[In the following essay, Tiffany maintains that Henry IV, Parts 1 and 2 represent Shakespeare's ironic commentary on the religious and sociopolitical rhetoric propagated by contemporary Puritans. According to the critic, Elizabethan playgoers would have detected in Falstaff many of the egalitarian aspects of Puritanism and in Prince Hal a Puritan view of monarchic authority as a kind of theatrical performance.]

Since the publication of Jonas Barish's seminal The Anti-theatrical Prejudice in 1981, it has become a truism in Renaissance studies that English Puritans despised English theater.¹ However, though it is undeniable that many Puritan moralists condemned the “chappel of Satan,” as Anthony Munday called the London playhouse,² the relationship of many “precise” Protestants, or Puritans, to late-sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century theatrical entertainment was complex and ambivalent. Although Puritan ministers like John Rainholds opposed all theater, branding “all stage-players generally with infamie,”³ others were more tolerant. As both Paul White and David Bevington have shown, many early radical Protestants and first- and second-generation Puritans, such as John Bale and Munday, fought hard not to destroy but to transform London theatrical entertainment.⁴ These men feared the naturalistic stage representation of vice, which, in Munday's words, made “both the actors and the beholders giltie alike,” since while audience members “saie[d] nought, but gladlie looke[d] on, they al by sight and assent [were] actors.”⁵ Therefore some Puritans sought to replace dramatizations of evil with stagings of virtuous behavior. For example, despite his round condemnations in the 1590s and early 1600s of the licentiousness of playhouses, Anthony Munday was himself a playwright who sought, with the Admiral's Men, to produce moral drama that expressed and supported the growing Puritan temper of Renaissance London. Plays like Sir John Oldcastle and the Earl of Huntingdon series, written primarily by Munday and produced close to 1600, glorified Puritan martyrs like Oldcastle—an early-fifteenth-century Lollard burned at the stake for his allegedly heretical views—and expressed a low-church anticlericalism.

We cannot logically assume that sympathetic audiences were lacking for these successful plays, for Puritan influence was spreading through England in the 1580s and 1590s, during which time many of the godly migrated “from provincial villages to towns and cities, London especially,” as the historian Douglas Tallack notes.⁶ It is difficult to categorize the Puritans of this time according to the sectarian divisions that became distinct in the seventeenth century, when Puritans gradually gave up hope for achieving the reforms they wanted within the national Church. In the sixteenth century, Puritan impulses toward Anabaptism, Congregationalism, and Presbyterianism were variously experienced and championed by a variety of churchgoing English people and their pastors who still, in the words of Arthur J. Klein, “regarded themselves as part of the Anglican establishment.”⁷ Patrick Collinson writes of the popularity of the low-church movement among members of Elizabeth's court as well as the general public, due not only to eloquent Puritan preaching but to “the sustained influence of puritan masters, tutors, and lecturers” in the university towns from the 1560s on.⁸ Members of the resultant Puritan “church within a church,” as Collinson calls it,⁹ were widely dispersed in the London population, and many of these had not yet abandoned the playhouses, despite the pamphlets and sermons that reformers and divines were beginning to direct against the stage.¹⁰

Perceiving the Puritans as diverse constituents of the London Renaissance theater audience rather than as a uniform, self-marginalized antitheatrical group is essential to our appreciation of the Puritan as represented by Shakespeare. Shakespearean Puritans were sometimes reprehensible and often extremists, but were never unsympathetically rendered or wholly unattractive. That they were not was probably not only the result of Shakespeare's large-mindedness, but of the hard economic fact that increasing numbers of Londoners were coming to think and behave the Puritan way, and that the Puritan segment of the public had a measure of box office clout.

Nowhere is this fact more evident than in the recorded circumstances of Shakespeare's change of the Henriad's Sir John Oldcastle's name to Sir John Falstaff. In his flouting of various types of authority, Shakespeare's “Oldcastle” bears some resemblance to the historical John Oldcastle, Lord Cobham, a proto-Puritan who was martyred during Henry V's reign for his resistance to episcopal authority.¹¹ But soon after the play's earliest staging Shakespeare changed the character's name. As Kristen Poole has shown, though Shakespeare scholars “have almost universally claimed that the name-change was the direct result of protests by William Brooke, Lord Cobham,” Oldcastle's powerful descendant, “we have only circumstantial, secondhand evidence of [Brooke's] opposition.”¹² As Poole also notes, Thomas Pendleton more persuasively argues that “The change from ‘Oldcastle’ to ‘Falstaff’ seems to have been motivated … much more … by the displeasure of a significant part of Shakespeare's audience at his treatment of a hero of their religion.”¹³ Thus Shakespeare's epilogue's claim in 2 Henry IV that “Oldcastle died a martyr, and this [Falstaff] is not the man” (line 32) seeks to pacify those playgoers who venerated the memory of a radical Protestant “saint.”

Presumably such playgoers were offended by the representation of a rollicking, drunken Oldcastle (based partly on the Oldcastle of the anonymous Famous Victories of Henry V, produced some years before Shakespeare's Henry plays). And presumably their opinions were powerful enough to occasion Shakespeare's diplomatic retraction of Oldcastle's name. However, here I will argue not only that Shakespeare did intend Falstaff to be an exaggerated representation of both Oldcastle and contemporary Puritans, but that this representation embodied some of the tremendous affective power of Puritan ideas and practices. This is not to say that through the amusing figure of Falstaff, Shakespeare was urging popular acceptance of a carnivalesque Puritanism. To the contrary, Henry IV concludes with the clear suggestion that Falstaffian influence, whatever its attractions, is politically and morally dangerous, and will be rejected by a sane commonwealth. However, Falstaff's skill at undermining the theatrical fictions on which England's governing systems depended leaves even contemporary audiences uneasy at his dismissal. Perhaps Falstaff's attractive subversiveness left late-sixteenth-century audiences more generously disposed to the Puritans' leveling project than Shakespeare consciously intended.

