The Falstaff of Part Two in some ways differs markedly from the Falstaff of Part One. In the earlier play, he serves as a surrogate father for the Prince: their relationship is the driving force of the play.38 In Part Two, however, Falstaff and the Prince cross paths only twice – briefly at the tavern, and again at the end of the play, when the new King banishes Falstaff in earnest. For the rest of the play, Shakespeare’s most daring strategy was to give Falstaff his own scenes to bustle in, unimpeded by the burden of the Prince’s protection or the demands of chronicle history. He created a world rich in the quotidian life of Elizabethan subcultures. Falstaff dominates this world; and since his role is significantly larger than anyone else’s, it isn’t surprising that performances of Part Two have sometimes been billed as Falstaff.39 In so far as the play has achieved popularity, it is because audiences have paid to see him.

  Despite the plays’ ostensible temporal continuity, Falstaff in Part Two is an older, more diseased and more corrupt figure than he was in Part One. He thrives on the reputation for valour falsely won at Shrewsbury and therefore is determined to cut a figure in the world. He refuses to succumb to the economic hardship endured by many veterans in the final decades of the sixteenth century: instead, he will indulge his taste for fashion to appear a complete courtier by buying rich clothing on credit.40 To pay for these material markers of his social status, he relies on a military pension which, he slyly avouches, will be increased by the limp (‘’Tis no matter if I do halt’) which he will claim is a war injury (1.2.244 –5) instead of a symptom of gout or the pox brought on by leading a life of dissipation. Indeed, his opening speech wryly acknowledges the reputation he has earned among theatre audiences as well his contemporaries: ‘The brain of this foolish compounded clay-man is not able to invent anything that intends to laughter more than I invent or is invented on me; I am not only witty in myself, but the cause that wit is in other men’ (6 –11).

  Falstaff’s complaints about his gout, his tailor and his purse establish key motifs for the play’s chronicle history as well: age, disease and consumption, both moral and physical, plague the King and Northumberland alike. The thread connecting Falstaff most securely to the royal narrative, however, is his pairing with the Lord Chief Justice, a scrupulously virtuous man who, according to legend, once had the Prince jailed for boxing him in the ear. In a sense, these two old men offer competing centres of authority for England and for the Prince. Perhaps because they both recognize this, the animosity between them is palpable. Falstaff makes audacious witticisms about the Chief Justice’s age – ‘You that are old consider not the capacities of us that are young’ (174 – 6) – which the Chief Justice is able to parry tap for tap, a stand-off that should alert Falstaff that his exploitation of others cannot last indefinitely:

  Do you set down your name in the scroll of youth, that are written down old with all the characters of age? Have you not a moist eye, a dry hand, a yellow cheek, a white beard, a decreasing leg, an increasing belly?

  (179 –83)

  Though audiences may anticipate that Harry, when he is King, will embrace the Lord Chief Justice as his chief adviser as surely as he will reject Falstaff, their joy lies in watching Falstaff attempt to outwit him – ‘My lord, I was born about three of the clock in the afternoon, with a white head and something a round belly’ (187–9)41 – and presumptuously beg him for a thousand pounds to furnish his next expedition.

  Puns announce Falstaff’s strategy for survival early in the play, when, in cursing his big toe – ‘A pox of this gout, or a gout of this pox’ (243) – he vows to turn his diseases to commodity.42 Attempting to work his way around the Lord Chief Justice, he confesses that he suffers from ‘the disease of not listening’ (122) and repeatedly puns about his own girth. When the Chief Justice tells him that he lives ‘in great infamy’, Falstaff replies, ‘He that buckles himself in my belt cannot live in less’ (137– 40); and here begins a string of puns about wishing his ‘waste’ (waist) slenderer (143– 4), burning as long as a wassail candle whose ‘wax’ (growth) proves his worth (159 – 60), and following the Prince not as his ‘ill angel’ but as genuine currency, for an ‘ill angel [counterfeit gold coin] is light, but I hope he that looks upon me will take me without weighing’ (166 –8). Such wordplay, intended to disarm the opposition, demonstrates Falstaff’s virtuosity in turning ironic self-deprecation to advantage and colours his rapaciousness with apparently benign humour.

