Shakespeare (48 page)

The connection between Shakespeare and Langley is to be found in a petition of a certain William Wayte who, in the autumn of 1596, named them both—together with Dorothy Soer and Anne Lee—in a writ
ob metum mortis
. Wayte was alleging that he stood in danger of death or grave physical harm from Shakespeare and others. This was a legal device for the completion of a writ, however, and did not necessarily mean that Shakespeare had threatened to kill him. It transpired that Francis Langley himself had previously taken out a writ against Wayte and his stepfather, William Gardiner; Gardiner, Justice of the Peace with special jurisdiction in Paris Garden, had a reputation in the district for corruption and general chicanery, and had apparently sought to close down the Swan Theatre. Wayte may have encountered some kind of resistance from Shakespeare and his co-defendants while in fact attempting to do so. But that is supposition. We only know for certain that Shakespeare was somehow involved with the imbroglio. It has in fact been suggested by some theatrical scholars that the Lord Chamberlain’s Men played at the Swan for a short season, but there is no evidence of this except for a stray reference in Thomas Dekker’s
Satiromastix—
“My name’s Hamlet revenge: thou hast been at Paris Garden, hast not?”

It is perhaps worth noting that Langley himself enjoyed a somewhat dubious reputation as a money-broker and minor civic official who had managed to accumulate a large fortune; he had been charged by the Attorney General, in no less a tribunal than the Star Chamber, of violence and of extortion. Sharp practice has always been a London speciality. He had purchased the manor of Paris Garden in order to build and let out tenements, and of course there were also brothels in that particular neighbourhood. One
of those named in the petition, Dorothy Soer, owned property in Paris Garden Lane and gave her name to cheap lodgings known as “Soer’s Rents” or “Sore’s Rents.” It is more than likely that some of the tenements in that lane were of low repute.

Shakespeare may even have lived among them. The eighteenth-century scholar, Edmond Malone, has left a note stating that “from a paper now before me, which formerly belonged to Edward Alleyn, the player, our poet appears to have lived in Southwark, near the Bear garden, in 1596.”
³
That paper has never been recovered. But whatever the date of Shakespeare’s removal to the south bank of the Thames, Wayte’s petition reveals one salient fact. Shakespeare was associated with people not altogether dissimilar to the comic pimps and bawds of his plays. He was thoroughly acquainted with the “low life” of London. It was an inevitable and inalienable part of his profession as a player. The fact is often forgotten in accounts of “gentle” Shakespeare but it is undoubtedly true that he knew at first hand the depths, as well as the heights, of urban life.

And then, for the winter season, he was once more in front of the queen. The Lord Chamberlain’s Men gave six performances at court, among them of
The Merchant of Venice
and
King John
. It is also possible that Falstaff made his appearance before the sovereign, in the first part of
Henry IV
. There is a long-enduring story that Elizabeth was so taken with the comic rogue that she requested a play be written in which Falstaff falls in love; the requests of Elizabeth were never lightly refused, and so appeared
The Merry Wives of Windsor
. It is a charming, if unconfirmed, story.

The nature of
The Hystorie of Henry the Fourth
, otherwise known as the first part of
Henry IV
, has also been the subject of debate. It is not clear whether Shakespeare wrote it with Part Two in mind, or whether the narrative grew under his hand. The first part did in any case provoke controversy of another kind. The Lord Chamberlain, Sir William Brooke, Lord Cobham, had been alerted to the fact that the play’s principal comic character was named Sir John Oldcastle. He may well have first seen the play in the presence of the queen at court. He was related to the original Oldcastle, and was not pleased with the farce surrounding the theatrical namesake. The real Oldcastle had been a supporter of the Lollards who had led an abortive insurrection against Henry V; subsequently he had been executed
for treason. But he was considered by many to have been a proto-Protestant, and thus an early martyr to the cause of Reformation. His descendant did not approve of his presentation as a thief, braggart, coward and drunkard.