A similar argument has recently been advanced by Kristen Poole, who links Falstaff with the anti-Puritan caricatures of satires penned in the 1580s by John Lyly, Robert Greene, and Thomas Nashe. These satires were commissioned by an anxious prelacy in response to the Puritan-authored “Martin Marprelate” tracts, anonymous pamphlets that had begun appearing on the London streets in 1589. The Martin Marprelate pamphlets mocked the Anglican hierarchs and even questioned the queen's headship of the church. In Poole's words, the Marprelate pamphlets “confronted the bishops with a new breed of ecclesiastical enemy: the puritan wit.”¹⁴ The bishops' and the queen's remedy, the satirical rebuttals of hired guns Lyly, Greene, and Nashe known as the anti-Marprelate tracts, lampooned the Marprelate authors and marked “the entrance of the puritan figure into popular literature.”¹⁵ To the amusement of Londoners, satires flew back and forth between the anonymous “Martinists” and their conservative enemies Nashe, Lyly, and Greene from 1589 through early 1590. Targeting the bishops and occasionally the queen, the Martinists protested against the corrupt and invasive hierarchy that imposed increasingly unpopular religious practices on the English people. The anti-Martinists retaliated by ridiculing “Martin” and Puritans in general, depicting them as anarchic, self-aggrandizing, hypocritical windbags. Quoting extensively from Nashe's, Lyly's, and Greene's anti-Martin Marprelate tracts, Kristin Poole shows that the view of the Puritan they promoted was not one of “the lean, mean Malvolio … that post-Restoration readers and audiences … would exclusively associate with the term puritan.” Instead, these satires presented “puritans as grotesque individuals living in carnivalesque communities”—an image to which Falstaff clearly conforms.¹⁶ Like the anti-Marprelate tracts' disorderly caricatures of Puritan Martin, a gluttonous clown who distorts law and would topple the state's institutionalized hierarchies, Shakespeare's Falstaff embodies chaos in his “Bakhtinian grotesque body,” wherein “death, birth, sex, and bodily functions are often simultaneous and inextricable”¹⁷ (Falstaff appears to die in 1 Henry IV but does not, and was “born … with a white head” [1.2.187-88]).¹⁸ While Poole acknowledges that the Elizabethans probably disapproved of a Puritan outlaw who “respect[ed] neither rank nor hierarchy,”¹⁹ she observes that Lyly's, Greene's, and Nashe's carnivalesque caricatures of Martin gained attractiveness when, transformed into Falstaff, they migrated from page to stage. On stage “the legacy of Martin's popular appeal overwhelms the pressures of satire, and the audience finds itself … laughing with the target of the attack.”²⁰

This is undeniably so. It is impossible for playgoers to watch Falstaff's tricks without engaging, to a degree, in the imaginative participation in vice that Puritans like Munday feared “made both the actors and the beholders giltie alike.” Thus late-Elizabethan audiences may not only have been seduced into approving Falstaff's vices by the theatrical dazzlement deplored by Puritan anti-theatricalists. Ironically, these audiences may also have been encouraged to identify Falstaff's vices with Puritanism.

Such a representation of Puritanism was not, in itself, likely to take the low-church cause anywhere its serious proponents wanted to go. But Falstaff performs a compensatory function that even ardent low churchmen and churchwomen might well have appreciated, for he exposes the theatrical unreality of the dignities of office that Elizabethan Puritans were beginning to condemn. Mocking the lord chief justiceship and, ultimately, the monarchy (though, interestingly, not the chief target of Puritan attacks, the prelacy—a point that I will ultimately address), Falstaff demonstrates the illusoriness of claims to hereditary authority and to authority bestowed by hereditary monarchs. His subversion operates on two levels. In obvious ways, Falstaff embodies the danger of both Oldcastle and the sixteenth-century German religious reformer Thomas Munzer, both of whom led disenfranchised peasants and townsmen in famous rebellions. As did Oldcastle and Munzer, Falstaff leads a troop of ragged “slaves” and “ostlers trade-fall'n” to battle (1 Henry IV 4.2.25, 29), and so evokes, despite the ostensibly royalist cause for which he fights, a vision of the kind of “Munzer's commonwealth” that conservative sixteenth-century English people feared.²¹ But Falstaff's true antihierarchical subversiveness lies deeper than these superficial images of popular revolt, and is bound to his language and behavior even in the plays' peaceful scenes. In those, against the Henriad's rhetoric of divine right—articulated by Bishop Carlisle in Richard II (4.1.121-49) and ultimately embraced by Henry V (2 Henry IV 5.2.129-33)—Falstaff acts out the powerful suggestion that the king is not the man born for the task, but the man who currently plays the role. Thus the theory underlying the nonparliamentary apparatus of state power, including justices and prelates appointed by the monarch, is destabilized through Falstaff's festive play.²² And this destabilization, despite the regard Elizabethan Puritans cautiously expressed for Elizabeth, was one of Puritanism's ultimate goals.²³ Thus Falstaff does something to advance Elizabethan Puritans' interests. Staging a version of Puritan antitheatricalism, he turns comedy against itself, using theatrical rhetoric and behavior to expose the histrionics of monarchs and magistrates. Falstaff's moral hollowness, in other words, is balanced by his exposure to the hollowness of royal claims to authority.

Falstaff's theatrical exposure of royal theatrics depends crucially on a technique that was becoming increasingly associated with Puritanism in the 1580s and 1590s: sophistical argument. Patrick Collinson writes of how in the late 1580s, Puritan lawyers “were able to parade a useful array of legal quibbles to confuse the processes of ecclesiastical discipline” and defend low-church practices (such as Sabbatarianism).²⁴ Falstaff, as I will show, is a past master of such legal casuistry, which he performs in a rhetorical style redolent of Puritanical argumentation and preaching. Yet this sophistical brilliance does not damn his character as the play's pious hypocrite (an identity that the anti-Marprelate tracts strove to fashion for the Puritan Martin). While Falstaff's obvious sophistry calls his “truth” into question, his slippery argumentative skills become part of his comic charm. Further, we see Falstaffian sophistry, a kind of verbal histrionicism, borrowed and perfected by Prince Hal. Hal ultimately enfolds sophistry into his repertoire of royal stage tricks, performing the role of repentant crown prince in 2 Henry IV and king in 2 Henry IV and Henry V with consummate verbal skill. Thus even Falstaff's morally suspect “Puritan” features contribute to the plays' overall destabilization of monarchy's claims to intrinsic authority: that is, to authority that is inborn rather than theatrically performed.

There was, then, something for everyone in the Henriad. The plays support skepticism toward both radical and conservative theories of governance alike. Despite their ostensible rejection of the Puritan leveling impulse embodied by Falstaff, whose theatrics and familiarity with the prince reduce (in audience imagination at least) ranked hierarchical structures to rubble, the plays' political moral is ambiguous. The Henriad leaves audiences with a choice: smug disapproval of Puritan chaos or skepticism regarding a state hierarchy that depends from a sophistical, playacting monarch, no matter how skillful and even virtuous one such monarch may be.

