Falstaff’s ‘Play Extempore’: Illegal Inn Performances and Local Politics in 1 Henry IV

ABSTRACT

1 Henry IV is often praised for how it juxtaposes major geo-political events with the more mundane depictions of city life. But the local London scenes generally aren’t thought of as events with their own politics and histories. This essay seeks to trace that local history and show how the play engaged in those local politics. It is specifically interested in how the tavern scene at 2.4. is connected to London’s regulations on inn performances in the 1590s.

The paper makes two interrelated claims about this scene. The first is historical. The ‘play extemporary’ at 2.4 should be understood as an illegal or, at the very least, an illicit inn performance that is interrupted by the local authorities and thus can be read against the background of increasing restrictions on inn performances. Next, I argue that the play was probably played at inns, including Cross Keys, and so Falstaff’s performance should be understood on a meta-level since the audience would have recognised themselves as tavern-goers watching an illicit performance. Together, these readings help to explain some of the puzzling interpretive cruxes of the text and demonstrate how local political events intruded on Shakespeare’s play about national, dynastic history.

KEYWORDS:

• I Henry IV; inns
• performance history
• local politics
• Shakespeare

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Jean E. Howard’s introduction to the Norton Shakespeare is, I think, indicative of this perspective. Howard, Introduction to 1 Henry IV in The Norton Shakespeare, ed. Stephen Greenblatt et al., 3rd ed. (New York: Norton, 2016), especially 1165 and 1167.

2 A notable exception is Chris Fitter’s work on the play. As I will show below, our approaches to this scene overlap in general but are different in some crucial ways. Fitter, ‘“The Devil Take Such Cozeners!” Radical Shakespeare in 1 Henry IV’, in 1 Henry IV: A Critical Guide, ed. Stephen Longstaffe (London: Continuum, 2011): 99-121.

3 My description of the mainstream reading of the play is, of course, a generalization, but will be, I wager, recognizable to readers and viewers of the play, and so a lengthy list of sources that use this interpretive framework is unnecessary. That being said, a brief and somewhat speculative provenance of this view may be helpful. A mid-twentieth century, post-war focus on Hal, which overturned previous generations’ fascination with Hotspur coupled with a penchant for psychological criticism, helped produced the kind of developmental reading of Hal’s character I describe here. Furthermore, a Bakhtinian infused new historicism led to the depiction of Eastcheap and its denizens as festive and timeless. And the Machiavellian Hal can be traced to the interest in early modern historiography pioneered by Phyllis Rachin, among others. Rackin, Stages of History: Shakespeare's English Chronicles (London: Routledge, 1991), especially 78-81. For the performance history that traces the shift from Hotspur to Hal, see Scott McMillin, Henry IV Part 1 (Manchester: Manchester UP, 1991). For an older but extremely clear example of psychological criticism that foregrounds a developmental model of Hal’s narrative, see M.D. Faber, ‘Falstaff behind the Arras’, American Imago 27, no. 3 (1970): 197-225. For an influential investigation of the festive elements of the Eastcheap world, see C.L. Barber, Shakespeare’s Festive Comedy: A Study of Dramatic Form and Its Relation to Social Custom (Princeton: Princeton UP, 2012), 219–251 (originally published in 1961). For a Bakhtinian reading of the play, see David Ruiter, Shakespeare’s Festive History: Feasting, Festivity, Fasting, and Lent in the Second Henriad (New York: Ashgate, 2003), 69-102.

4 David Kathman, ‘Inn-Yard Playhouses’, in The Oxford Handbook of Early Modern Theatre, ed. Richard Dutton (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2011), 154-167; Paul Menzer, ‘The Tragedians of the City? Q1 Hamlet and the Settlements of the 1590s’, Shakespeare Quarterly 57, no. 2 (2006): 162-182; Herbert Berry, ‘The Four Inns’, in English Professional Theatre, ed. Glynne Wickham, Herbert Berry, William Ingram (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2000), 295-305; Lawrence Manley, ‘Why Did London Inns Function as Theatres?’, Huntington Library Quarterly 71, no. 1 (2008): 181-97. See also, Andrew Gurr, ‘Henry Carey's Peculiar Letter’, Shakespeare Quarterly 56, no. 1 (2005): 51-75; Siobhan Keenan, Travelling Players in Shakespeare’s England (New York: Palgrave, 2002), 87-88; and W.R. Streitberger, Master of Revels and Elizabeth I’s Court Theatre (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2016): 230-237.

