, trenchant wit, and personal fascination that we like him, almost love him, in open and conscious defiance of instinct, knowledge, judgment, morals, and taste’ (325).

  38 In her psychoanalytic study of the Henry IV plays, Valerie Traub argues that Falstaff takes the place of an absent mother, his swollen belly figuring ‘the female reproductive body’ upon which the Prince’s development as ‘a “prototypical” male subject’ depends (456 – 62).

  39 It is not unusual for directors to call the play Falstaff in order to distinguish it from Henry IV, Part One, as Stuart Burge did with his production for the Stratford Festival in Ontario, 1965, and Joseph Anthony did the following year when staging Part Two for the American Shakespeare Festival in Stratford, Connecticut. For Burge’s production, see Leiter, 195 –7; for Anthony’s, see Cooper, 110 –12.

  40 Falstaff’s wardrobe may also be financed by his corrupt practices as a captain, such as accepting bribes and collecting ‘dead pay’. Paul A. Jorgensen discusses the crown’s apparent lack of concern with the plight of returning veterans (World, 210 –13). Although Falstaff cynically predicts in Part One that the few survivors among his regiment ‘are for the town’s end to beg during life’ (5.3.39), in fact there were ‘occasional … hospitals for the maimed, and pensions for a few deserving veterans’, Falstaff presumably one of the deserving few. On the failure of the military profession to thrive under the Tudors, and the consequent estrangement of the ‘bluff’ professional soldier from the Tudor court, see A. Ferguson, 101–5.

  41 This line can be interpreted as a metadramatic reference to Falstaff’s birth as a fully-fleshed theatrical character, three o’clock being the time of an afternoon performance at an outdoor Elizabethan theatre.

  42 The best study of Falstaff’s prose idiom remains Vickers, Artistry, 118– 41.

  43 Hattaway, ‘Falstaff’, notes that the recurrence of the term in Henry V, when Williams characterizes Pistol as ‘a rascal that swaggered with me last night’ (4.7.123– 4), attests to the enduring association of the term with Pistol’s performance.

  44 In addition to the obvious parody of heroic diction in Marlowe and others, Lever (‘French’) argues that some of Pistol’s lines closely resemble the Braggart’s bungling of classical allusions in John Eliot’s Ortho-epia Gallica.

  45 C.L. Barber equates Falstaff with the festive spirit of Bacchus and Shrove Tuesday (67–73): the mood of Part One with carnival, and of Part Two with Lenten restraint, a ‘trial of carnival’ (213–14). For other discussions of Falstaff as a site of carnivalesque resistance to the authority and power of state, see Holderness, ‘Carnival’; Grady; and Laroque. Cressy, 13–33, discusses how the rhythm of the liturgical year in Elizabethan England affected national memory.

  46 A speech prefix in the 1600 Quarto reads ‘Old.’ (1.2.121) but may have resulted from a memory lapse. The second Epilogue issues an explicit corrective: ‘Oldcastle died martyr, and this is not the man’ (Epil.32). For the Oxford editors’ justification of their reversion to the name Oldcastle, see Taylor, ‘Fortunes’, 95 –100, and Kastan’s judicious rebuttal in ‘Oldcastle’.

  47 G.W. Williams cogently argues that Shakespeare decided against replacing the name of one historical personage, Oldcastle, with that of another, Sir John Fastolf, a knight much honoured for his service in the French Wars. Although the speech prefix ‘Fast.’ occurs twice in Q0 of 1H4, Shakespeare clearly changed his mind during the course of composition and, rather than simply recycle a name he had already used, altered the spelling to Falstaff ‘to avoid having it resemble “Fastolf” or any common variant of the name’ (‘Second’, 82).

  48 Kastan, 1H4, 58. Alice-Lyle Scoufos surveys sixteenth-century accounts of Oldcastle’s martyrdom in works by More, Bale, Foxe, Stow, Hall and Holinshed (44 – 69).

  49 Kastan, 1H4, 60 –1, quoting Neale, 2.163.

  50 Poole, ‘Saints’, 54. Holderness applies Bakhtin’s theory of the carnivalesque, with its central image of the gargantuan body and its dominant discourse of the grotesque, to the Rabelaisian figure of Falstaff (History, 79 –101). On the radical potential of the Elizabethan clown to alter playgoers’ perspectives, see Weimann; Bristol; and Helgerson, 215 –28.

  51 Nashe, 3.342, 374, cited in Poole, ‘Saints’, 59; see also Kaul. The most searching study of Nashe’s formative influence on Falstaff’s comic prose style, especially on his absurd parodies of rhetorical tropes and his delight in grotesque physical imagery, is Rhodes. For Nashe’s possible influence on Falstaff’s Calvinist speech, see Tobin.

  52 ‘Let your communication be, Yea, yea: Nay, nay. For whatsoeuer is more then these, commeth of euil’ (Matthew, 5.37).

