Oldcastle and the Oxford Shakespeare


© Notes and Queriesccxxxviii, 1993, 180-85

 

  

The Oxford Shakespeare prints its text of 1 Henry IV in a previously unknown version which refers to Falstaff as “Sir John Oldcastle” throughout. This, the editors claim, [1] “restores Sir John's original surname” from the play as “first acted, probably in 1596”. There is no evid­ence whatever for any such assertions or any such version.

     The Oxford editors add that “a play called Famous Victories of Henry V, entered in the Stationers’ Register in 1594, was published anonymously, in a debased and shortened text, in 1598. This text – which also features [the Protestant martyr Sir John] Oldcastle as reprobate – gives a sketchy version of the events portrayed in 1-2 Henry IV and Henry V. Shakespeare must have known the original play, but in the absence of a full text we cannot tell how much he depended on it.” What they can tell (though we are not told how) is that he must have known it in manuscript, long before its publication, and also that he could not conceivably have written any of it, not even the sup­posedly missing bits.

      Yet John Aubrey [2] affirmed that Shakespeare began with early popular plays, soon after 1582, Famous Victories was written by 1586. According to its 1598 title-page, it was “plaide by the Queenes Maiesties Players”, often proposed [3] as Shakespeare's earliest company. It proved popular enough to be reprinted as late as 1617, “As it was Acted by the Kinges Majesties Seruants”, as Shakespeare's known company (the Lord Chamberlain's Men) had been renamed after the accession of James I in 1603. Famous Victories was attributed to Shakespeare more than thirty years ago by two distinguished American scholars, in general terms by Ephraim Everitt [4] and in great detail by Seymour Pitcher. [5]

     But such a play would vitiate the Oxford assumption of an “Oldcastle” version of I Henry IV. So the Oxford editors should have seriously studied that possibility. Instead, they pay it no attention at all. Indeed, Famous Victories is even excluded from the “Works Excluded from this Edition”, [6] as listed by Gary Taylor; and no evidence whatever is adduced for the “Oldcastle” 1 Henry IV hypothesis, on which the entire Oxford text is based. Instead, John Jowett [7] just cites two earlier essays by Gary Taylor, [8,9] both of which merely assume and assert what they purport to prove.

     According to the first, ‘We all know that the character called “Falstaff” in every modern edition of Henry IV, Part I was originally called “Oldcastle”.’ But this completely begs the actual question at issue, namely whether that latter name was ever used in any text or performance of 1 Henry IV. In the absence of documentary evidence for any such entity, Gary Taylor identifies the play said [10] to have been per­formed by the Chamberlain’s Men on 6 March 1600, for the private entertainment of the Flemish ambassador, as the very version of 1 Henry IV that the Oxford hypothesis requires. But its title is clearly recorded as “Sir lohn Old Castell”; and there was indeed a play of that name, entirely different from 1 Henry IV, in existence at the time. It had been written c. 1599, as the first half of a two-part play. In October of that year, Philip Henslowe [11] of the Admiral's Men had paid Munday, Drayton, Wilson, and Hathway ten pounds between them for their work on the first part and “in earnest of the Second Pte. for the use of the company”. The complete work was registered on 11 August 1600 as “The first part of the life of Sir John Old­castell lord Cobham. Item the second and last parte of the history of Sir John Oldcastell lord Cobham with his martyrdom”; and “The first part Of the true and honourable historie of the life of Sir John Old-castle… As it hath been lately acted by” the Admiral's Men, was duly published in the same year. Successful perform­ances of it are recorded in November 1599. The second part remained unpublished and is now unknown; but it was mentioned by Henslowe [11] in diary entries of December 1599, 12 March 1600, and August 1602. Both parts sought to restore the credit of the historical Oldcastle. The prologue to part one says so:

 

It is no pampered glutton we present,

Nor aged Councellor to youthful sinne,

But one, whose vertue shone above the rest,

A valiant Martyr and a vertuous peere,

… Let fair Truth be grac'te,

Since forg'de inuention former time defac'te.