5 Keenan, Travelling Players, 87. For evidence of this history of playing at inns, see O.L. Brownstein, ‘A Record of London Inn-Playhouses from c.1565-1590’, Shakespeare Quarterly 22, no. 1 (1971): 17-24; and Kathman, ‘London Inns as Playing Venues for the Queen’s Men’, in Locating the Queen’s Men, Helen Ostovich, Holger Schott Syme, and Andrew Griffin(London: Routledge, 2016), 65-75.

6 Kathman, ‘Inn-Yard Playhouses’, 159.

7 Berry, ‘The Four Inns’, 296. Andrew Gurr also suggests 1596 as the final year of inn-yard performances. Gurr, ‘Henry Carey's Peculiar Letter’, 58.

8 Kathman, ‘Inn-Yard Playhouses’, 160. For a transcription of the letters see, English Professional Theatre: 1530-1660, eds. Glynne Wickham, Herbert Berry, William Ingram (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2000), 440-441.

9 Kathman, ‘Inn-Yard Playhouses’, 160. The order is reproduced in English Professional Theatre, 507-508.

10 Menzer, ‘The Tragedians of the City’. Manley thinks that the final order of 1600 probably marks the end of inn playing, which dovetails with the conversion of the suburban inns, Boar’s Head and Red Bull, into permanent theatres. Manley, ‘Why Did London Inns Function as Theatres?’, 196.

11 Sally Templeman,‘“What’s this? Mutton?” Food, Bodies, and Inn-Yard Performance Spaces in Early Shakespearean Drama’, Shakespeare Bulletin 31, no. 1 (2013): 79-94.

12 Manley, ‘Why Did London Inns’, 188-190.

13 Ibid., 189.

14 Ibid.

15 King Henry IV Part 1, ed. David Scott Kastan (London: Arden, 2002). All references are to this edition and cited in text.

16 The ‘two hours traffic’ is, of course, a reference to the prologue of Romeo and Juliet. For the length of early modern plays, see Lukas Erne, Shakespeare as Literary Dramatist (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2013): 155-197.

17 On Tarleton at inns, see Kathman, ‘Inn-Yard Playhouses’, 158. See also Richard Preiss, Clowning and Authorship in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2014): 110-140.

18 On the Tarleton roots of Falstaff, see Joseph Allen Bryant, ‘Shakespeare's Falstaff and the Mantle of Dick Tarlton’, Studies in Philology 51, no. 2 (1954): 149-162. For Falstaff as a signifier for merry England, see, among others, Phebe Jensen, Religion and Revelry in Shakespeare’s Festive World (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2009), 149-193, and Preiss, Clowning and Authorship.

19 Bryant suggests that Falstaff’s talent at improvisation also links him to Tarlton. Bryant, ‘Shakespeare’s Falstaff’, 158.

20 Kathman, ‘The Inn-Yard Playhouses’, 158.

21 For explorations of the connection between rogue literature and Falstaff’s character, see Robert Hapgood, ‘Falstaff's Vocation’, Shakespeare Quarterly 16, no. 1 (1965): 91-98; and Craig Payne, ‘Shakespeare's Henry IV, Part 2’, The Explicator 54, no. 2 (1996): 67.

22 Robert Fehrenbach, ‘When Lord Cobham and Edmund Tilney “Were Att Odds”: Oldcastle, Falstaff, and the Date of 1 Henry IV’, Shakespeare Studies 18 (1986): 87–87. James Gibson provides a compelling case for a slightly earlier date, by arguing that the play was debuted in the months before its court performance. ‘Shakespeare and the Cobham Controversy: The Oldcastle/Falstaff and Brooke/Broome Revisions’, Medieval & Renaissance Drama in England 25 (2012): 94–132, especially 102. James C. Bulman ed, King Henry IV Part 2 (London: Arden, 2016), 137-140.

