Age in Love

by Jacqueline Vanhoutte

100. Worden asserts that, with the exception of Wolsey in Henry VIII, “there are no favourites with major parts in Shakespeare” (“Favourites,” 171). Perry briefly discusses Falstaff, but without noting specific allusions (Literature and Favoritism, 7–8). MacFaul includes a longer discussion of Falstaff, in which he casts Falstaff as a “scapegoat for the prince’s sins” (“Kingdom with my Friend,” 63).

  101. John Pole, describing Leicester, quoted in Robert Shephard, “Sexual Rumours,” 104; see previous chapter.

  102. Carlson, citing Herbert Blau, Haunted Stage, 1.

  103. According to an old tale, the queen intervened on Cobham’s behalf. See Richard James, “Epistle-Dedicatory,” 143; and Rowe, Life of Mr. William Shakspear, ix. Taylor’s reconstruction of the circumstances “lend[s] . . . plausibility” to this tradition (“William Shakespeare,” 352); see also Kastan, Shakespeare after Theory, 93–94. As Dutton points out, however, “it is possible that the Cobhams intervened as and when they did, not simply out of family pique, but because the fat knight had immediate and uncomfortable political connotations” (Mastering the Revels, 10).

  104. Prologue to Sir John Oldcastle (1600), A2r.

  105. Traub points out the name could also refer to castration, an equally apt association (Desire and Anxiety, 57).

  106. Briefe Discoverie, 49.

  107. For accusations of treason see, e.g., Leicester’s Commonwealth, 73; and “Letter of Estate,” 25. Both men served as generals.

  108. The 1587 edition of Holinshed’s Chronicles parallels the Cobhams and the Dudleys; a genealogical treatise on the Earls of Leicester is followed by a similar treatise on the Lords Cobham, which includes a Latin poem on Sir John Oldcastle, 1424–1505. The material on Leicester was cut from later editions. The woodcut appears in Foxe, Actes and Monuments, 592.

  109. Poole, “Saints Alive!” 54, 64; Verstegan, Declaration, 53; “Letter of Estate,” 31. There’s substantial overlap between the Marprelate controversy and the earlier controversy about Leicester (Lyly contributed works to both). “Letter of Estate” reproduces the association with Bacchus, 31. News claims that Leicester was “so greate a student of Baccus” that he thought there would be “quaffing in heaven as there is in Flanders” (148). For a recent account of Falstaff’s connection to Oldcastle and to the Marprelate controversy, see Jensen, Religion and Revelry, 153–56.

  110. Sidney, “Defense of Leicester,” 256; see also previous chapter.

  111. Nashe picks up the infernal themes in his description of Leicester as “a right earthly divell” (Pierce Penniless, 81).

  112. Leicester’s Commonwealth, 89.

  113. Sidney to Sir Francis Walsingham, March 24, 1586, Prose Works, 3:167.

  114. See Baldwin, Organization and Personnel, 241–43, on Kempe as Bottom. Although earlier scholars proposed other actors, including Thomas Pope, for the part of Falstaff (Baldwin, 229–32), Wiles’s argument that “Falstaff was written for Kemp” is now broadly accepted (Shakespeare’s Clown, 120). The similarities between Bottom and Falstaff lend weight to Wiles’s argument, since “playwrights . . . specifically created and designated parts suited to the particular range and talents of individual actors” (Stern and Palfrey, Shakespeare in Parts, 41). We do not have a birthdate for Kempe, who began his theatrical career in the early 1580s (Butler, “Kemp, William”).

  115. The earl’s alleged fondness for drink was linked to his residency in the Netherlands—unfairly so, according to Adams (“Dudley, Robert”). For Kempe’s biography, see Butler, “Kemp, William”; and Wiles, Shakespeare’s Clown, 24–42.

  116. Hornback, English Clown, 5, 132–34.

  117. Jones and Stallybras, Renaissance Clothing, 2–3.

  118. Wotton to Sir Edmund Bacon, July 6, 1613, Life and Letters of Sir Henry Wotton, 2:32–33. Roland Whyte describes a now lost play, The Overthrow of Turnhout, which depicted several living gentlemen and in which the actor who played Sir Francis Vere “got a beard resembling his, and a watchet satin doublet with hose trimmed with silver lace” (Whyte to Robert Sidney, October 26, 1599, Letters, 362–63). Jones and Stallybras discuss Middleton’s Game of Chess, in which the actor playing Gondomar had obtained the Spanish Ambassador’s cast-off clothing (Renaissance Clothing, 196).