I

The carnivalesque Puritan is, as Kristen Poole notes, unfamiliar to readers used to the image of the dour Puritan spoilsport, despite “the fact that the official [American] holiday celebrating puritans is one of nationwide gluttony.”²⁵ And it is, indeed, difficult to replace the sober Malvolio—called “a kind of puritan” by Maria, though she then retracts the charge (Twelfth Night 2.3.140, 147)—with the Falstaffian Toby Belch as our vision of the Shakespearean Puritan. After all, Malvolio, who condemns festive celebration, is a stereotype justified (if any are justified) by radical Elizabethan and Jacobean Puritans' published diatribes against “cursed mirth,”²⁶ “New-yeares-gifts,” “Christmas-keeping,” and “May-games.”²⁷

Yet the carnivalesque or “Bahktinian” Puritan was a caricature naturally attractive to the conservative anti-Marprelate authors, who feared that reforms called for in the Marprelate and other Puritan tracts, as well as by famous preachers such as John Field, Thomas Wilcox, and Edward Dering, would wreak a different kind of mayhem by leveling the institutions that ordered England. “The Martinists,” wrote a disapproving Thomas Nashe, “seeke to drawe every place in this Campe royall [England] to an equalitie with themselves.”²⁸ While no such radical project was explicitly articulated by Martin, Martin's attacks on the bishops yet implied a disregard for social and political rank that suggested his general hostility to the unelected elements of English government. In Theses Martiniance, for example, Martin radically proposes “That the places of lord bishops are neither warranted by the word of God, nor by anie lawfull humane constitutions”; “That the governement of the church of England, by lord archbishops and bishops, is not a church governement set downe in the worde, or which can be defended to be Gods ordinance”; and “That the gouvernement of lord archbishops and bishops is unlawefull, notwithstanding it bee mainteined, and in force by humane lawes and ordinances.”²⁹ These pseudonymously expressed Puritan views reiterated those earlier set forth in Field and Wilcox's 1572 Admonition to the Parliament, which complained of any appointment to clerical office that depended on the authority of queen or bishop rather than “the common consent of the whole church”³⁰ (remarks for which Field was ultimately jailed).³¹ As John Lyly wrote in one anti-Marprelate tract, Pappe with an Hatchet, such attacks on the Anglican hierarchy and championings of the masses amounted to putting “Religion into a fooles coate.”³² Similarly, Nashe likened these projected social levelings to holiday foolery, calling them “the May-game of Martinisme.”³³ Thus, though Puritans focused their attacks on Church rather than secular government, their antiestablishmentarianism was easily associated with the threat of a permanent “May-game,” or national carnival: the chaotic obliteration of all class rank, as well as of government offices not designed and filled by communal consensus.

With its characteristic ambivalence, Shakespeare's Henriad registers both Anglican dismay at the prospect of such chaotic leveling and Puritan skepticism regarding the institutionalized alternatives. Prince Hal's observation that “If all the year were playing holidays, / To sport would be as tedious as to work” (1 Henry IV 1.2.204-5) is from one perspective deeply conservative. Delivered in a speech predicting his eventual rejection of Falstaff, the speech seems to express disapproval of the permanent Puritan heyday implied by Falstaff's scanting of rank: the Levelers' chaos represented by the fat knight's disrespect toward all royally authorized persons, from the lord chief justice to the “rascal” Prince of Wales (2.2.18) to the king himself (whom Falstaff rudely interrupts in part 1, act 5 [5.1.28]). However, Hal's speech, when closely attended to, actually encourages a Falstaffian irreverence for royal authority, for Hal's reference to the tedium of a yearlong holiday finally points not to Falstaff's tiresomeness, but to the tiresomeness of displaying his own royal character for sustained periods of time. In this way the prince justifies his immersion in Falstaff's holiday world. The references to holiday, which superficially discredit the Boar's Head revelers, are thus deeply connected to Hal's anticipation of his own future royal performances. This early use of an image proper to the tavern world to describe the arena of royal theater begins to merge the worlds in audience imagination. That is, Falstaffian play begins, in Hal's own language, to describe royal play as well, and hence to undermine the seriousness of images of monarchical authority. The endless May Day, it would seem, is threatened by the performances of the monarch, no less than by the “Munzer's Commonwealth” threatened by Falstaff.

The identification of the ranked establishment with carnival chaos was not (as I will show) a Shakespearean innovation, but one made a decade earlier by Martin Marprelate. For the most part, however, English fears of chaotic political innovations focused on the Puritans no less than on the Catholic threat, from the 1570s on. The Puritan push toward what seemed, to staunch Anglicans, an indiscriminate authorization of all voices on issues of moral import was described in a letter from George Carleton, a Northamptonshire Puritan gentleman, to Lord Burghley, the queen's secretary, in 1572. Carleton speaks of “a great people, daily increasing,” who “consist of all degrees from the nobility to the lowest. … This people, as they do not like the course of our Church, so they do and will practise assemblies of brethren in all parts of this realm.”³⁴

This dangerous subversion of hierarchy by united “brethren” included the influence of outspoken women like Jane Minors of Barking, who left her churching rite complaining that it “was a ceremony.”³⁵ The early-seventeenth-century Puritan minister Thomas Carew, of St. Margaret's parish in Essex, reputedly preached that “it was not lawfull for princes nor magistrates to have any government in the discipline of the church,” but that church government should involve “widows, elders and deacons.”³⁶ In London, at St. Anne's Blackfriars, the popular Puritan preacher Stephen Egerton led a congregation composed “mostly of merchant's wives … drawn from all parts of the city.”³⁷ In Anthony Munday's Huntingdon plays, which championed Robin Hood as an egalitarian Puritan hero, Robin's equal relationship with Maid Marian reflected and encouraged the increased stature of women in Puritan assemblies.³⁸ (Fond of the figure of “Robin Hood” of Huntingdon,³⁹ Munday in his 1600 Sir John Oldcastle, Part 1, presented Oldcastle as another Robin Hood type, stressing Oldcastle's alignment with the poor and his partnership with his wife in championing peasant causes.)⁴⁰ In fact, as Collinson notes, the Martin Marprelate operation was largely financed by women, such as Elizabeth Crane of East Molesey, whose home for some time housed Martin's printing press.⁴¹

The key role women played in the Puritan movement is surprising given the simultaneous Puritan attacks on “feminizing” corrosiveness of certain kinds of social entertainments and practices, like “lascivious effeminate Musicke” and men's wearing of “Periwigs”⁴² (attacks delivered by Munday himself, along with later Puritan authors like William Prynne).⁴³ But however resistant some Puritans were to such “feminizations,” the Puritan movement as a whole was generous to females themselves—a fact usually overlooked by critics of Renaissance literature, if not by historians.