  53 Jean E. Howard and Phyllis Rackin discuss the entrepreneurial Mistress Quickly as an anarchic figure, the sexualizing and criminalizing of whom coincide with her economic prosperity (176 –85).

  54 As a gloss on this line, Partridge cites the undictionaried proverb ‘A standing prick hath no conscience’ (114 –15).

  55 Gowing, Dangers, 73, and ‘Gender’, 16. See also Williams, Revolution, 259. For a fuller examination of the function of sexual wordplay as social critique in Part Two, see Bulman, ‘Bawdy’.

  56 Peter Clark discusses the tavern as a permissive site where all classes could converge for public drinking as a ‘family of vagrancy’ (111–15). Shakespeare collapses under one roof an alehouse, a tavern (which offered wine) and a brothel. Usually identified as the Boar’s Head, Mistress Quickly’s tavern may allude to a historical tavern – there were six by that name in London – which served as a playing space for actors long before there were public theatres. Andrew Gurr notes that a Boar’s Head in Whitechapel was converted from an innyard to a playhouse in 1599 (117).

  57 Since the accession of Elizabeth, brothels had reopened and prospered not only in the suburbs beyond the jurisdiction of London’s conservative city fathers, but within the city itself, as Mistress Quickly’s establishment anachronistically confirms. Brothels, however, bred crime and disease, problems featured more prominently in Measure for Measure (1604), in which the pimp Pompey Bum reports that by proclamation, ‘All houses [brothels] in the suburbs of Vienna must be plucked down’ (1.2.88–9). Lever relates this to a proclamation by King James on 16 September 1603 which called for the pulling down of houses in London’s suburbs to prevent the spread of the plague by ‘dissolute and idle persons’, a measure which ‘bore heavily upon the numerous brothels and gaming houses which proliferated on the outskirts of the city’ (Measure, xxxii–xxxiii).

  58 Hodgdon observes that by the end of the play, ‘the potential threats Carnival represents are displaced onto the play’s women’ who are ‘demonized as corrupt, set aside and excluded from the commonwealth’ (End, 172).

  59 Of the early histories, only Henry VI, Part Two attempts to dramatize an expansion of such boundaries, by including Jack Cade’s rebellion, which echoes the Puritan Hacket’s 1591 London uprising and anachronistically reflects the cultural anxieties of that decade.

  60 Hodgdon, First Part, 210 –11 and 250 –7, cites Thomas Dekker’s Lantern and Candlelight as a guide to the hierarchy of London’s vagrant population and reprints his first chapter, ‘Of Canting’, as a context in which to read the colloquialisms, ‘strange tongues’ and ‘gross terms’ used by the low-lifes in Part One.

  61 Steven Mullaney discusses the Prince’s language lesson in terms of the evolution of an English vernacular in the sixteenth century, a time when ‘an imaginative sympathy’ allowed ‘alien voices and ideologies not merely to be recorded or studied, but entered into and enacted quite fully’ (76 –85). This process is imitated when the Prince’s study of a ‘strange tongue’ involves his developing ‘an appetite for the unfamiliar details of popular culture, for the manners and morals, the ways of speech and material conditions of life on the margins of society, among the masterless men, bawds, bankrupts, wayward apprentices, and refugees from country reforms’ to which his father so strenuously objects (79 –80).

  62 Shallow’s establishing a link between Falstaff and Thomas Mowbray, Duke of Norfolk, makes Falstaff by association an adversary of the King, who, as Henry Bolingbroke in Richard II, accused Mowbray of treason. Though this association is not made explicit here, and Falstaff fights on behalf of the King, it nevertheless provides a history for any antagonism the two men may feel towards one another.

  63 When Shallow asks, ‘O Sir John, do you remember since we lay all night in the Windmill … ?’ (194 –5), Falstaff obviously humours him with his reply – ‘No more of that, Master Shallow’ (196) – since, as a mere boy, Falstaff would not have accompanied Shallow to a brothel. By confirming Shallow’s memorial delusion, Falstaff is priming him for his request of a thousand pounds.

  64 Keith Thomas concurs that ‘in a semi-literate society, still much dependent on oral tradition, it was the old who controlled access to the past. They were the repositories of history and custom, of pedigree and descent’ (233– 4).

  65 Thorne’s observation (58–9) of course applies as well to the scenes in Eastcheap as to those in Gloucestershire. Naomi Conn Liebler perceptively reads 4.3 as a scene that narrows ‘the play of history to selective frames of personal memory’, and therefore as ‘the foil to [King] Henry’s opportunism’, for it ‘casts a shadow over the reliability of memory and nostalgia as justification for his present aggression’ (87). For a discussion of how communal memory led to distortion, how oral testimony as a way of preserving the past persisted in local communities well into the sixteenth century, and how the printed word eventually displaced oral testimony in its ‘creation … of a national master narrative that largely excluded both the remembered and the local’, see Woolf, Social, 276 –99.

