Gadshill, Poins, and Peto as companions of Falstaff and the Prince. In the Second Part Pistol appears; but it is not till we come to the play of King Henry the Fifth that we find Nym. Quickly, the hostess of the Boar's Head in East Cheap, is in all.

In the older play entitled, The Famous Victories of King Henry the Fifth, these characters are represented by persons called Ned and Tom, while the Falstaff of Shakespeare is Sir John Oldcastle himself under his proper name, appearing as one of the seducers and gay companions of the young Prince. It is quite clear that in Shakespeare's play also the character now known as Sir John Falstaff was at first Sir John Oldcastle

Away, good Ned, Falstaff sweats to death

where Oldcastle suits the rythm better. The Prince addresses Falstaff, "Old Lad of the Castle," and in one of the Quartos "Old," stands in one place as one of the interlocutors instead of "Falstaff." There is also a tradition to that effect. The Quarto of 1598 has Falstaff, not Oldcastle.

All this and other matter to the point is fully stated in the Variorum; yet, after all, both Steevens and Malone hesitate in coming to the conclusion that Shakespeare wrote this play, the first in which Falstaff appears, with the name of Oldcastle given to the character. What has been already stated seems almost decisive. As to the rest, there is this difficulty, that when critics are found speaking of the abuse of the venerable name of the good Lord Cobham on the stage, it is not easy to determine whether they are alluding to the plays of Shakespeare, or to those of earlier or other dramatists, in which there is no reason to doubt that Lord Cobham was held up to contempt, because he appears under his proper

name.

Yet the external evidence that Falstaff was a supersession

of Oldcastle in Shakespeare's own play is stronger than those commentators seem to have been aware.

First we have James, a Fellow of Christ's College, Oxford (born 1592, died 1638), who prepared for the press a poem of Occleve's entitled, The Legend and Defence of the noble Knight and Martyr Sir John Oldcastle.* James prefixes a dedication to Sir Henry Bourchier, from which I extract the following remarkable passage, as I find it in one of Mr. Thorpe's valuable catalogues of the year 1834:-" A young gentle lady of your acquaintance having read the works of Shakespeare, made me this question:-How Sir John Falstaff could be dead in Harry the Fifth's time and again live in the time of Harry the Sixth to be banished for cowardice? Whereto I made answer, that this was one of those humours and mistakes for which Plato banished all poets out of his commonwealth that in Shakespeare's first share of Harry the Fifth [Fourth] the person with whom he undertook to play a buffoon was not Falstaff but Sir John Oldcastle; and that offence being worthily taken by personages descended from his title, as peradventure by many others also who ought to have him in honourable memory, the Poet was put to make an ignorant shift of abusing Sir John Fastolphe, a man not inferior of virtue, though not so famous in piety as the other who gave witness unto the truth of our Reformation with a constant and resolute martyrdom." James is a worthy witness, and his testimony seems to be decisive.

The next is the testimony of an anonymous writer, who may however be identified without the least hesitation with Charles Aleyn, the author of various printed poems similar in style and subject to that of the manuscript I am about to quote. This manuscript poem is entitled, Trinarchodia: the several reigns of Richard the Second, Henry the Fourth, and * See it, No. 34 of James's MSS. in the Bodleian.

Henry the Fifth, 1649. Here the testimony is not less decisive that Shakespeare's Falstaff was originally Oldcastle.

The worthy sir, whom Falstaff's ill-used name
Personates on the stage, lest Scandal might
Creep backward and blot Martyr, were a shame,
Though Shakespear story, and Fox legend, write.

Henry the Fifth. Stanza 47.

Again,

136.

Here, to evince the scandal has been thrown
Upon a name of honour, (charactered
From a wrong person, coward and buffoon)
Call in your easy faith from what you have read
To laugh at Falstoffe; as an Humour, named
To grace the stage, to please the age, misnamed.

137.