 

In other words, a ruffian-knight corresponding to the character later called “Falstaff”, the reprobate companion of Prince Hal, had appeared on the public stage under the name of “Oldcastle” in or before 1599; and the probity of that historical Protestant martyr, also known as Lord Cobham, who had been burned for his beliefs in 1417, was being publicly reaffirmed. His Tudor descendants had protested against the “Oldcastle” character as a slur on their family honour; no doubt they had also inspired and sponsored this new play. The seventh Lord Cobham, William Brooke, was especially well placed to do so; he was the Lord Chamberlain, ex officio patron and master of Shakespeare's company, from 8 August 1596 to his death in March 1597.

     It seems not only economical but self-evident to suppose that this well-known play specially written c. 1599 about the life of “Sir John Old­castell” and registered for publication on 11 August 1600 was indeed the play described as 'Sir John Old Castell' acted by the Chamberlain's Men on 6 March 1600. Gary Taylor, however, asserts that these two plays with the same title at the same time 'cannot be' the same play. His reasons are as follows. First, the known play "stayed in [Henslowe's] possession from October 1599 until at least September 1602". But there is no objective reason to suppose that the text was not copied, or borrowed, or indeed commandeered, by the court company, the Lord Chamberlain's Men.

     Taylor's second point is the same non sequi­tur repeated; the known Oldcastle play “could hardly have been played by a rival company at that time”. But of course it could, by order of the Lord Chamberlain himself, who from August 1596 to his death in March 1597 was William Brooke, the seventh Lord Cobham. Offence at the Oldcastle caricature had been “worthily taken by Personages descended from his title”; [12] Brooke's son Henry, the eighth Lord, would have sufficient incentive and influence to con­tinue the campaign as necessary.

     Taylor proceeds: “Nor is it probable that Shakespeare's company would wish to perform a play which so clearly represents an attack on one of their own; they would, on the contrary, probably be asked to perform one of their own most successful plays, and that they did so is suggested by the ambassador's ‘great Content­ment’ with what he saw.” But in the real world, Tudor players and playwrights would obey orders; and an ambassador to the excommunicated Protestant Elizabeth might well be shown, and profess pleasure at, the well-known extant pro-Protestant play Sir John Oldcastle, not a deliberate anti-Protestant lampoon on that worthy in a hypothetical lost early “Oldcastle” version of 1 Henry IV.

     The so-called “internal evidence” for such a version is equally contrived. It consists solely of four small points. First, the Quarto text of 1 Henry IV alludes to Falstaff as “my old lad of the castle” (I.ii.41). It also contains the verse line “Away, good Ned, Falstaff sweats to death” (II.ii.103) which would allegedly be less metric­ally lame with “Oldcastle” as its third foot. Next, the Quarto text of 2 Henry IV contains one instance (I.ii.138) of the speech-prefix “Old” instead of the customary “Fal.” or “Fals.”. Finally, that play's Epilogue (31-2) explains to the audi­ence that “Olde-castle died Martyre, and this is not the man”. But of course none of this need carry the implications claimed. A possible pun, a supposed irregularity, a slip in a speech-prefix, the correction of a mistaken impression; how can these four dots delineate a lost “Oldcastle” 1 Henry IV “first acted probably in 1596”?

     They may well show that Shakespeare, exactly like the author of Famous Victories (as the Oxford edition itself points out), had once naughtily depicted the Protestant martyr Oldcastle as a reprobate, and that this name natur­ally remained at the back of his creative mind. But then the rational inference, like it or not, is that the Catholic sympathizer who wrote Famous Victories was the young Shakespeare. The known name in the known play, and the known background, must take a threefold precedence over the unevidenced hypothesis.