  119. So many lines refer to Falstaff’s sweat staining his shirt that Shakespeare may have meant for it to become stained (Wiles, Shakespeare’s Clown, 124).

  120. Kempe may have had other garments associated with Leicester in his possession; according to Platter, English actors were “most expensively and elaborately costumed” because “eminent lords or Knights at their decease” bequeathed clothes to servants, who sold them to actors (Travels, 167).

  121. See also, e.g., Leicester’s Commonwealth, which describes the earl as among the “cunning practitioners in the art of dissimulation” (132).

  122. Chambers and Greg, Dramatic Records, 2:262–63.

  123. Allen, Admonition, xviii.

  124. On Tarleton’s connection to Leicester, see Wiles, Shakespeare’s Clown, 12; and Billington, Social History, 35.

  125. See, e.g., Whitney, Early Responses, 81; and Bevington, introduction to Henry IV, Part I, 32.

  126. My argument thus explains why Falstaff is so eager to prove that “being old and fat is no natural bar” to his desires, and why Shakespeare collapses “the characteristics of the clown with those of the courtly wit” (Ellis, Shakespeare’s Practical Jokes, 86–89).

  127. Entry dated September 7, 1588, Galloway, Records of Early English Drama, 90. See also previous chapter.

  128. Roach, Cities of the Dead, 78.

  129. Berger, Waking Trifles, 134–35.

  130. As Wilson and Yachnin note, “the idea of ‘the public’ or ‘the world’ motivates public making” by promising “boundlessness or even immortality” (introduction to Making Publics, 5). On the leveling effects of “embodied writing,” see Bruster, Question of Culture, 80–81.

  131. Hobbes, On Human Nature, IX.13, 46; Gosson, Plays Confuted, C8v-Dr.

  132. Warner, Publics and Counterpublics, 69.

  133. Freedman, “Falstaff’s Punishment,” 165.

  134. Dutton, Licensing, 30–38.

  135. See also Rackin, Stages of History, who describes this moment in terms of the players deferring to “the present realities of female power and authority that hovered at the margins of their historical stages” (147).

  136. Whitney, Early Responses, 71–111.

  137. Rackin gives the classic account of Wales as a place of “female enchantment” (Stages of History, 171–76).

  138. Sullivan, Sleep, Romance, 82. Sullivan describes the Welsh lady and Lady Hotspur as a Circean figures (72–80). Berger reviews the reasons that Falstaff’s lines here might refer to Hal (“Prince’s Dog,” 43–44). Falstaff, not Hal, “has a passion for friendship, a tendency to be ‘bewitched’” (Shannon, Sovereign Amity, 171).

  139. On idleness, effeminacy, and bestiality as characteristic of Circe’s victims, see Brodwin, “Milton and the Renaissance Circe.” The dispersal and regendering of the Circe myth in 1 Henry IV helps account for the ambivalent sexuality and gendering of Falstaff (and, I would argue, Hal) noted by critics like Parker, Shakespeare from the Margins, 21–23; and Traub, Desire and Anxiety, 50–70.

  140. Cicero, Booke of Old Age, 21v-22r.

  141. According to Bradley, “all competent estimates” involve separating “the real Falstaff” from the “degraded” one “befooled” by women (“Rejection of Falstaff,” 78). Even critics skeptical of Bradley’s assumptions have confirmed his judgment by ignoring Merry Wives. As Rackin demonstrates, “From Maurice Morgan to Harold Bloom, male critics have fallen in love with the Falstaff of the history plays and identified with him,” while they have rejected Merry Wives, because “Falstaff’s humiliations are devised by women” (Shakespeare and Women, 67–68). The result, Rackin shows, has been a critical tradition that labels the Falstaff from Merry Wives an “impostor” (68), a position against which my ar
gument advocates.

  142. Erickson, “Order of the Garter,” 119, 130. I do not believe, as Erickson does, that Merry Wives is a court play that “favors aristocratic interests” (124); rather, I agree (albeit for different reasons) with Freedman that it was written for the public stage (“Shakespearean Chronology”). The quote from Auden is from “Prince’s Dog,” 157–58. Falstaff’s age situates him as a contemporary of Elizabeth and Leicester, both born in 1533.