Certainly sixteenth-century Puritans were mocked by their enemies for the place and privilege they gave to women in their churches. Thomas Nashe goes so far as to charge Puritan Martin with androgyny, in a sentence that mocks the Maid Marian of Puritan legend: in Martin's “May-game,” “Martin himselfe is the Maydmarian, trimly drest uppe in a cast Gowne, and a kercher of Dame Lawsons, his face handsomlie muffled with a Diaper-napkin to cover his beard.”⁴⁴ Shakespeare released this image's comic potential by staging something much like it in The Merry Wives of Windsor, when Falstaff dons a woman's gown to escape the jealous inquiries of Master Ford, but fails to hide his beard: “I spy a great peard [beard] under his muffler,” one onlooker observes (4.2.194). (Falstaff of the Henry plays has androgynous aspects as well: of his girth, he complains, “My womb, my womb, my womb undoes me” [2 Henry IV 4.3.22].) The gender-inclusive constituency of Puritan assemblies is also mockingly alluded to in 2 Henry IV, when Prince Hal's page likens the Boar's Head tavern, where Falstaff resides, to the meeting place of “Ephesians … of the old church” (2.2.150): that is, to the primitive church that Puritan congregations strove to emulate.⁴⁵ “Sup any women with him?” the prince asks, and is told, “None, my lord, but old Mistress Quickly and Mistress Doll Tearsheet” (lines 151-53). Like Hal's speech on “playing holiday,” this dialogue cuts two ways. From one perspective, the page's lines grant a mock moral dignity to Falstaff and his heterogeneous crew by likening them to the primitive Christians; from another, they degrade Puritan meeting places by comparing them to ale shops and brothels, and impugning the characters of the women who frequent them (as well as those of the men). Yet, as Poole has suggested, the transfer of the anti-Puritan satire from page to Shakespearean stage unleashes its comedy and encourages audiences to join in Puritan “carnival revelries,” despite these revelries' moral suspiciousness.

In his anti-Marprelate tracts, Thomas Nashe mocks both the female presumption encouraged by Puritan congregations and the involvement of lowly artisans at Puritan meetings. He recounts that at “an assemblie of the brotherhood at Ashford in Kent” which he visited,

The roome was full of Artificers, men and women, that sat rounde about uppon stooles and benches to harken to [the Scripture reading]. The Chapter was, the I. Cor. 3, which being read, the reader began first to utter his conceit upon the Text, in short notes; then it came to his next neighbours course, and so in order Glosses went a begging, and Expositions ranne a pace through the Table.

Asked to give his own gloss of Scripture when his turn came, Nashe reports, he at first refused but then “spake among them,” and the result of the experience was that he “needed no Minstrill to make me merrie, my hart tickled of it selfe.”⁴⁶ Thus the proceedings of the godly assembly, comically (from Nashe's perspective) involving the participation of lower-class craftsmen and women in the high pursuit of scriptural interpretation, are likened by Nashe to a festive minstrel show. Such mockery of the carnivalesque empowerment of the lower classes in Puritan assemblies is, in fact, pervasive in Nashe's anti-Marprelate texts. “Where had this [Martinesque] brable his first beginning but in some obscure corner … in the land, in shoppes, in stalles, in the Tynker's budget, the Taylors sheares, and the Shepheardes Tarboxe?” Nashe sneers in The Returne of Pasquill.⁴⁷ In A Countercuffe Given to Martin Junior, he jokes, “I can bring you a Free-mason out of Kent, that gave over his occupation twentie yeeres agoe. He will make a good Deacon for your purpose: I have taken some tryall of his gifts; he preecheth very pretilie over a Joynd-stoole.”⁴⁸

Again, the Puritan-like social leveling Nashe mocks is dramatized in the Henriad's Boar's Head scenes, especially in the sustained saturnalia in 1 Henry IV 2.4 and 2 Henry IV 2.4. In the former scene Hal declares himself “sworn brother to a leash of drawers” (tapsters) and Falstaff (“false staff”) plays king from a “join'd-stool” throne (lines 6-7, 380). In the latter scene a disguised Hal waits on Falstaff at dinner (“From a prince to a prentice?” Hal exults beforehand, “a low transformation!” [2 Henry IV 2.2.175-76]). And again, the anti-Puritan mockery loses its edge in Shakespeare, as the audience shares Hal's delight in the carnivalesque subversion of rank and power.

These Shakespearean subversions, it might be argued, take place in a comic tavern world separate from the field of hard human striving: the court and the battlegrounds to which Hal is continually pulled, and to which he finally submits as he accepts his role as king. Thus the audience sympathy generated for Falstaff might be thought carefully limited by Falstaff's own restricted power within the play. When Hal finally accepts his authority over Falstaff, this argument runs, the audience accepts it as well: when, as Henry V, Hal rejects the knight (“I know ye not, old man” [2 Henry IV 5.5.47]), we reject him too, along with the Puritan social revolution he has embodied. Such a containment of Puritan subversiveness, to adapt Stephen Greenblatt's term,⁴⁹ might be said to be accomplished by As You Like It as well. In that play—in some ways analogous to Munday's Huntingdon plays, that featured Robin Hood as proto-Puritan champion⁵⁰—Shakespeare displaces a duke and his court to the Arden forest, where they live in an egalitarian community “like the old Robin Hood of England” (1.1.116). The Arden Green World dignifies workers like Corin, a “true laborer” who “earn[s] that [he] eat[s]” (3.2.73-74). This world also empowers women, like the cross-dressed Rosalind, who buys property near the forest (2.4.88-100). But though social positions and even gender roles are enjoyably suspended in this wilderness, the suspension is necessarily temporary. Rosalind must resume her submissive femininity to marry Orlando, and the comedy ends with the old duke preparing to return to his lands and to the old gradations of power (5.4.163-65). Thus, historical-comic and comic representations of female and lower-class self-governance are, in Shakespeare, holiday diversions from normal life: short-lived, as all holidays should be. According to this argument, espoused by Louis Montrose,⁵¹ these plays could not have inspired sympathy for the Puritan communities that their comic communities invoked, since these “leveled” communities were desirable only insofar as they were temporary. “If all the year were playing holidays, / To sport would be as tedious as to work.”