  66 Patricia A. Cahill explains that ‘recruitment’ – reinforcing an army with fresh troops – is an anachronistic term first used in 1645, when the New Model Army was organized by Parliament. Instead, this scene depicts a ‘muster’, ‘the practice of gathering men in a country for inspection of numbers or for training’, the responsibility for which, after the 1570s, fell to local officials such as Justice Shallow, who ‘were required to report in their returns on all men eligible to serve’ and ‘chosen for service’. The term is first used in the Induction (12), when Rumour ‘grandly takes responsibility for the “fearful musters” [12] that have uprooted the men of the country’ (Breach, 73– 4).

  67 See de Somogyi, 42–51, and Fortescue, 1.112–26. Among contemporary observers, Barnaby Riche asserts in Path-Way (1587) that captains are often incompetent and corrupt, negligent of their men and provisions, cowardly and undisciplined, and, at worst, thieving murderers; and Nashe, in Pierce Pennilesse (1592), ranks captains among those who devote themselves to corrupt pleasures such as gaming, drinking and whoring.

  68 Located by RP in Acts of Privy Council of England, 237, Item 3.

  69 Thomas Proctor, fols 21–2, cited in Jorgensen, ‘Rank’, 34. Jorgensen also quotes Matthew Sutcliffe, The Practice, Proceedings, and Lawes of Armes (1593) as offering an argument that Falstaff uses to justify recruiting Feeble: ‘Men of meane stature are for the most part more vigorous and couragious … and commonly excell great bodied men in swiftness end running’ (65). Compare Falstaff: ‘And for a retreat, how swiftly will this Feeble … run off!’ (3.2.268–70).

  70 R.W. Dent quotes an early modern source: ‘To dig anothers garden’ meant ‘to Cuckold one, to do his work and drudgery, as they say for him’ (L57).

  71 Jensen, 157. In an illuminating review of the complaints made ‘by Puritan controversialists’ about ‘residual rural Catholicism’ (Walsham, 103), Baldo (85 –8, following Wallace, 27– 49) quotes a preacher who ‘numbered among the persistent errors of what he termed “country divinitie” a nostalgia for the old days and an attachment to the customs of one’s forefathers’.

  72 Judith Weil discusses the ‘probing examination of ambitious retainers and their hopes’ in Part Two, illustrating how the tradition of ‘countenancing’ – that is, supporting or protecting – a ‘friend’ is crucial to an understanding of Falstaff’s relationship not only to the Prince, but to those in service to him such as Bardolph and the Page, and to those who, like Shallow, hope to benefit from his friendship (80 –91). Even Davy has applied the principle to Visor: ‘The knave is mine honest friend, sir; therefore I beseech you let him be countenanced’ (5.1.48–9).

  73 A. Barton notes that Falstaff’s ‘attempt to signal intimacy is not only a little too insistent, but glaringly one-sided’, for the Prince never ‘reciprocate[s] in kind’ (110).

  74 ‘Hal’s project’, according to Michael D. Bristol’s Bakhtinian reading, ‘is eventually to break the rhythmic alternation between the abundance of the material principle embodied in carnival and the abstemious social discipline embodied in Lent by establishing a permanent sovereignty of Lenten civil policy’ (206). Jensen writes that ‘since the second Henriad … participates in the secularizing process by which traditional celebrations were redirected towards a celebration of English nationhood, Falstaff must be banished from that world’ (192).

  75 Similar views have continued to be expressed, as by Jonas A. Barish who, in regarding the rejection of Falstaff as a litmus test for audiences, discusses the loss of humanity incurred by the Prince when he elects morality over holiday.

  76 Shakespeare’s decision to dramatize the Prelate’s Rebellion may account for his taking from Holinshed (3.529) the name of a noble who had participated in it, Lord ‘Berdolfe’, or Bardolph, and risking confusion with the name of the low-life Bardolph who had already proved popular as a companion of Falstaff in Part One (where his name is spelled ‘Bardoll’ in early quartos) and who reappears as Falstaff’s man-servant and corporal in Part Two.

  77 Virgil, Aen., 4.180 –3, cited in Garber, who draws a provocative analogy between Rumour and the Rainbow Portrait of Queen Elizabeth (c. 1600), who is ‘depicted wearing a cloak adorned with eyes and ears, implying that she sees and hears everything’ (345).

  78 In opposition to the totalizing discourse of critics ‘who claim that everything [in 2H4] is answerable to the Great Idea of a tetralogy’, Edward Pechter astutely analyses the Gaultree episode as an exposure of the rebels’ futile attempts to find origins for their cause in an indeterminate past (39 – 45).

  79 Jorgensen’s ‘Dastardly’ is the basis of Humphreys’s consideration of the moral ambiguity of the Gaultree episode in his edition of Part Two (Ard2, 237– 40).

  80 The True Reporte of the Service in Britanie Performed lately by the Honourable Knight Sir Iohn Norreys … before Guignand (1591), sig. A3.

  81 This sermon was delivered c. 1580 –5 and published in 1585. See Sandys, 200.