23 English Professional Theatre, 508.

24 Manley, ‘Why Did London Inns Function as Theatres?’, 189.

25 Steven Earnshaw, The Pub in Literature: England’s Altered State (Manchester: Manchester UP, 2000), 55.

26 I use the more familiar name Bardolph instead of Bardoll throughout even though Kastan uses Bardoll.

27 Earnshaw, The Pub in Literature, 55.

28 Manley, ‘Why Did London Inns Function as Theatres?’, 185.

29 Fitter, ‘“The Devil Take Such Cozeners!”’, 99.

30 The editors of the Arden and Norton editions note that this line is problematic. The Norton editorial team calls it a ‘famously difficult passage’, Kastan, ‘an odd remark, following the announcement of the Sheriff’s presence’. Ed. Stephen Greenblatt, The Norton Shakespeare, 3rd ed. (New York: Norton, 2016), 1209. Kastan, King Henry IV Part 1, 235.

31 Kastan, King Henry IV Part 1, 237.

32 Geoffrey G. Forward, ‘What “Maior” is Falstaff Denying?’, Shakespeare Quarterly 41, no. 3 (1990): 336-43.

33 Ibid., 337.

34 Kastan, Henry IV Part 1, 235; Forward, ‘What “Maior”’, 343.

35 E.K. Chambers, The Elizabethan Stage.(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1923), 4.316.

36 Earnshaw, The Pub in Literature, 55.

37 Fitter astutely picks up on part of this dynamic by highlighting the contingent nature of Hal’s support for the tavern-goers. Fitter, ‘“The Devil Take Such Cozeners!”’.

38 Barbara D. Palmer, ‘Early Modern Mobility: Players, Payments, and Patrons’, Shakespeare Quarterly 56, no. 3(2005): 272. Keenan, The Travelling Players, 90.

39 Fehrenbach, ‘When Lord Cobham’. Gibson, ‘Shakespeare and the Cobham Controversy’.

40 Gabriel Egan, ‘The Theatre in Shoreditch, 1576-1599’, in The Oxford Handbook of Early Modern Theatre, 182-183. Charles William Wallace, The First London Theatre: Materials for a History (London: Blom, 1969), 25.

41 For one account of this closure, see Glynne Wickham, ‘The Privy Council Order of 1597 for the Destruction of all London Theatres’, The Elizabethan Theatre 2 (1970): 21-43.

42 For records of these performances, see Sally-Beth MacLean and Alan Somerset’s Patrons and Performance website. For a general description of the East Anglian Tour, see Scott McMillin and Sally-Beth MacLean, The Queen’s Men and Their Plays (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1998), 55-67. See also, Peter Davison, ‘Commerce and Patronage: The Lord Chamberlain’s Men’s Tour of 1597’, in Shakespeare Performed: Essays in Honor of R.A. Foakes, ed.Grace Ioppolo (Newark: University of Delaware, 2000): 56-71.

43 MacLean and Somerset, Patrons and Performance. There is also a possible performance in Faversham in September, which would mean that the troupe must have split up as it is unlikely that they would go all the way west to Bristol then back east to Faversham and then all the way back to Bath, where they played in early September. That being said, whether they played in Faversham is immaterial to my argument. The important point, as will become clear, is that they played at Rye on August 27th.

44 Keenan, The Travelling Players, 89-90. McMillin and MacLean, The Queen’s Men, 68. Jennifer Roberts-Smith shows how two Norwich inns where commonly used and would have provided one of the best venues in the city. Roberts-Smith, ‘The Red Lion and the White Horse: Inns Used by Patronized Performers in Norwich, 1583-1624’, Early Theatre 10, no. 1 (2007): 109–144. Alan Somerset also uses these performances as models for what he thinks typical playing looked like, Somerset, ‘“How Chances it They Travel?”’ Provincial Touring, Playing Places, and the King’s Men’, Shakespeare Survey (1994): 54-55. Palmer thinks that theatre historians overestimate playing companies’ use of inns, pointing to the lack of evidence of inn performances outside of London. While her point is well taken, Patrons and Performances lists 13 inns and taverns that were used as performance spaces in the early modern era. In comparison, there are 26 guildhalls that hosted performances. So while guildhalls were the more popular choice (as Palmer argues), inns and taverns were hardly unpopular. Furthermore, the relative dearth of evidence for inn performances can easily be explained by the lack of record keeping in inns, as Keenen suggests. Palmer, ‘Early Modern Mobility’, 282-283. Keenan, The Travelling Players, 90.