So Cobham wrote to the Master of the Revels, Edmund Tilney, who in turn passed on the complaint to Shakespeare’s company; Shakespeare was then obliged in the second part of the play to change the name of his comic hero, from Oldcastle to Falstaff, and publicly to disavow his original creation. It is not clear why in the beginning Shakespeare chose the name of Oldcastle. It has been suggested that Shakespeare’s “secret” Catholic sympathies led him to lampoon this Lollard and anti-Catholic. In his
Church History
Thomas Fuller writes of Shakespeare’s original use of Oldcastle, “but it matters as little what
petulant Poets
as what
malicious Papists
have written against him.” But it seems unlikely that any overt Catholic bias entered the play. The name of Oldcastle had already appeared in
The Famous Victories of Henry the Fifth
, and Shakespeare may simply have borrowed it without considering the connection with Cobham.

It was in any case changed, and not without a certain humiliation on Shakespeare’s part. In an epilogue to the second part of
Henry IV
he himself came upon the stage and announced that “for any thing I knowe Falstaffe shall die of a sweat, vnlesse already a be killd with your harde opinions; for Oldecastle died a Martyre, and this is not the man …” (3224–7). Then he danced, and afterwards knelt for the applause.

The connection was not wholly erased, however. In a letter to Robert Cecil the Earl of Essex gave out the news that a certain lady was “maryed to Sir Jo. Falstaff” —this was the Court nickname now given to Lord Cobham. The name of Oldcastle was also still associated with
Henry IV
, and in fact the Lord Chamberlain’s Men played for the Burgundian ambassador a play entitled
Sir John Old Castell
. Shakespeare’s inventions have a habit of lingering in the air.

Oldcastle, or Falstaff, is at the centre of the play. He is the presiding deity of the London taverns who takes the young Prince Hal, heir to the throne, within his paternal and capacious embrace; he is discomfited only when Hal, on becoming sovereign, repudiates him in bitter terms. Hal has been compared to Shakespeare in that respect, disowning such supposed drinking companions as Robert Greene and Thomas Nashe. It may be significant that Greene had a wife known as “Doll” and that Falstaff’s weakness is for a
prostitute known as Doll Tere-Sheete, but this may be coincidental. In any case Falstaff is too large, too monumental, to be identified with anyone in life. He is as mythical as the Green Man.

He has become perhaps the most recognisable of all Shakespearian characters; he now appears in a thousand different contexts, from novel to grand opera. He became famous almost as soon as he appeared upon the stage. One poem notes “but let Falstaff come” and “you scarce shall have a roome” in the theatre, and another celebrates how long “Falstaff from cracking nuts hath kept the throng”:
⁴
when Falstaff came on stage the audience were silent with anticipation. It was indeed the presence of Falstaff that rendered these plays so popular; the first part of
Henry IV
was reprinted more frequently than any other of Shakespeare’s plays. The first quarto edition was read so often and so widely that it survives only in fragments; there were three reprintings in the first year of publication.

The boisterous, extravagant, rhapsodical figure was at once recognised as a national type; he seemed to be as English as beef-pudding and beer, a great deflator of authority and pomposity, a drinker to excess, a rogue who concealed his crimes with wit and bravado. He is an enemy of seriousness in all of its forms, and thus represents one salient aspect of the English imagination. He is filled with good humour and good nature, even when he is leading conscripted soldiers to their certain death, and in that sense he is above mere censure; he is like one of the Homeric gods whose divinity is in no way impeded by their wilful behaviour. He is free from malice, free from self-consciousness; he is in fact free from everything. He is the thorn to the rose, the jester to the king, the shadow to the flame. His instinct for bawdry and subversion are part of his language that parodies the rhetoric of others and follows its own anarchic chain of associations; we have already seen how he translates “gravitie” into “gravie.” Whatever can be thought of, Falstaff says. Shakespeare took comedy as far as it can possibly go.

