Why is falstaff fat?

Review of English Studies

Volumn 47, Issue 185, 1996, Pages 1-22

  Womersley, David ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 62949212057     PISSN: 00346551     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1093/res/xlvii.185.1     Document Type: Review

References (73)

1. B. Everett, 'The Fatness of Falstaff', London Review of Books, 16 Aug. 1990, 18-22.
2. W. Hazlitt, Characters of Shakespear's Plays (1817);
3. A. C. Bradley, Oxford Lectures on Poetry (1909), 247-75. Everett praised Bradley's lecture as perhaps 'the best essay ever written on the Henry IV plays' ('Fatness of Falstaff', 20).
4. It was disparaged by J. Dover Wilson as 'perhaps the weakest of his writings' (The Fortunes of Falstaff (Cambridge, 1943), p. vii) - judgements of course not absolutely incompatible.
5. Dover Wilson, Fortunes of Falstaff;
6. C. L. Barber, 'Rule and Misrule in Henry IV', in Shakespeare's Festive Comedy (Princeton, 1959), 192-221.
7. The Famous Victories of Henry V, entered in the Stationers' Register in 1594, was one of Shakespeare's sources for the English history plays.
8. Alfred Ainger thought that there was 'always a tradition (likely enough a true tradition) that he [Oldcastle] was very fat', but his editor, H. C. Beeching, confirms that there is no reference to 'Oldcastle's fatness earlier than 1597, the date of Shakespeare's play' (A. Ainger, Lectures and Essays (1905), i. 126 and n.).
9. Foxe, Actes and Monuments (1596), 526, col. b, ll. 68-78. The text is reprinted identically, apart from accidentals of spelling and punctuation, in the reprints of 1576 (550b-551a) and 1583 (i. 572a). In 1570 (i. 680b), there are two small variants: 'out of Judea' for 1596's 'of Judea', and 'Roma' for 1596's 'Rome'.
10. A. R. Humphreys, in his introd. to the Arden edn. of 2 Henry IV, offered no source (p. lv).
11. A. L. Scoufos, Shakespeare's Typological Satire: A Study of the Falstaff-Oldcastle Problem (Athens, Oh., 1979).
12. G. Taylor, 'The Fortunes of Oldcastle', Shakespeare Survey, 38 (1985), 85-100;
13. G. Melchiori, 'The Corridors of History: Shakespeare the Re-Maker', Proceedings of the British Academy 1986, 167-85.
14. quoted in A. G. Dickens and J. M. Tonkin, The Reformation in Historical Thought (Oxford, 1985), 65).
15. v.
16. Foxe, Actes and Monuments (1632), i. 863b, 51-4.
17. r-v).
18. 'Where by divers sundry old authentic histories and chronicles it is manifestly declared and expressed that this realm of England is an empire, and so hath been accepted in the world, governed by one supreme head and king having the dignity and royal estate of the imperial crown of the same, unto whom a body politic, compact of all sorts and degrees of people divided in terms and by names of spirituality and temporalty, be bounden and owe to bear next to God a natural and humble obedience ...' (G. R. Elton (ed.), The Tudor Constitution (Cambridge, 1960), 344).
19. For the revision of Holinshed by Abraham Fleming, see S. Booth, The Book Called Holinshed's Chronicles (San Francisco, 1968), esp. p. 66: 'The models for Fleming's historiography are books like John Foxe's Acts and Monuments, books that make history illustrate the active Protestantism of God.'
20. The metaphor of the shepherd has a well-established religious reference. It is used to suggest a union of political and spiritual authority in William Bradshawe's Hvmble Motives for Association to Maintaine Religion Established (1601): 'there should be but one Shepheard, and one sheepfould, one God, & one way' (p. 24).
21. William Harrison applied it to Joshua in this sense (G. J. R. Parry, A Protestant Vision: William Harrison and the Reformation of Elizabethan England (Cambridge, 1987), 22).