45 In Patrons and Performances, several records of performances at Sprytwell’s Inn are described as, ‘Payments to Lord Mountjoy's Players in 1569-70, to the Queen's Players in 1571 and to unidentified minstrels at a supper for officials of the Court in 1581 suggest that Sprytwell's was an occasional performance venue’.

46 REED, Kent, ed James M. Gibson (Toronto: Toronto UP, 2002), 484. See also, Patrons and Performances.

47 Roslyn Lander Knutson, The Repertory of Shakespeare’s Company, 1594–1597 (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press,, 1991), 33.

48 Ibid, 61. She records, what seems like, a contemporary reference to the play in a letter dated 1598 September 20th, suggesting that the play was still in rotation almost two years after its debut. Its continued presence is probably due to its concurrent staging with 2 Henry IV and maybe even Henry V. Additionally, we know the play was revived later at court, again suggesting its continued popularity on the early modern stage. For a list of revivals at court, see Gurr, The Shakespeare Company, 1594–1642 (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2004), 283.

49 Kastan, 1 Henry IV, 77. Palmer’s description of plays within the Queen’s Men’s repertory that would have probably been chosen for travel also confirms that I Henry IV would have been a likely pick. Palmer, ‘On the Road and on the Wagon’, in Locating the Queen’s Men, 1598-1603: Material Practices and Conditions of Playing, ed. Helen Ostovich, Holger Schott Syme, and Andrew Griffin (London: Routledge, 2009), 29.

50 Manley and MacLean, Lord Strange’s Men, 248.

51 REED, Sussex, Camron Lewis (Toronto: Toronto UP, 2000), 140. See also, Patrons and Performances.

52 McMillin and MacLean, The Queen’s Men, 65.

53 John Roche Desant, ed. Acts of the Privy Council, 1591–1592 (London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1901), 22. 550.

54 REED, Sussex, 136. See also, Patrons and Performances.

55 Henslowe’s Diary, ed. R.A. Foakes(Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1961), 19.

56 Patrons and Performances.

57 Menzer, ‘The Tragedians of the City’, 178.

58 We know of this illegal performance through a letter from the Lord Mayor to the Privy Council, reproduced in Wickham, English Professional Theatre, 302.

59 Gerald Eades Bentley, The Profession of Player in Shakespeare’s Time, 1590-1642. (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1984), 196.

60 Ibid., 196-197.

61 Ibid., 196.

62 For more on the authorities’ suspicion of large crowds, see Eric Dunnum, Unruly Audiences and the Theatre of Control in Early Modern London (London: Routledge, 2020), 29-30.

63 Manley notes the important and privileged position of inns in early modern England. ‘Why Did London Inns Function as Theatres?’, 185.

64 Wickham, English Professional Theatre, 302.

65 Ibid., 189-190.

66 Ibid.

67 Glynne Wickham, Early English Stages 1300 to 1660 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1963) 2 part 1.187-196; Gurr, ‘Henry Carey’s Peculiar Letter’,65; Kathman, ‘Inn-Yard Playhouses’, 163; Manley, ‘Why Did London Inns Function as Theatres?’, 190.

68 Kathman, ‘Inn-Yard Playhouses’, 156-167. Brownstein comes to the same conclusion in ‘A Record of London Inn-Playhouses’, 23.

69 Wickham, English Professional Theatre, 302.

70 Kathman, ‘London Inns as Playing Venues’, 72-73.

71 For the relevant portion of Tarlton’s Jests, see Wickham, English Professional Theatre, 301-302.

72 Ibid., 300.

73 Ibid., 304. The only other reference to a post 1588 performance at the Bell comes from a German tourist, who mentions the Privy Council’s suppression of ‘playhouses in Gracious street, Bishopsgate Street, nigh Pauls (that on Ludgate Hill)’. Since both the Bell and the Cross Keys were located on Gracious street, it isn’t clear which inn he is referring to here, but again, since the Bell had been subleased out since 1588, it seems likely that it had ceased to offer performances well before the German visited London in 1596, and so the Gracious street ‘playhouse’ probably refers to the Cross Keys. Wickham, English Professional Theatre, 304.