  143. Ralegh had gone in person. Leicester sponsored others to go in his place. The Galleon Leicester participated in the ill-fated Fenton expedition in 1582, for example (Adams, “Robert Dudley”). Fenton is the name of Ann Page’s courtly suitor in Merry Wives.

  144. The licenses and monopolies that the queen awarded her favorites were a source of incessant grumbling; see Leicester’s Commonwealth, 96; and “Letter of Estate,” 31.

  145. Falstaff’s association with animals is well established; see, e.g., Sullivan, Sleep, Romance, 85; and Traub, Desire and Anxiety, 56–57. In the space of one scene Hal refers to Falstaff as a “dog,” an “old boar,” and a “town bull” (2 Henry IV, 2.2.107, 146, 158).

  146. Kegl argues the “‘abominable terms’ promote collective identities” in this play (“Adoption,” 254).

  147. Golding, “Prefatory Epistle,” 405, 408. On Actaeon and Elizabeth, see, e.g., Berry, Chastity and Power, 28–29, 99, 137–38; Dutton, Mastering the Revels, 133–34; and previous chapter. On Falstaff and Actaeon, see Steadman, “Falstaff as Actaeon,” and Barkan, Gods Made Flesh, 281–82.

  148. Privy Council Letter to the Mayor of London, June 1585, in Leicester’s Commonwealth, 282–84.

  149. On the Garter and its origins see, e.g., Platter, Travels, 207.

  150. Holinshed immortalized Leicester’s ostentatious celebration of the Garter Feast during his stay in the Netherlands (Chronicles, 1433). Hunt describes the associations of the Order in relation to the motto’s retributive properties (“The Garter Motto,” 383–406).

  151. Jonson, “To the Memory of my Beloved, the Author Mr. William Shakespeare,” in Riverside Shakespeare, 97, l.29.

  152. According to Camden and others, this is what Leicester did in the Netherlands (Annales, 214).

  153. Leicester’s Commonwealth, 73.

  154. “Letter of Estate,” 24.

  155. Sullivan, Sleep, Romance, 82. Sullivan’s language recalls Traub’s argument about Falstaff as a fantasized mother figure rejected by Hal in his bid for male subjectivity. Where Traub sees Hal as a “‘prototypical’ male subject” (Desire and Anxiety, 51), I think his political status as a prince dominates Shakespeare’s representation. Traub’s argument leads her to liken Falstaff to Elizabeth I (69–70), where I think we are supposed to compare the queen to Hal.

  156. Doty, Shakespeare, Popularity, 83.

  157. For Fluellen’s comparatives as a parodic reflection of humanist historiography, see Rackin, Stages of History, 239–40. Fluellen does not seem to remember Falstaff’s name, a fact that Rackin attributes to Falstaff having “acquired the impotence (fall-staff) of fiction” along with its “license” (240).

  158. De Certeau, Writing of History, 8.

  159. The indeterminacy about who plays the Fairy Queen, or the incongruity of Mistress Quickly playing the Fairy Queen, highlight this act of usurpation. We are meant to think of Elizabeth but the relation is one of likeness rather than of identity, as critics like Helgerson assume (Adulterous Alliances, 72).

  160. Rackin, Stages of History, 138.

  161. Prologue to Sir John Oldcastle, A2r.

  162. Quoted in Whitney, Early Responses, 74. Whitney cites Hotson in supposing the reference is to Henry Brooke, Lord Cobham (74–75).

  163. Rowe, Life of Mr. William Shakspear, XVIII.

  164. Whitney notes that a central question raised by the early reception of this character is “how a satiric butt came to release so many positive reactions and sympathetic applications” (Early Responses, 73). For every reader who applauds the wisdom of Hal’s decision, another derides its callowness; see, e.g., Bradley, “Rejection of Falstaff”; Kastan, Shakespeare after Theory, 145; and Helgerson, Forms of Nationhood, 227. Hunter reviews arguments on either side (“Shakespeare’s Politics”), as does Crewe (“2 Henry IV: A Critical History,” 433–50).

  165. The “inexhaustible” qualities of Falstaff, his “resistance to closure,” are key to “the character’s enduring popularity” (Whitney, Early Responses, 70–71).