22. R. M. Benbow, 'The Providential Theory of Historical Causation in Holinshed's Chronicles 1577 and 1587', Texas Studies in Literature and Language, 1/2(1959), 276;
23. Parry, A Protestant Vision, 114-15
24. . It is not surprising, in view of its stronger ideological commitment, that the 1587 Holinshed should have been extensively censored; see E. S. Donno, 'Some Aspects of Shakespeare's Holinshed', HLQ 50 (1987), 229-48.
25. A division between ecclesiastical and civil history in the 16th century is asserted in D. Woolf, The Idea of History in Early Stuart England (Toronto, 1990).
26. Henry had been praised by Thomas More in 1529 as 'that good catholike king' (Supplication of Souls (1529); quoted in A. Fox, Thomas More: History and Providence (Oxford, 1982), 185).
27. M. Walzer, The Revolution of the Saints: A Study in the Origins of Radical Politics (London, 1966).
28. P. Collinson, The Religion of Protestants: The Church in English Society 1559-1625 (Oxford, 1982), 150.
29. r-v.
30. r;
31. r;
32. v. 'Puritan' might be used as a term of reproach even by advanced Protestants.
33. Collinson, Religion of Protestants, 150; on Erastianism, see ibid., ch. 1, 'Monarchy and Prelacy'.
34. The dramatic precedents for scenes in which a disguised monarch meets his subjects have been discussed by Anne Barton, 'The King Disguised: Shakespeare's Henry V and the Comical History', in J. G. Price (ed.), The Triple Bond (Philadelphia, 1975).
35. These psalms were often translated in the 16th century, and were of course regularly read aloud in church: see R. Zim, English Metrical Psalms: Poetry as Praise and Prayer 1535-1601 (Cambridge, 1987), esp. pp. 203-10 for a summary of her findings concerning the prevalence and influence of translations of the psalms.
36. v;
37. r;
38. r.
39. v;
40. v;
41. v.
42. v.
43. Barton, 'The King Disguised'.
44. r).
45. Henry V, IV. i. 169-70.
46. v;
47. v.
48. V.
49. r-v, an important assertion of the duty of the king to ascertain the justice of his cause in any war.
50. r: 'Oh, I say this is a most excellent, and glorious thing, when euery man keepeth his standing, his raunge, and his rancke.'
51. r.
52. John Downame, The Christian Warfare against the Deuill, World, and Flesh (1604), 230a.
53. r).
54. v; Greenham, Workes, 2;
55. r;
56. r. The biblical text on which it is founded is 2 Cor. 12: 10: 'Therefore I take pleasure in infirmities, in reproaches, in necessities, in persecutions, in distresses for Christ's sake: for when I am weak, then am I strong.'
57. r-v. The Catholic doctrine it replaced also had three stages: contrition, confession, and satisfaction.
58. r.
59. v.
60. r-v.
61. r.
62. v;
63. r;
64. see Elton, Tudor Constitution, 382-5.
65. A. C. Bradley misreads these lines when he finds them 'superstitious', since Catholic superstition is what Henry is putting behind him, and judges them by anachronistic standards when he denigrates them for being 'political' (Bradley, Oxford Lectures, 256-8). It is no argument against the reading I am advancing to remark that Henry is determined to persist with these Catholic practices ('More will I do ...'). Protestants were enjoined to perform good works, but not to think that they had any efficacy in the business of our salvation, or any power to atone for sin.
66. The nullity of ceremonies, and the identification of Catholicism as a religion of ceremonies, are commonplaces of Protestant theology: cf. Greenham, Workes, 2;
67. v;
68. William Bradshawe, English Pvritanisme (1605), 2-3;
69. r;
70. v;
71. r;
72. Downame, Christian Warfare, 573;
73. For instance, L. B. Campbell, who denied that Falstaff had political significance: Shakespeare's Histories: Minors of Elizabethan Policy (Los Angeles, 1947; London, 1964), 244.