Page:Henry IV Part 1 (1917) Yale.djvu/151

King Henry the Fourth Away good Ned, Falstaff sweats to death (II. ii.)

which would be corrected by the substitution of the word Oldcastle for Falstaff. In the first Quarto of Henry IV, Part II, the prefix Old. is found instead of Fal. before Falstaff's speech in I. ii. 137, and in the Epilogue to this play the author explicitly states that the Falstaff of the play is not the Oldcastle who 'died a martyr.'

Oldcastle was a famous Lollard, and according to tradition many Elizabethan Protestants protested against Shakespeare's 'degradation' of an honorable name, and 'some of that family being then remaining, the Queen was pleased to command him to alter it.' It is at least a singular coincidence that Shakespeare substituted the name of a Lollard sympathizer, Sir John Fastolfe, in slightly disguised form. The Falstaff of the play bears no resemblance, save in name, to either Sir John Oldcastle or Sir John Fastolfe.

Of the first performances and the first players of Henry IV no records are extant; but the large number of contemporary references add their testimony to the fact of the play's popularity. Ben Jonson alludes to the fatness of Sir John Falstaff in Every Man out of his Humour, and in Beaumont and Fletcher's Knight of the Burning Pestle, Ralph, the apprentice, when asked to 'speak a huffing part,' declaims Hotspur's speech on honor, with variations. Shakespeare's chief rivals, the Lord Admiral's players, in 1599 paid him the compliment of producing a play of their own on The Life of Sir John Oldcastle; and even during the period of the Commonwealth, Puritan legislation failed to prevent the clandestine performance of a farcical abridgment of Shakespeare's play, known as The Bouncing Knight.