  If Falstaff in Part One embodied carnivalesque energy, the cynical opportunism of Falstaff in Part Two marks how far he has declined from such energy. This decline involves both a recognition – on the part of the characters as well as the audience – that festivity is a thing of the past, and a consequent nostalgia for it. Falstaff is at the centre of the play’s nostalgia for the merry England dramatized in Part One. The play’s only tavern scene illustrates how nostalgia functions by invoking the memory of an equivalent scene in Part One – both of them occurring late in Act 2 – in which merriment, generosity and a festive spirit reigned. The scene in Part Two is suffused with a longing for such merriment but darkened by a recognition that festivity may be irrecoverable. Where, in the earlier play, the scene focused on the Prince and Poins’s exposure of Falstaff’s increasingly inflated lies about his bravery at Gad’s Hill, the exposure of Falstaff in Part Two is thinly plotted and almost incidental. It has made generations of playgoers nostalgic for the vibrant comedy of the tavern scene in Part One. Recollections of the earlier play are explicit when the Prince and Poins briefly mock Francis the drawer with ‘Anon, anon, sir!’ (2.4.285), an echo of their more elaborate joke at his expense in Part One; and when, after Falstaff protests that he has recognized them through their disguises and the Prince responds, ‘Yea, and you knew me as you did when you ran away by Gad’s Hill’ (310 –11), their exchange bids an audience recall the comic vitality of the earlier scene and, in so doing, recognize the diminished pleasure, and even pointlessness, of goading Falstaff in this play.

  In place of festive merriment, the tavern scene in Part Two offers a tonally more complex confrontation between Falstaff and the Ancient Pistol. A scurrilous rogue whose mock-heroics parody the chivalric ethos embodied so memorably in Hotspur (who often, in stagings of the two plays together, is played by the same actor), Pistol is a braggart soldier of Jonsonian proportions. He purports to hold military rank – ‘ancient’ being a corrupt form of ‘ensign’ – and is appropriately named for a weapon new in sixteenth-century England, dangerously temperamental and likely to go off without warning (see Garber, 349). Pistol is also a ‘swaggerer’, or quarreller, a term that is used to characterize him fourteen times in the course of the play. Swaggering denoted a behaviour of aggressive bravado marked onstage by an eccentrically flamboyant style of acting which made Pistol second only to Falstaff in popularity with Elizabethan audiences, as evidenced by his name appearing on the title-page of the Quarto: ‘with the exploits of Falstaff and the Swaggering Pistol’.43 A coward whose most serious threat is ‘tearing a poor whore’s ruff in a bawdy house’ (2.4.144 –5), an action which signified sexual assault in drama of the period, he stands as the reductio ad absurdum of bygone theatrical heroism and marks the decline of English chivalry in an age of political self-interest.

  Pistol’s soldiership amounts to no more than theatrical imposture. He derives his language from the outmoded fustian of a previous generation of stage heroes, and his bravery runs no deeper than an absurd hodgepodge of misremembered tags and scraps from old plays by Robert Greene, George Peele, Thomas Kyd and Christopher Marlowe.44 His butchering of heroic verse recalls those hyperbolic sentiments which once invoked a world of greatness not unlike that imagined by Hotspur, but which now sound ludicrously out of date. ‘Shall pack-horses, and hollow pampered jades of Asia, which cannot go but thirty mile a day, compare with Caesars and with Cannibals and Troyant Greeks?’ he rants (164 –7), nonsensically echoing great speeches of Tamburlaine, the play whose two-part structure underlies that of Henry IV. And his misquotation of Peele’s Battle of Alcazar inflates his rage against Doll Tearsheet with classical bombast: ‘I’ll see her damned first! To Pluto’s damned lake – by this hand – to th’infernal deep, with Erebus and tortures vile also!’ (157–9).