But this argument does not take into account the growing criticism of traditional systems of rank that increasingly characterized the left-leaning Elizabethan public and a large portion of the theater audience as well. To approve the restored power of kings and dukes, audiences must approve of royal and ducal power in the first place. As I have begun to show, increasingly, Puritans in the audience no longer did—or at least disapproved of the extent of powers invested in such manmade offices. Specifically, from the 1570s on Puritans expressed resistance to the queen's authority in religious matters—matters that pertained to crucial aspects of her subjects' lives, including tithing, church attendance, and, as noted, the rights of common men and women to speak in assemblies. George Carleton wrote that the growing Puritan congregations, “as they hate[d] all heresies and popery, so they [could not] be persuaded to bear liking of the queen's proceedings in religion.”⁵² Martin Marprelate himself directly (though pseudonymously) questioned the queen's authority in these crucial matters, asking his opponents, “doe you thinke our Churche governement to be good and lawfull because hir Maiestie and the state who maintaineth the reformed religion alloweth the fame? Why, the Lorde doth not allow it; therefore it cannot be lawfull.”⁵³

Nashe satirized the Martinists' alleged designs against monarchical power in The Returne of Pasquill, warning that “at the next pushe, Martin and his companions might overthrow the state and make the Emperiall crowne of her Maiestie kisse the ground.”⁵⁴ Perhaps Nashe was right: the 1601 rebellion of the earl of Essex, whose connection to Martin Marprelate was rumored, was reputedly tied to “the Calvinist doctrine that the lesser magistrates had a right to restrain princes.” The revival of Shakespeare's Richard II is famously associated with Essex's Puritanically minded revolt, and, as Patrick Collinson notes, on the Sunday after the rebellion “not only [the Puritan pastor Stephen] Egerton but two other leading puritans, Anthony Wotton of Tower Hill, Essex's chaplain, and Edward Phillips, preacher at St. Saviour's, Southwark, failed to deliver from their pulpits the official account and condemnation of the rebellion.”⁵⁵ These acts of defiance reflected the progressive disillusionment with the queen that many Puritans felt after the 1584 Parliament, during which she had failed to honor their interests.⁵⁶ Though Lyly and Nashe (whose anti-Marprelate tracts were state-subsidized) condemned all such slightings of monarchical authority, even the conservative bishop John Jewel preached of the monarchy's conditional legitimacy and the queen's consequent responsibility to her subjects:

The people of Babylon built themselves a Tower as high as the heavens, to shew forth their pryde, and get themselves a name. Hereof David sayth, the kinges of the earth band themselves, and the Princes are assembled together against the Lord, and against his Christ. He sayeth not, the vulgar people, or a sort of Raskals onely, but Kinges and Princes, and they which beare authoritye in the worlde, assemble themselves against the Lord, and in this power they think they are invincible.⁵⁷

In short, the Elizabethan population was familiar with suggestions from various quarters of the precariousness of royal claims to authority, and thus of the claims to authority of all prelates and courtiers installed by monarchical fiat. Hence, it is logical to suppose Shakespeare's audience's openness to—if not outright approval of—the staged leveling of such structures, which was the carnivalesque achievement of the comic history plays. Further, it is likely that Henry IV and Henry V supported the more radical members of their audiences in their skepticism regarding the privileges of rank, by presenting royalty not as a divinely bestowed quality, but as a special kind of stage show: one that depended on rhetorical skill of the very kind displayed by John Falstaff.

II

John Bale's 1544 account of the martyrdom of Sir John Oldcastle—next to Foxe's Acts and Monuments, the most popular sixteenth-century source of the story—presents a hero who is superficially as different from the anti-Marprelate caricatures of Puritans and from Shakespeare's licentious Falstaff as he could be. Though, as Bale recounts, Oldcastle was accused in the early-fifteenth century of having condemned “the order of priesthood,” he was no such enemy of hierarchies or leader of rebellious masses. Instead, says Bale, though Oldcastle condemned the pope, he stressed that it was the duty of the “common people” to “bear their good minds and true obedience to the … ministers of God, their kings, civil governors, and priests.” Thus, according to Bale, the bishops who tried Oldcastle distorted his words to convict him of blasphemy and treason, using not truth, but “their wits and sophistry.”⁵⁸ Bale thus lays sophistry, the self-serving manipulation of words, to the charge of the tyrannical bishops serving King Henry V. A similar complaint was lodged by John Foxe, whose account of Oldcastle's martyrdom refers to the inquisitorial prelates as “subtle sorcerers” whose “common practice” was “to blear the eyes of the unlearned multitude with one false craft or other.”⁵⁹

Following the Protestant martyrologists Foxe and Bale,⁶⁰ the Martin Marprelate tracts accused not only bishops but their defenders of sophistry, writing in one tract that an anti-Marprelate author has given invalid “reasons for the defence of [his] hierarchie” and has ignored crucial points of Martin's antibishop argument in an attempt to rebut it:

he [Martin's antagonist, presumably Greene and Lyly or Nashe] might (if he had any learning in him or had read anything) know that every … logician giveth this for an inviolable precept that the conclusion is not to be denied. For that must needs be true if the major and minor be true. He in omitting the major and minor because he was not able to answer thereby granteth the conclusion [that bishops have no lawful standing] to be true.⁶¹

In a reversal that would become characteristic of the Marprelate controversy, however, the anti-Marprelate authors turned the charge of sophistry back on Martin in particular and on Puritans in general. In their “I'm rubber, you're glue” style of argument, the anti-Marprelate tracts responded to Puritan criticism of English May games by attacking the “May-game of Martinisme.” Similarly, they responded to Puritan charges of Anglican sophistry by criticizing the Puritans' own style of argument and by incorporating a tendency for casuistical quibbling into the Martin caricatures on which Shakespeare would partly base Falstaff.⁶² Lyly disclaims all logic in his attack on Martin in Pappe with an Hatchet since (as he claims) the Martinists themselves abandon logical disputation. Thus,