  3. Remembering Old Boys in Twelfth Night

  1. Shaw, “Better than Shakespeare?,” xxviii.

  2. Whitney, Early Responses, 71–111.

  3. Jonson, Every Man Out, 3.1.23. Further parenthetic references to Jonson’s plays are to vol. 1 of Works. Falstaff describes himself as an “apple-john” (1 Henry IV, 3.3.4). There are continuities as well between Merry Wives and Every Man in His Humour (1598); see McDonald, Shakespeare and Jonson, 31–55.

  4. The Cambridge editors point out that Every Man Out obsessively refers to the Falstaff plays, especially Merry Wives (1:240); on the Henriad, see also Gras, “Twelfth Night,” 547. Shift further resembles Falstaff in having a “shift of names,” in plying his trade at Paul’s, and in being associated with dirty shirts (3.1.7–10). On the censoring, see Clare, “Comical Satires,” 34; and Dutton, Mastering the Revels, 136–37. Jonson erred in identifying the actor as Elizabeth rather than featuring a substitute as Lyly and Shakespeare had; “to represent the Queen theatrically could only draw attention to the discrepancies between images of immortality and perpetual youth and the reality of the Queen’s old age” (Clare, 35).

  5. Carlson, Haunted Stage, 26.

  6. The connection between this passage in Every Man Out and the plot of Twelfth Night is often noted; see Clare, “Comical Satires,” 33; and Bednarz, Poets’ War, 180. Although little consensus exists about what the connection signifies (Gras, “Twelfth Night,” 545), most critics agree that Twelfth Night has an oppositional relation to Jonson’s comedies (Bednarz, 180–81; Leonard, “Shakespeare and Jonson Again,” 45–69).

  7. McDonald, Shakespeare and Jonson, 1–16. McDonald proposes Shakespeare’s and Jonson’s plays exist on a “sliding scale,” with Jonson’s “most satiric” and Shakespeare’s “most romantic” comedy at either end (55).

  8. Hunter, “English Folly,” 85. Bednarz’s claim that Shakespeare’s “most radical closural variation before 1599” on comic form is in Love’s Labor’s Lost (Poets’ War, 63) disregards the ending of Merry Wives, in which Falstaff is exposed and his romantic plots foiled. On the “nearly satirical” effect of Merry Wives, see also Bevington, “Shakespeare vs. Jonson,” 114.

  9. Jensen, Religion and Revelry, 20.

  10. Kerrigan discusses the relation between gossip and social structure, “Secrecy and Gossip in Twelfth Night.”

  11. Middleton, Microcynicon, in Works, 1974. For the “violent literary fantasies” that characterized the wars of the theatres, see Bruster, Question of Culture, 65–93. Bruster identifies this phenomenon with the Martin Marprelate controversy but, as I argued in the previous chapter, the kerfuffle about Leicester created the same “abusive, flyting atmosphere” (68). Scott-Warren notes that “although nobody has ever proved that Malvolio or Morose represented real individuals, they are clearly embedded in the satirical culture” that Bruster describes (“Bear-Gardens,” 80n50).

  12. Dickey, “Shakespeare’s Mastiff Comedy,” 262. On Twelfth Night’s bearbaiting references, see also Berry, “Twelfth Night,” who argues that the “subliminal metaphor” figures the audience as spectators and Malvolio as the bear (118); and Scott-Warren, who finds that “the sports of baiting and playing occupied homologous social positions” (“Bear Gardens,” 64).

  13. Bruster, Question of Culture, 80–82.

  14. Markham to Harington, in Harington, Nugae Antique, 1:240.

  15. Harington, Ajax, 171.

  16. Leicester’s Commonwealth, 192; Peck, introduction to Leicester’s Commonwealth, 19. />
  17. Harington, Ajax, 70. According to Donno, Harington’s satire is so obscure as to make identifications difficult (introduction to Ajax, 21). The scandal caused by the pamphlet indicates that contemporaries were able to identify Harington’s targets, however, and Scott-Warren persuasively takes this reference to Leicester as the “Beare” to be the source of the queen’s disfavor (“Harington, Sir John”). Harington refers to “Sarcotheos” (72) when describing Ajax’s pedigree—Donno attributes this name to Harington’s coinage but Sarcotheos is also Leicester’s companion in the anonymous satire News from Heaven and Hell (see chapter 2). In a section decrying courtly pride Harington also takes a jab at “close stools” dressed in “fugered satin and velvet” (111). Leicester was a fan of these luxurious conveniences; see Donno, 111n5; and Adlard, Amye Robsart, 243.

  18. Fiedler, “Eros and Thanatos,” 238.