But think how far unfit, how much below
Our Harrie's choice, had such a person been
To such a trust; the town's a tavern now,
And plump Sir John is but the bush far-seen:
As all this toil of princes had been spent
To force a lattice or subdue a pint.

138.

Such stage mirth have they made him; Harry saw
Merit; and Scandal but pursues the steps

Of Honour with rank mouth; if Truth may draw

Opinion, we are paid, howe'er the heaps

Who crowd to see in expectation full

To the sweet Nugilogues 'twixt Jack and Hal.

139.

No longer please yourselves, to injure names
Who lived to Honour (as who dare breathe
A syllable from Harrie's choice) the fames
Conferred by princes may redeem from death.

Live Falstaff then, whose trust and courage once
Merited the first government in France.

140.

This may suffice to right him; but the guilt
Fall where it may, unquestioned Harrie stands

From the four points of virtue, equal built:
Judgment secured, the glory of his hands:

And from his bounty blot out what may rise
Of comic mirth to Falstoffe's prejudice.*

The testimonies to the same point by Fuller, both in his Church History and his Worthies, are too well known to require to be repeated. Speed speaks generally of the “stageplayers" having abused the memory of Sir John Oldcastle, without naming Shakespeare in particular.

After all, the distinction is so slight that the question is not very material, whether Shakespeare banished Oldcastle from the stage as the representative of a riotous and disorderly companion of Prince Henry, or whether he wrote a play in which Oldcastle appeared in that character, and then on subsequent advice or suggestion withdrew the name of Oldcastle and substituted that of Falstaff. One thing is certain, that about the time when this play of Henry the Fourth was first acted, say 1596 or 1597, Oldcastle disappeared in a great measure, though it seems not entirely, from the stage as the name of a disreputable royster, and Falstaff took his place. Not long after appeared a serious play, entitled, The Life and Death of the good Lord Cobham, which was printed in 1600 with the name of Shakespeare as the author in the title page. This play was however not admitted as his when Hemings and Condell published the collected edition of his plays in 1623.

It may seem that there was an indecorum in representing Sir John Oldcastle in so disreputable a light in the times when the Reformation had fully established itself, of which it was

* This manuscript once belonged to Oldys. It was lately in the library of Mr. B. H. Bright, at whose sale it passed to the Rev. Mr. Corser, of Stand, near Manchester, who has obliged me with many extracts from it touching Oldcastle and Falstaff. There are a few extracts from it by Oldys in Harl. MS. 6,933.

then the custom to regard him as one of the harbingers. If it could be shewn that the character of Oldcastle existed as very feebly pourtrayed in the play of the Famous Victories, in dramatic compositions of a date before the Reformation was beginning, we might see a very probable reason for it in attempts of the church to raise a prejudice against one who had been one of its (supposed) greatest enemies. But it will have been observed that James assigns a more particular reason for the withdrawing the name of Oldcastle: certain personages descended from the title" objecting to this use of his name.

66

For the illustration of this, and to correct certain crude writings respecting it, a few genealogical particulars may here be given. The ancient line of the Cobhams, one of the longest and most illustrious in the kingdom, ended in John Lord Cobham, who died a very old man in the ninth year of King Henry the Fourth. His heir was a granddaughter named Joan, the daughter of a daughter who had married Sir John de la Pole. Joan Lady Cobham was the wife of five husbands in succession; (1) Sir John or Robert de Havenhall, (2) Sir Reginald Braybrooke, (3) Sir Nicholas Hawbeck, (4) Sir John Oldcastle, and (5) Sir John Harpenden. All the children of Lady Cobham died young, except Joan, the daughter of Sir Reginald Braybrooke. This lady married Sir Thomas Brooke, and from this marriage originated a second race of Lords Cobham, extinguished by attainder in the reign of James the First. William Lord Cobham died in 1597, being then Lord Chamberlain of the Household, an office which would give the weight of authority to any wish he might express for the forbearing to bring into contempt upon the stage any person so nearly connected with his house as Sir John Oldcastle, if the holding that office by him did not itself suggest the propriety of withdrawing it.