[s]eeing that either [Puritans] expect no grave replie, or that they are settled with railing to replie; I thought it more convenient, to give them a whisk with their owne wand, than to have them spurd with deeper learning. … [I]f here I have used bad tearmes, it is because they are not to bee answered with good tearmes: for whatsoever shall seeme lavish in this Pamphlet, let it be thought borrowed of Martins language.⁶³

Similarly, Nashe likens the controversy between him and Martin, as well as Puritan Bible studies like the one he claims to have attended in Kent, to the ancient “contention in the Schooles of Philosophers and Rhethoritians,” when “Every one that had a whirlegig in his braine, would have his own conceit to go currant for as good paiment as any infallible grounde of Arte.” The parodic association between Puritans and sophists appealed to the Puritans' enemies well into the seventeenth century (Thomas Hobbes, for example, likened Puritan preachers to the ancient Sophists, accusing them of spreading “apparent” rather than “genuine” truths).⁶⁴ Like Socrates—unfairly stigmatized as an arch-Sophist by Erasmus⁶⁵—Puritan pastors relied on an inner spiritual call for their persuasive powers. Socrates attributed his philosophical insights to a daimon; similarly, Puritan pastors claimed to be filled with the Holy Spirit when they preached.⁶⁶ Mocking the Puritans' attribution of their exegetical skills to divine promptings, Nashe scoffs that Martin Marprelate

would have that to be the meaning of the holy Ghost, that his mastership imagines. … They that believe what soever they lust in holy Scriptures, are a generation that give more credit to themselves than to the Scriptures. … They take the word by the nose with a paire of Pinchers, and leade it whether soever it pleaseth them. … So now we must either burne all the Bookes and famous Libraries in the worlde, and take Martins assertions for undoubted Maximes, or else fetch up the Apostles by conjuration, to demand of them whether we be right or no?⁶⁷

Ending by again appropriating and redirecting the Puritan critiques of carnival activities, Nashe charges that “It is the propertie of Martin and his followers, to measure Gods mouth, by theyre own mouth, as you shall see in the May-game that I have promised you” (what follows is the mocking description of the gospelers' discussion of Scripture, described in part I, above).⁶⁸ That this boomeranging or circular disputational style could go on indefinitely is suggested by Martin's own seizure of the insulting carnival reference. In Hay any worke for Cooper—a treatise that mocked the verbose Bishop Cooper of Winchester with a title taken from the street cry, “Ha'ye any worke for the Cooper”⁶⁹—Martin compares the episcopal prelates to lords playing “Maie game[s]”—and, ironically, to Robin Hood's merry men.⁷⁰

The mockery of carnival, play, and sophistry in Shakespeare's Henry plays has this same circular character. Shakespeare's Falstaff contains all the vices of which Martin's enemies accused Martin (though in Falstaff, as noted, these vices are at least partially converted to charismatic qualities). In “A Whip for an Ape,” John Lyly calls Martin a “Scoggins,” or court jester (line 56);⁷¹ in 2 Henry IV Justice Shallow likewise calls Falstaff a “Scoggins” (3.2.30). Falstaff and his Boar's Head henchmen are, in a Robin Hood allusion, merry “foresters” (1 Henry IV 1.2.26), robbing rich travelers to fill their own empty purses.⁷² As noted, Falstaff's presumptuous familiarity with the prince and his mockery of the kingly office (1 Henry IV 2.4.398-432) suggest his carnivalesque embodiment of the dismantling of hierarchy. And central to Falstaff's carnivalesque features and to his mockery, as I will show, is his sophistic ability to appear to win arguments. Yet just as the anti-Marprelate authors played Martin's own game to defeat him, Prince Hal imitates Falstaff even as he prepares to reject him. In his close association and continuous interaction with Falstaff, Hal demonstrates—or absorbs—a Falstaffian talent for the carnival disruption of hierarchy and for sophistic play. But Hal's carnival and sophistry, realized in his play with Falstaff, are part of his design ultimately to emerge as Falstaff's clear superior, and to banish Falstaffian/Puritan community revelry (“I do, I will,” he warns [1 Henry IV 2.4.481]). We are privy to this plot from the start, when Hal, in soliloquy, discloses the speciousness of the communitarian image he will project, and his ultimate goal publicly to manifest his power over the revelers:

I know you all, and will a while uphold
The unyok'd humor of your idleness,
Yet herein will I imitate the sun,
Who doth permit the base contagious clouds
To smother up his beauty from the world,
That when he please again to be himself,
Being wanted, he may be more wond'red at. …

(1 Henry IV 1.2.195-201)

Thus, the Henriad's final incarnation of the trickster sophist is not the mock Puritan Falstaff, but the monarch himself.

To demonstrate the “migration” of sophistry from Falstaff to Hal, I will begin by identifying the sophistic tendencies, themselves evocative of the anti-Marprelate Puritan caricatures, at which Falstaff excels. As noted, Falstaff wins disputes by sleight-of-tongue, as when he defends his cowardice at the Gad's Hill robbery by claiming to have recognized his opponent as the prince (“was it for me to kill the heir-apparent? Should I turn upon the true prince?” [1 Henry IV 2.4.268-70]). Falstaff is sophistic again later in this scene when, playfully impersonating Hal, he verbally translates his own gluttony and dissoluteness to virtue: “If sack and sugar be a fault, God help the wicked! … If to be fat be to be hated, then Pharaoh's [lean] kine are to be lov'd” (lines 470-74). In part 2, Falstaff repudiates Mistress Quickly's claim that she and he are affianced with a glib ad hominem rebuttal: Quickly “is a poor [mad] soul. … [P]overty hath distracted her” (2.1.104, 107). And near the end of part 1, Falstaff justifies his battlefield cowardice by a false proof discounting the existence of honor, since honor has no tangible effects: “Can honor set to a leg? No. Or an arm? No. … What is honor? a word” (5.1.131-34). Such mock Socratic argument—again, associated by Erasmus and other sixteenth-century authors with sophistry—is basic to the character of Falstaff, who is adept at “wrenching the true cause the false way,” as the Lord Chief Justice charges (2 Henry IV 2.1.110-11).⁷³ And, as we have seen, such parodic uses of philosophical debate had become associated, via the Marprelate controversy, with Puritan rhetoric: recall Nashe's likening of Puritan disputation to ancient “contention in the Schooles of Philosophers and Rhethoritians.”