     The “extensive external evidence” adduced by Taylor for his conjecture is equally self-refuting. He relies on Dr Richard James's undated letter to Sir Henry Bourchier [12] as “the most explicit deposition”. This says that “in Shakespeares first shewe of Harrie ye fift, ye person with which he vndertook to playe a buffone was not Falstaffe, but Sr John Oldcastle”. Taylor dates this letter 1633-4. But James (1592-1638) was then over forty years old. How could he possibly have known a lost play supposedly performed in London during his infancy, while he was still living at his birthplace in Newport, Isle of Wight? His field of expertise, as Sir Robert Cotton's librarian, was printed books. No doubt James knew the 1617 second edition of Famous Victories; he might well have inferred its Shakespearean origins from its announced performances by Shakespeare's company. The phrase “he undertook to playe a buffone” is unclear; it could mean for example that Shakespeare had acted the part of Oldcastle, or else that naming a sinner after a saint was a jest in the worst of taste. But “first shewe” surely implies a different Oldcastle play, not just an “Oldcastle” 1 Henry IV, especially since the former exists and the latter does not. Prima facie, the Protestant James was complaining about the Catholic Shakespeare's Famous Victories. Hence James's further pious references to the historical Oldcastle's “constant and resolute martyrdom, unto which he was pursued by the Priests, Bishops, Moncks, and Friers of those days [i.e. the early fifteenth century]”.

     As Taylor says, [9] James's “intellectual scrupu­lousness, his [political and literary connections] and his concern for his reputation all give his testimony ... an authority impossible to dismiss.” Further, as Taylor also observes, [8] the abundant evidence “does demonstrate, at the very least, [Shakespeare's] willingness to exploit a point of view which many of his contemporaries would have regarded as ‘papist’. In such circumstances, the possibility that Shake­speare deliberately lampooned Oldcastle can hardly be denied.”

    The same complaint had been levelled during Shakespeare's lifetime. John Speed [13] inveighed against the Jesuit Robert Parsons for making “Ouldcastle a Ruffian, a Robber and a Rebell, and his authorities taken from theStage-plaiers” a slander “only grounded from this Papist and his Poet, of the like conscience for lies, the one euer fairing, and the other euer falsifying the truth ...”. Parsons [14] had written in 1603 that Sir John Oldcastle was “a Ruffian-knight as all Eng­land knoweth, & commonly brought in by comediants on their stages: he was put to death for robberyes and rebellion vnder the foresaid K. Henry the fifth.”

     The outrage thus provoked rankled for decades. Of course its original cause was an actual published and performed Tudor play, not the “Oldcastle” I Henry IV conjectured by Gary Taylor, together with two other unknown lost Tudor plays about Henry the Fifth. [15] On any economical appraisal all three are equally chi­merical.Pace Taylor, there is no reason to doubt that the popular play about Henry the Fifth described by Nashe in hisPierce Penniless of 1592, and the popular play “harey the v" [11] acted thirteen times by the Admiral's Men between November 1595 and July 1596, and still current in 1598, are one and the same, namely The Famous Victories of Henry V.

     The contexts are worth closer consideration. Nashe says [16] that stage plays immortalize his­torical heroes. His first example is Talbot, in Shakespeare's 1 Henry VI. His second is Henry the Fifth, “leading the French king prisoner and forcing both him and the Dolphin to swear fealty”. Taylor [15] curiously contends that this cannot mean Famous Victories because “the text we have does not contain any scene in which Henry leads the French king prisoner (or in which such an incident is even imaginable)”. But this view not only overlooks Taylor's own opinion that the text of Famous Victories is incomplete but also loses sight of Scene Twenty, in which the Dolphin (sic) is forced to swear fealty; and the French king must be a prisoner, on the field of Agincourt. The simple explanation is that Nashe is deliberately juxtaposing two Shakespeare plays.