  11 Theophilus Cibber [1703–58] in the character of Ancient Pistol, after a print by John Laguerre (c. 1733)

  Falstaff’s rescuing Doll from Pistol’s attack on her honour – or at least on her ruff – leads to a poignantly nostalgic scene which is tonally at odds with the festive tone of the tavern scene in Part One. There, the clever way in which Falstaff refashioned his cowardice at Gad’s Hill as bravery led to laughter and merriment. Here, Doll’s attempt to recapture a heroic past for Falstaff that may never have existed leads to a frank appraisal of his decline. ‘Thou art as valorous as Hector of Troy, worth five of Agamemnon’, she assures him; but in the next breath, she bids him to be mindful of his own mortality: ‘when wilt thou leave fighting a’days, and foining a’nights and begin to patch up thine old body for heaven?’ (220 –1, 233–5). Falstaff acknowledges that his days are numbered: ‘Peace, good Doll. Do not speak like a death’s-head: do not bid me remember mind end’ (236 –7). The tenderness of this exchange tempers Doll’s far less sympathetic appraisal of Falstaff’s situation earlier in the scene: ‘Come, I’ll be friends with thee, Jack: thou art going to the wars, and whether I shall ever see thee again or no there is nobody cares’ (66 –8). The dialogue Doll and Falstaff share in this scene is delicately poised between loving nostalgia and brutal candour, between longing for a bygone heroism, always more imagined than actual, and present awareness of the impotence and ravages of age.

  12 Doll Tearsheet, Falstaff, Henry & Poins (2.4). Painted by Henry Fuseli; engraved by William Leney; published by J. & J. Boydell in 1795

  Tonally, this scene depicts the season of Lent after Shrovetide: its echoes of an earlier festive world give rise to a longing for the past akin to what was felt by many in England for whom the Protestant Reformation had meant ‘the collapse … of festivity’ (Hutton, 89).45 Patrick Collinson notes that by the time of Elizabeth’s reign, ‘Merry England’ had become a phrase signifying ‘almost the same thing as Catholic England’ (135). Indeed, as early as 1552 Dr John Caius complained that the Reformation, with its suppression of festivity as a form of social disorder, had destroyed ‘the old world, when this country was called merry England’ (in Hutton, 89). The scuttling of those ‘merrie and sportful’ pastimes of a bygone (and Catholic) world nostalgically celebrated in John Stow’s Survey of London (1.91) – a work published within a year of the first performance of Henry IV, Part Two – gathered momentum as the sixteenth century drew to a close. Francis the Drawer remembers the pleasure of that festive world: his remark anticipating the arrival of the Prince and Poins pointedly uses the archaic word ‘utas’ for such merriment: ‘By the mass, here will be old utas!’ (2.4.19). Furthermore, by invoking the Mass in his oath, Francis ‘links Roman Catholic ritual, by now long outlawed in England, to the nearly ritualistic pranks at the expense of Falstaff’ (Baldo, 81). Paradoxically, as Jonathan Baldo observes, the figure who stands as the vestigial embodiment of that merry world was originally named for a proto-Puritan martyr who was put to death by Henry V: ‘Shakespeare installs a representative of the forces that many Elizabethans held responsible for the demise of England’s merry past as a synecdoche for that very past… . By fusing, or confusing, the wildly distorted figure of a Reformation martyr with the merry world the Reformation was thought to have swept aside, Shakespeare outrageously constructs a figure of forgetfulness and historical revisionism as the object of a powerful, irresistible nostalgia’ (83).

  Falstaff as Oldcastle

  Falstaff was originally called Sir John Oldcastle, the name of a Lollard leader who ran afoul of authorities for his radical beliefs, may have been involved in a plot to assassinate his friend Henry V, and was ultimately hanged in chains and burned at the stake ‘for the doctrine of wiclyffe and for treason (as that age supposed)’, according to Francis Thynne (in McKeen, 1.22). He was known by the name Oldcastle in early performances of Part One and may have been so designated during the composition of the first act of Part Two as well.46 Censorship by the Lord Chamberlain, William Brooke, a collateral descendant of Oldcastle, apparently forced Shakespeare to change the name in late 1596 or early 1597, for reasons I assess on pp. 134 – 42. Obliged to find a substitution, Shakespeare adapted the name of another knight, Sir John Fastolf, who was also a contemporary of Henry V and had already played a role in Henry VI, Part One.47