Indeed, like the satirically realized Puritan zealots and like the Aristophanic and Erasmian Socrates, Falstaff is inspired by a kind of “whirlegig in his braine” (to recall Nashe's phrase), brought on by the operation of sack. Sack “ascends me into the brain,” Falstaff tells us, “dries me there all the foolish and dull and crudy vapors which environ it, makes it apprehensive, quick, forgetive, full of nimble, fiery, and delectable shapes, which deliver'd o'er to the voice, the tongue, which is the birth, becomes excellent wit” (2 Henry IV 4.3.97-102). This “indwelling” of spirit(s) parodies the Puritans' divine inspiration, mocked by Nashe: in Nashe's account of the meeting of the Kent godly, he describes the “breathing time” given to each participant “to whisper with the holy Ghost, to know what should be put into his head to utter” when it came time for him to speak.⁷⁴ As Harold Bloom has suggested,⁷⁵ Falstaff himself parodies Puritan sermonizing with his inspired “excellent wit,” as when, exhorting Poins to involve Hal in the Gad's Hill robbery, Falstaff intones, “God give thee the spirit of persuasion and him the ears of profiting, that what thou speakest may move and what he hears may be believe'd” (1 Henry IV 1.2.152-54). For the Elizabethans, Falstaff's argumentative “I deny your major” (1 Henry IV 2.4.495) also would have evoked Martin Marprelate's logical proofs, with their heavy reliance on “major” and “minor” syllogistic points. (This rhetorical style continued to characterize Puritan pamphlets for decades. Lambasting London vices in Histrio-Mastix, William Prynne writes of how his “Minor therefore must be granted” and his “Major is unquestionable.”⁷⁶ Such writers, joked John Lyly, “hath sillogismes in pike sauce.”⁷⁷) Like Martin Marprelate, the Falstaff of both the Henry plays and The Merry Wives of Windsor tends to control arguments by summarily declaring questions “answered” or concluded: in response to Justice Shallow's charge that Falstaff has “beaten my men, kill'd my deer, and broke open my lodge” in Merry Wives, Falstaff belligerently retorts, “I have done all this. That is now answer'd” (1.1.111-16). Falstaff's summary dismissal of his opponents' arguments echoes Martin Marprelate, who in Hay any Worke for Cooper declares that his enemies' “reasons for the defence of [their] hierarchie … are already answered.”⁷⁸ But rather than just “an overweight, ungodly knight making barroom jokes” about zealous pastors and Puritan pamphleteers, Falstaff represents those pastors and pamphleteers, as Kristen Poole notes.⁷⁹ And never is Shakespeare's satire of Puritans more pointed than when, as above, Puritan “persuasion” is lampooned as drunken, self-serving blather.

“Puritan” sophistry as performed by Falstaff is always directed toward winning the argument by verbal dazzle, if necessary at the expense of truth: hence the Lord Chief Justice's accusation that Falstaff “wrench[es] the true cause the false way.” Falstaff's persuasiveness, like that of Socrates (at least according to Socrates' Elizabethan reputation), derives partly from his strategically posed rhetorical questions, whose emotive impact (though not whose logic) orients the listener toward his position, or at least melts the listener's opposition into laughter. Thus Falstaff characteristically “answers” questions with his own witty questions, displacing original interrogatives with others to which the answers, he suggests, should be obvious:

POINS.
Come, your reason, Jack, your reason.
FAL.
What, upon compulsion? … Give you a reason on compulsion?

(1 Henry IV 2.4.235-39)

POINS.
Come, let's hear, Jack, what trick hast thou now?
FAL.
… Why, hear you, my masters, was it for me to kill the heir-apparent? Should I turn upon the true prince?

(1 Henry IV 2.4.265-70)

CH. Just.
Go pluck him by the elbow, I must speak with him.
SERV.
Sir John!
FAL.
What? a young knave, and begging? is there not wars? is there not employment?

(2 Henry IV 1.2.69-73)

HOST.
You'll pay me all together?
FAL.
Will I live?

(2 Henry IV 2.2.159-61)

At times Falstaff poses as both interrogator and respondent, structuring both question and reply, as in “What is honor? a word” (1 Henry IV 5.1.133-35). But whatever the form of his disputation, Falstaff's discourse becomes a proof of whatever he wants to be true: that he is brave, that he is not subject to law, that he will pay his debts.

That Falstaff manages to win every argument, or at least to escape the consequences of losing, testifies to the excellence of his verbal showmanship. His sophistry, in other words, is like that of Martin Marprelate, whose captivating “straunge phrases” and railings are like the actions of a “stage player,” as Lyly writes.⁸⁰ The Elizabethan view of the Puritan speaker as dazzling player was not, however, due solely to the Marprelate controversy. The showmanship of popular Puritan pastors was widely acknowledged,⁸¹ and Falstaff's rhetorical tricks—when joined with his other Puritan associations—must have reminded even audiences unfamiliar with the Marprelate controversy of the aural “spectacle” such pastors presented. Bryan Crockett speaks, for example, of the “moving … performance” of a 1595 sermon by Thomas Playfere, the “showiness” of the general Puritan “style of preaching,” and the “verbal pyrotechnics” of pastors Playfere, Ralph Browning, and Thomas Adams.⁸² In Elizabethan England, as Crockett notes, Puritan preaching was frequently regarded as a kind of auditory “spectacle,” distinct from the “visual display” of the licentious playhouse entertainments many Puritans decried.⁸³

Of course Falstaff, as stage Puritan, unites the visual and auditory realms in his self-promotional theatrics (as will the reformed Prince Hal). Significantly, Falstaff's most famous act of casuistic self-defense is also his most obvious act of theatrical self-presentation. In the central tavern scene of part 1, Falstaff diverts inquiries into his cowardly departure from Gad's Hill with the question “What, shall we be merry, shall we have a play extempore?” (2.4.279-80). In the ensuing playlet, Falstaff mockingly portrays King Henry IV and, speaking as Henry, creates a deceptively excellent “character” for himself: “And yet,” he tells Hal, “there is a virtuous man whom I have often noted in thy company. … A goodly portly man, i'faith … of a cheerful look, a pleasing eye, and a most noble carriage, and as I think, his age some fifty. … I see virtue in his looks” (lines 417-28). A few lines later, switching to the role of Prince Hal, Falstaff continues to construct the appealing character of “sweet Jack Falstaff, kind Jack Falstaff, true Jack Falstaff” (lines 475-76) in a staged rhetorical defense against charges of his iniquity.