     This also explains what Taylor calls [15] “the obscure business transactions” recorded in the Stationers' Register for August 1600, when “Henry the ffift” was among five plays “to be staied” and ten days later the rights in it were formally allocated to Thomas Pavier, on adjudica­tion, among other “thinges formerlye printed”. There is no reason for anyone to assume, still less for Taylor to assert as a fact, that the canoni­cal “Henry V had already been printed”. The thing formerly printed might well have been Famous Victories, in which Pavier could have had rights as Creede's sponsor; the two were certainly partners in publishing the second edition of Henry V in 1602. Further, it seems that plays on the same theme were governed by the same copyright, as in the case of the Shrew and the King John plays; and such a rule would be especially sensible and readily justifiable if the same playwright had written both versions. [17] As the Oxford Shakespeare agrees, [6] The Taming of A Shrew could be “Shakespeare's own earlier play, later completely reworked as The Shrew”; and he was the only known Tudor playwright ever to undertake any such complete reworkings. The metamorphosis of Famous Victories into 1-2 Henry IV and Henry V is thus economically explained. So are the date and occasion and cause of the offence taken by the descendants of Oldcastle-Cobham, at the time (c. 1596) when Famous Victories was being performed in London by the Admiral's Men and the seventh Lord Cobham controlled the Chamberlain's Men. He could certainly have decreed that the Admiral's Men should commission and perform the refutation Sir John Oldcastle, as a suitable penance; and the current theatre authorities could readily have arranged for the same play to be also performed by the Chamberlain's Men, at court, on a state occasion. If Shakespeare himself was among the cast, that too would have been a suitable penance.

     On any assessment, the offence given and taken was indeed grievous and enduring. Half a century later, Thomas Fuller [18] was still complaining that “Stage-Poets have themselves been very bold with … the Memory of Sr John Oldcastle, whom they have fancied a boon Companion, a jovial Royster, and yet a Coward to boot.... The best is, Sr John Falstaffe … of late is substituted Buffoone in his place; but it matters as little what petulant Poets, as what malicious Papists have written against him.” Fuller returned to the same charge in 1662: [19] “Sir John Oldcastle [was] made the make-sport in all plays for a coward. It is easily known out of what purse this black perry came. The Papists railing on him for a Heretick…”.

     All these references, from Parsons in 1603 onwards, are prima facie to the actual per­formed and published play Famous Victories, not hypothetical performances of the hypothetical “Oldcastle” 1 Henry IV. The hunted fugitive Jesuit Parsons was unlikely to have frequented the public playhouse in London, and the only published Oldcastle play was Famous Victories. It is in that play, furthermore, and not in the canon, that Oldcastle talks like “a Rebell”, [20] as Speed complained in 1611. It was written by 1586, acted by Shakespeare's putative company the Queen's Men, described by Nashe (like 1 Henry VI) in 1592, registered in 1594, acted by the Admiral's Men 1596-8, published in 1598, acted by Shakespeare's own company the King's Men after 1603, and republished in 1617, the year after his death, with no risk of protest against the continued exploitation of his juvenilia. Fuller's reference to the substitution of Falstaff for Oldcastle “of late” is readily explained as an allusion to the seventh or eighth editions of 1 Henry IV, in 1632 and 1639 respectively. Fuller was no littérateur; he need not have known any earlier edition or seen any performance of the canonical play. Nor is there the least reason to suppose that the popularity of Famous Victories had significantly waned in the first half of the seventeenth century. Oldcastle's martyrdom remained a burning issue to the Protestant community.

     Shakespeare was said to have “died a Papist”, [21] and on abundant evidence he was held to have lived and thought as one too. As it happens, the text of Famous Victories often parallels [5] the marginalia written by a Catholic annotator on an extant copy of Hall's 1550 chronicle history. That annotator has been independently ident­ified [22,23] with Shakespeare, and that copy has associations with the Lancashire Catholic families often proposed [24,25,26] as the young Shake­speare's employers in the early 1580s. Here is a potentially rich mine for the open-minded. The problems, and hence the rational approach, are historical not literary. When was Shakespeare most likely to have penned his first lampoon on the Protestant martyr Oldcastle? Before the Spanish Armada of 1588, while he was still unknown, in a famous and popular anonymous Tudor play which is still extant? Or long after, when he was rich and famous, in a play entirely unknown except as a modern editorial hypothesis? 