He was played by William Kempe, the pre-eminent clown in England, and Inigo Jones gives a fine contemporaneous description of “a Sir John fall staff” with “a roabe of russet Girt low … a great belley … great heade and balde” and “buskins to shew a great swollen leg.”
⁵
He was great in every respect, therefore, and Kempe provided the perfect model of the comic fat man. The actor was also famous for his jigs, and so he would have set Falstaff
dancing and singing on the stage. He is in any case conceived in great theatricality and, as William Hazlitt puts it, “he is an actor in himself almost as much as upon the stage.”
⁶

Inigo Jones’s coincidental spelling of “fall staff” makes a phallic pun not unlike those connected with shake-spear, and it has been suggested by the more analytical critics that in Falstaff Shakespeare is creating an alter ego through which all his unruly energy, all his defiance and instinct for subversion, can be channelled. Behind the face of Falstaff we can see Shakespeare smiling. Falstaff deflates the claims of history and of heroism on every level, even as his creator was writing plays about those subjects. How can the creator of
Henry V
also be the writer who revels in Falstaff’s unheroic antics upon the battlefield, with his parodies of martial ardour and even his parody of death itself? In that sense Falstaff is the essence of Shakespeare, cut free of all ideological and traditional notions. He and his creator go soaring into the empyrean, where there are no earthly values. It would of course be absurd and anachronistic to portray Shakespeare as a nihilist; nevertheless the dissolute and antinomian Falstaff is powerful and energetic because he has the power and energy of Shakespeare somewhere within him. It is also worth observing that in the first part of
Henry IV
there are certain words of Warwickshire dialect, among them “a micher” (one who sulks by straying from home), a “dowlas” and “God saue the mark” (from ancient Mercia, of which Warwickshire was a part). In a play concerned with fathers and with father figures, Shakespeare seems instinctively to revert to the language of his ancestors.

Hegel said that the great characters of Shakespeare are “free artists of themselves” engaged in fresh and perpetual self-invention; they are surprised by their own genius, just as Shakespeare was surprised when the words of Falstaff issued from his pen. He did not know where the words came from; he just knew that they came. It has become unfashionable in recent years to discuss Shakespeare’s characters as if they somehow had an independent existence, outside the boundaries of the play; but it was not unfashionable at the time. Falstaff and his comic colleagues proved so successful that they were brought back by Shakespeare, for an encore, in
The Merry Wives of Windsor
.

There is perhaps a further connection between Falstaff and Shakespeare. The relation of the fat knight to Prince Hal has often been taken as a comic version of the relationship between Shakespeare and the “young
man” of the sonnets in which infatuation is succeeded by betrayal. The twin “act” of older and younger man in that sonnet sequence has also been related to Shakespeare’s longing for his dead son. These were some of the forces in his life that, in this period, propelled him towards a supreme poetic achievement.

A
re Shake-speares Sonnets
authentic representations of Shakespeare’s inner experience, or are they exercises in the dramatic art? Or do they exist in some ambiguous world where both art and experience cannot be distinguished? Could they have begun as testimonies to real people and real actions, and then slowly changed into a poetic performance to be judged on its own terms?

There were many models for their composition. Shakespeare was entering a crowded arena where poets and poetasters regularly published sequences of sonnets to various real or unreal recipients. The unofficial publication of Sir Philip Sidney’s
Astrophil and Stella
, in 1591, was an indication of the demand for such works; the pirated edition was withdrawn but in its preface the sonnets were described by Nashe as “a paper stage strewed with pearl … whiles the tragicomedy of love is performed by starlight.”
¹
This suggests the overwhelming theatricality or artificiality of the genre, for which the expression of private passion was by no means a necessary condition. They were primarily designed to display the wit and ingenuity of the poet, and to test his ability in handling delicate metres or sustained conceits. The publication of Sidney’s collection was followed by Samuel Daniel’s
Delia
, Barnaby Barnes’s
Parthenophil
and
Parthenophe
, William Percy’s
Coelia
, Drayton’s collection of fifty sonnets entitled
Idea’s Mirror
, Bartholomew
Griffin’s
Fidessa
, Henry Constable’s
Diana
and a host of other imitators. Sonneteering had become the English literary fashion.