  What Shakespeare may have had in mind by naming his fat knight after a Lollard martyr is unclear. The most innocuous explanation is that he borrowed the name without further thought from his source play, The Famous Victories of Henry the Fifth, in which Oldcastle is one of the Prince’s three boon companions with whom he commits robbery, though this Oldcastle has neither the humour nor the girth of Falstaff, and the thieving exploits of these ‘knights’ in the source play served as only a skeleton on which Shakespeare fleshed out his comic scenes of the Gad’s Hill robbery. Drawing inspiration from Famous Victories does not imply, of course, that Shakespeare was unaware of the true identity of the historical Oldcastle. Indeed, he could not have been ignorant of the implications of naming his debauched knight after a figure whose reputation had been rehabilitated in the sixteenth century by John Bale in A brefe Chronycle concernynge the Examinacyon and death of the blessed Martyr of Christ Syr Johan Oldecastell the Lorde Cobham (1544) and most adamantly by John Foxe in Actes and Monuments (1563), works which sought to create for a newly reformed England a history of Protestant struggle and martyrdom which found in Oldcastle’s ‘life and death the pattern of virtuous opposition to a corrupt clergy that underpinned the godly nation itself’.48

  Why, then, would Shakespeare have risked lampooning a Protestant martyr for an audience whose sympathies may have lain with the very principles of religious reform for which Oldcastle gave his life? Though recent speculation that Shakespeare was a Catholic has led Gary Taylor to argue that in ridiculing Oldcastle’s excesses, Shakespeare was exploiting ‘a point of view that many of his contemporaries would have regarded as “papist”’ (‘Fortunes’, 99), by the end of the sixteenth century Lollards were regarded as ‘precursors [not] of the national church’, as Foxe had urged, but ‘of the nonconforming sectaries who threatened to undermine it’ – that is, Puritans, that ‘godly brotherhood’ who had sought a more radical reformation of the Church than the crown was willing to permit (Kastan, 1H4, 60), whose influence had grown alarmingly in the last decades of the century and who were increasingly opposed to all forms of pleasurable entertainment, especially theatre. ‘Whatever Shakespeare’s own religious leanings,’ Kastan concludes, ‘certainly most members of his audience in 1596 would … have viewed the travesty of a Lollard martyr’ as ‘an entirely orthodox commitment, designed to reflect upon the nonconformity that the Queen herself had termed “prejudicial to the religion established, to her crown, to her government, and to her subjects”’.49

  By naming his debauched knight for a Lollard martyr, therefore, Shakespeare appears to have been contributing to contemporary political satire against non-conformists ‘as grotesque individuals living in carnivalesque communities’,50 glancing wryly at the hypocrisies of which Puritans were often accused – gluttony, lust, covetousness and deceit. Kristen Poole traces the history of the carnivalesque Puritan figure to the Marprelate controversy, in which Anglican bishops, responding to witty anti-ecclesiastic pamphlets written by young nonconformists under the pseudonym Martin Marprelate, hired writers such as Greene, John Lyly, Anthony Munday and Thomas Nashe to ‘challenge Martin on his own ground’ (Poole, ‘Saints’, 58) by turning the satirical figure of the bishop-as-voluptuary into a satire of the Puritan himself. Nashe, for example, vows to attack Puritan ‘Hipocrites’ by ‘imitating … that merry man Rablays’; and ‘throughout the anti-Martinist literature, Martin becomes “the ape, the dronke, and the madde”: he copulates, vomits, drinks, [and] gorges himself’51 – those same behaviours in which Falstaff indulges.

  In the two Henry IV plays Falstaff attempts to cloak such behaviour in a layer of pious cant common among Puritans. He quotes the Bible more liberally than any other character in Shakespeare, 26 times in Part One and 15 in Part Two (Shaheen, History, 153). The Prince, he assures the Lord Chief Justice in Part Two, ‘repents’, though ‘not in ashes and sackcloth’ (1.2.197–8; cf. Matthew, 11.21); in a borrowing from Ephesians, 5.18–19, which recommends ‘making melodie to the Lord in your hearts’, he claims to be an enthusiastic singer of spiritual songs: ‘For my voice, I have lost it with hallowing and singing of anthems’ (1.2.189 –90), a behaviour that firmly linked Puritans with Lollards (Ainger, 1.145); and he repeatedly refers to himself as a ‘saint’ (that is, one of God’s elect) and to salvation by faith alone. Just as tellingly, Falstaff mimics ‘the scriptural style of the sanctimonious Puritan’ (Hemingway, 37–8) in the letter he writes to the Prince when he signs himself, ‘Thine by yea and no … Jack Falstaff with my family, John with my brothers and sisters’ (2.2.128–30) – ‘yea and no’ being a common Puritan oath derived from Matthew,52 and ‘brothers and sisters’ being terms by which nonconformists addressed one another.