Notes

[1] William Shakespeare: The Complete Works, ed. Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor (Oxford, 1986), 509.
[2] In Brief Livesc. 1680: “This William .. came to London, guesse about 18.... He began early to make essayes at Dramatique Poetry, which at that time was very lowe; and his Playes tooke well.”
[3] E.g. S. Schoenbaum, William Shakespeare: A Documentary Life (Oxford, 1975), 90.
[4] E. B. Everitt, The Young Shakespeare(Copenhagen, 1954), 171-2.<br[5] S. Pitcher, The Case for Shakespeare's Authorship of The Famous Victories (London, 1961).
[6] Gary Taylor and Stanley Wells, with John Jowett and William Montgomery, William Shakespeare: A Textual Com­panion (Oxford ‘1987’, recte 1988), 134-41, 169.
[7] Ibid., 329-32.

[8] G. Taylor, 'The Fortunes of Oldcastle', Shakespeare Survey, xxxviii (1985), 85-100.

[9] G. Taylor, 'William Shakespeare, Richard James, and the House of Cobham', Review of English Studies, xxxviii (1987), 334-54.

[10] By Rowland Whyte, in a letter to Sir Robert Sydney: Historical Manuscripts Commission, MSS of Lord de Lisle and Dudley, ii (London, 1934), 446.

[11] Henslowe's Diary, ed. R. Foakes and R. Rickert (Cambridge, 1961), 125, 126, 129, 132, 213, 214, 216 for Oldcastle and 33, 34, 36, 37, 47, 48, 319, 323 for Famous Victories.

[12] R. James, Epistle to Sir Harry Bourchier (Bodleian Library James MS 34; British Library Grenville MS 35), set out in E. K. Chambers, William Shakespeare: A Study of Facts and Problems (Oxford, 1930), ii.241.

[13] J. Speed, History of Great Britaine (London, 1611), iix.15, in Chambers, op. cit. ii.217-18.

[14] N[icholas] D[olman] [i.e. Robert Parsons],The Third Part of a Treatise, Intituled: of three Conversions of England: conteyning An Examen of the Calendar or Catalgoue of Protestant Saints . . . by John Fox (London, 1603), 31, in Chambers, op. cit., ii.213.

[15] Henry V, ed. G. Taylor (Oxford, 1982), 3-6

[16] T. Nashe, Works, ed. R. B. McKerrow (Oxford, 1958), i. 213.

[17] E. Sams, ‘The Troublesome Wrangle over King John’, N&Q, ccxxxiii (1988), 41-4.

[18] T. Fuller, Church History (London, 1655), iv.cent.xv, 168, in Chambers, op. cit., ii.244.

[19] Ibid. Worthies of England (London, 1622), 253, in Chambers, loc. cit.

[20] He says of the dying Henry the Fourth “He is a good old man; God take him to his mercy the sooner” and “We shall never have a merry world till the old king be dead” (Famous Victories, Sc.5, 17, 35); see op. cit. at n. 5 above, 30.

[21]  R. Davies, Fulman MS, in Chambers, op. cit., ii.255-7.

[22] A. Keen and R. Lubbock, The Annotator: The Pursuit of an Elizabethan Reader of Halle's Chronicles (London, 1944).

[23] M. McLaren, ‘By Me. .’ a report upon the apparent discovery of some working notes of William Shakespeare in a sixteenth-century book (London, 1949).

[24] 0. Baker, In Shakespeare's Warwickshire and the Unknown Years (London, 1937).

[25] E. Chambers, ‘William Shakeshafte’, in Shakespearean Gleanings (Oxford, 1944), 52-7.

[26] E. Honigmann, Shakespeare: The 'Lost Years' (London, 1985).