74 Wickham, English Professional Theatre, 302.

75 For a compelling argument that Shakespeare began his London career before 1588, see Rory Loughnane, ‘Shakespeare and the Idea of Early Authorship’, in Early Shakespeare, 1588-1594, ed. Rory Loughnane and Andrew J. Power (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2020), 26-27.

76 Bulman King Henry VI Part 2241.

77 Edward Gayton, Pleasant notes upon Don Quixot (London, 1654), 277. Wing G415, EBBO, Harvard University Libraries.

78 I’m following James O. Halliwell, who traces the early references to the Boar’s Head. I haven’t found an earlier reference. Halliwell, The Works of William Shakespeare (London: Adlard, 1859), 9.354-355. Lewis Theobald, The Works of William Shakespeare (London: 1733), 5.353.

79 Alexander Pope and Nicholas Rowe, The Works of William Shakespeare (London: 1725), 219.

80 Oliver Goldsmith, ‘A Reverie at the Boar’s Head Tavern’, in The Miscellaneous Works of Oliver Goldsmith,ed. James Prior (New York: Derby and Jackson, 1589), 1.189-204. Halliwell notes the date of the visit as 1758, in the Work of William Shakespeare,9.354. Boswell’s Life of Johnson, ed. George Birkbeck Hill (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1934), 5.247-248. Boswell doesn’t explicitly say he visited the tavern, but does remark that a club meets there and that members pretend to be the Shakespearean characters. Washington Irving, The Sketchbook of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. ed. Susan Manning (Oxford: Oxford World Classics, 2009), 102-111.

81 For Shakespeare’s eighteenth century celebrity, see Michael Dobson, The Making of the National Poet: Shakespeare, Adaptation and Authorship, 1660–1769 (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1992). This search for the celebrity probably wouldn’t have motivated Gayton. Charles Whitney shows that Gayton’s favourite was actually Jonson. It seems unlikely that a Jonson fan, living in a world before Rowe and Garrick, would be committed enough to track down the location of Falstaff’s tavern. Charles Whitney, Early Responses to Renaissance Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2006), 253-254.

82 John Stow, Survey of London, ed. H.B. Wheatley (London: Dent, 1970), 74 and 194-195.

83 Ibid, 177.

84 See Stow, for instance, 196. See also, the Eastcheap entry in The Agas Map of Early Modern London, which suggests Eastcheap as a neighbourhood.

85 Earnshaw, The Pub in Literature, 46; Manley, ‘Why Did London Inns Function as Theatres?’, 185; and Alan Everitt, ‘The English Urban Inn 1560-1760’, in Perspectives in English Urban History, ed. Alan Everitt (London: Palgrave, 1973), 91-137.

86 Manley, ‘Why Did London Inns Function as Theatres?’, 185. It is unclear when inns closed. Since they were not actually under the jurisdiction of the Justice of the Peace, it is possible that they could stay open as late as they wished, which would track with our own experiences with hotels. They have to stay open all night to accommodate late travellers. For a discussion of the lack of oversight over inns, see Peter Clark, The English Alehouse: A Social History, 1200–1830 (New York: Longman, 1983), 173-174. For the act that regulated taverns, see ‘Licencing Act, 1552’ in Tudor Constitutional Documents, A.D. 1485-1603, ed. J.R. Tanner (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1922), 501.

87 At the end of 3.3 he cryptically states, ‘I could wish this tavern were my drum’ (3.3.189) but earlier in the scene refers to the establishment in Eastcheap as ‘mine inn’ (3.3.73). Earnshaw notes that while the distinction was important for practical and legal reasons, the terminology was never fixed. I assume that ‘tavern’ works through a kind of synecdoche, labelling a part of the establishment as the whole. Similarly, in contemporary America there are real and important legal and practical differences between a restaurant and a bar, even though many restaurants include a bar, and one might tell a friend, ‘I’m headed to the bar’, when in fact you are going to a bar inside an establishment that serves food and is properly called a restaurant. Earnshaw, Pub in Literature, 54. For the fluidity of the nomenclature, see also Mark Haliwood, Alehouses and Good Fellowship in Early Modern England (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2014), 11.

88 Halliwell, The Works of William Shakespeare, 354.

89 Gibson, ‘Shakespeare and the Cobham Controversy’, 112.

90 Bulman, King Henry IV Part 2, 141.