Shakespeare: The Biography by Peter Ackroyd Chapter 51

His Companies Unletter'd,  Rude, and Shallow

James Burbage's plan to convert part of Blackfriars into a private theatre, and thus circumvent the authority of the City fathers, was not advancing.  In the early winter of 1596, it was criticised by thirty-one residents in the immediate vicinity.  Their petition objected to the erection of  "a common playhouse...which will grow to be a very great annoyance and trouble, not only to all noblemen and gentlemen thereabout inhabiting, but also a general inconvenience to all the inhabitants of the said precinct, but reason of the gathering together of all manner of lewd and vagrant persons."

Another piece of playhouse business was responsible for Shakespeare's next entry in the public records.  He had played some part in aborted negotiations for the Lord Chamberlain's Men to use Francis Langley's theatre, the Swan, and the Bankside.  It was a readily available alternative to the Curtain and the disputed. The Swan had been erected by Langley two years before in the neighbourhood of Paris Garden.  There is a famous drawing of it by Johannes de Witt, and such was the fame of this print that for many years it was taken as the model of all the sixteenth-century playhouses.

Johannes de Witt's sketch of the Swan

Langley's intent was that of somewhat cheap magnificence.  Despite its exterior luster the swan never achieved any great theatrical eminence.  If the Lord Chamberlain's Men had moved there, in the winter of 1596, its theatrical history would have been very different.

The connection between Shakespeare and Langley is to be found in a petition of a certain William Wayte who named them both - together with Dorthey Soer and Anne Lee - in a writ.  Wayte was alleging that he stood in danger of death or grave physical harm from Shakespeare and others.  Wayte may have encountered some kind of resistance from Shakespeare and his co-defendants while attempting to do so.  But that is supposition.  We only know for certain that Shakespeare was somehow involved in the whole embarrassing situation.

It is perhaps worth noting that Langly himself enjoyed a somewhat dubious reputation as a money-broker and minor civic official who had managed to accumulate a large fortune. He had been charged by the Attorney General in a tribunal of violence and extortion.  He purchased the manor of Paris Garden in order to build and let it out to tenants so of course there were brothels in that particular neighborhood. Shakespeare may have even lived among this class of people as he was also associated with people not altogether dissimilar to the comic pimps and bawds of his plays.  He was thoroughly acquainted with the love life of London.  The fact is often forgotten in accounts of "gentle" Shakespeare but is undoubtedly true that he knew it at first hand the highs and lows of urban life.

Then, in the winter season, he was once more in front of the queen.  The Lord Chamberlain's Men performed for the queen.  Among the six performances was The Merchant of Venice and King John. There is a long enduring story that Elizabeth was so taken with Falstaff that she requested that the comic rogue fall in love and Elizabeth were never lightly refused and so appeared The Merry Wives of Windsor.  It is a charming if unconfirmed story.

The nature of Henry IV part I had been a subject of debate.  It is not clear whether  Shakespeare wrote it with Part Two in mind.  The first part did, in any case, provoke controversy of another kind.  Sir William Brooke, the Lord Chamberlain, had been alerted to the fact that the play's principal comic character was named Sir John Oldcastle.  The Lord Chamberlain was related to the actual Oldcastle and was not impressed with the farce surrounding his theatrical namesake.  The real Oldcastle had been a supporter of the Lollards who had led a failed insurrection against Henry V.  He had been executed for treason.  But he was considered by many to have been a proto-Protestant, and thus an early martyr to the cause of Reformation.  His descendant did not approve that he was portrayed as a thief, a braggart, coward and drunken.

So the Lord Chamberlain wrote to the Master of Revels, Edmund Tilney, who in turn passed on the complaint to Shakespeare's company.  Shakespeare was then forced to change the name of his comic relief from Oldcastle to Falstaff.  It isn't clear why Shakespeare chose the name of Oldcastle but the current theory is that Shakespeare's "secret" Catholic sympathies led him to lampoon this Lollard and anti-Catholic.  But it seems unlikely that there was any overt Catholic bias entered the play.  The name Oldcastle had already appeared in The Famous Victories of Henry the Fifth, and Shakespear may simply have borrowed it without considering the connection with Brooke.

In any case, Falstaff is at the centre of the play.  He is the presiding deity of the London taverns who take the young Prince Hal, heir to the throne, within his paternal and capacious embrace; he is only uneasy when Hal, on becoming sovereign, abandons Falstaff on bitter terms.

Falstaff has become the most recognizable of all of Shakespeare's characters.  He became famous as soon as he walked on stage  He is boisterous, extravagant, and rhapsodical, at once recognised as a national type.  He seemed as English as beef-pudding and beer, a drinker to excess, a rogue who concealed his crimes with wit and bravado.  He is the enemy of seriousness in all its forms and free of malice, free from self-consciousness, free in fact, everything.  His instinct is for bawdry and subversion are part of his language. Whatever can be thought of, Falstaff says.  Shakespeare too comedy as far as it could go with this one character.

He was played with by William Kempe, the pre-eminent clown of England.  The actor was famous for his jigs and so he would set Falstaff dancing and singing onstage.

Behind the face of Falstaff, we can see Shakespeare smiling.  Falstaff deflates the claims of history and heroism at every level, even his creator was writing plays about this subject.  When he writes about Falstaff, Shakespeare revels in his unheroic antics on the battlefield with his parodies of martial ardour and even his parody of death itslef.      In a play concerned with father's and father figures, Shakespeare seems instinctive to revert to the language of his ancestors.

There is perhaps a further connection between Falstaff and Shakespeare.  The relation of the fat knight to Prince Hal has often been taken as a comic version of the relationship between Shakespeare and the "young man" of the sonnets in which infatuation is succeeded by betrayal.  The twin "act" of older and younger man in that sonnet sequence has also been related to Shakespeare longing for his dead son.  These were some of the forces in his life that, in this period, propelled him towards a supreme poetic achievement.