What prevents this self-serving sophistic theater from being merely an ironic mock at subversive antihierarchs like Falstaff (and, by extension, the Puritans) is the active participation of Prince Hal in Falstaff's performances; for Hal's delighted acceptance of the roles of prince to Falstaff's king (lines 420-21) and, later, servant at Falstaff's table (2 Henry IV 2.4) helps merrily destabilize the hierarchical distinctions on which his royal authority will ultimately depend. Further, and more insidiously, through Hal's verbal interaction with Falstaff we see Hal's absorption of the same sophistic tricks Falstaff uses to win arguments and to construct a virtuous image. These tricks Hal “studies … / Like a strange tongue” in Warwick's words (2 Henry IV 4.4.68-69), and ultimately deploys—ironically—to legitimate his own authority over Falstaff, Falstaff's comrades, and the entire realm of England. Shakespeare's disclosure of the theatrical means by which Hal finally exercises his authority thus tempers the Henriad's critique of Puritan “leveling” projects, however ridiculously those projects have been presented onstage—for if the king himself is a sophist, awing his subjects into submission by dazzling theatrical rhetoric, then the hierarchical system of power that depends from his throne has no intrinsic justification.

Hal's reliance on theater's capacity to awe is, as noted, a key aspect of his character from his first soliloquy, wherein he announces his intention to dazzle future audiences by a showman's strategy: by first hiding behind and then casting off his licentious companions (the “base contagious clouds”). With its visual metaphor of light banishing darkness, however, this speech diverts us from the rhetoricity that is the essence of Hal's skillful performances. Hal's rhetorical virtuosity takes various forms, most of which owe something to Falstaff's sophistic practices. Hal imitates Falstaff's technique of evading a question by substituting a different question:⁸⁴

FAL.
What a plague have I to do with a buff jerkin?
PRINCE.
Why, what a pox have I to do with my hostess of the tavern?

(1 Henry IV 1.2.45-48)

In addition, Hal proves able to “wrench the true cause the false way” on several important occasions, on all of which he uses verbal strategy to bolster an image of his own honor or authority. In part 1, Hal deflects his father's anger with an improvised self-defense: one that relies on theatrical imagery to construct a vision of a future, virtuous son. Countering Henry IV's accusation that Hal is alienating his audience of future subjects—itself a charge that supports the image of kingship as performance—Hal responds that he will redeem lost reputation by performing nobly in battle, donning a “garment all of blood” and a “bloody mask” (3.2.135-36). In another interview with his father in part 2, Hal uses Falstaffian rhetorical skill to excuse his mistaken theft of the sleeping king's crown, and to convert his father's wrath to appreciation.

Coming to look on you, thinking you dead,
And dead almost, my liege, to think you were,
I spake unto this crown as having sense,
And thus upbraided it: “The care on thee depending
hath fed upon the body of my father. …”
.....Accusing it, I put it on my head,
To try with it, as with an enemy. …

(4.5.155-66)

The sophistic qualities of this speech are reinforced by Henry IV's answering remark: “God put [it] in thy mind to take it hence, / that thou mightst win the more thy father's love, / Pleading so wisely in excuse of it!” (lines 178-80, my emphasis). The approving comment suggests that Hal is beginning to meet Henry IV's own standards for performative verbal skill, essential for the maintenance of royal power.

Hal's greatest rhetorical victories are, of course, reserved for his actual performances as king, chiefly in Henry V. “[W]hen he speaks” as king, says the Archbishop of Canterbury in Henry V, “The air, a charter'd libertine, is still, / And the mute wonder lurketh in men's ears / To steal his sweet and honeyed sentences” (1.1.47-50). We hear the young king's power verbally to enchant in his inspiring St. Crispian's Day speech, his wooing of the French princess, and, most centrally, his dialogue with soldiers Bates, Williams, and Court on the eve of Agincourt, a dialogue that again combines the tropes of theater with the tricks of rhetorical persuasion. On this occasion Henry costumes himself as a common soldier to argue the king's right to lead men to their deaths in battle. Henry's proof that “every subject's duty is the King's, but every subject's soul is his own” (4.1.176-77) substitutes sophistic style for genuine logic—his example of a son who dies while conveying his father's merchandise (lines 147-48) is an unfit analogy for soldiers deployed in war, which always kills men. But the analogy persuades his hearers. Williams agrees, “'Tis certain, every man that dies ill, the ill upon his own head, the King is not to answer for it” (lines 86-87). Thus, again, the king's authority is shown to rest not on intrinsic ability or even on the judgments of reason, but on a persuasive verbal performance.

We know, of course, that Hal's claim to the throne, like his usurping father's, must rest on this verbal mastery: chiefly, on his ability to persuade his public of his legitimacy, since the throne does not descend to him by unquestionable hereditary right. It is to learn persuasive skill, including an ability verbally to project a symbolic image of fraternity with even the lowest of his subjects, that Hal initially involves himself with the Boar's Head tavern crew, down to the tapsters who tell him that when he is king he will “command all the good lads in Eastcheap” (1 Henry IV 2.4.13-15). Of course, as king, Henry V immediately distances himself from his lower-class following, stressing in speeches only the symbolic character of his brotherhood with all subjects. As Stephen Greenblatt notes, Henry's communitarian promise that soldiers who bleed with him shall achieve royalty—“shall be [his] brother[s] (Henry V 4.3.61-62)—is undone by the Chorus's and Henry's own styling of the king as supraroyal, or divine.⁸⁵ The fraternal vow is also undercut by the conspicuously ranked list of the dead Henry reads after Agincourt, which emphasizes the “blood” and “quality” of the slaughtered (4.8.90).

But since the Henry IV plays, beginning with Hal's first soliloquy, have presented royal identity itself as a theatrical effect, Hal's ultimate spectacular revelation of the distance between himself and the lower classes seems no more than a performance when it finally occurs. Thus, even when Hal claims his royal birthright and repudiates Falstaff at the close of part 2, both the claim and the rejection—the last delivered in regal costume and both made in public, before approving audiences—are undermined by their contrived, theatrical character. Before the barons and the Lord Chief Justice, Hal claims to embody majesty, to contain the “tide” of royal blood (5.2.129-33)—a rhetorically fitting espousal of the divine right theory, but one that, if considered deeply, would invalidate his father's (and thus his own) claim to the throne. Similarly, in the London street, when the newly crowned Henry V forbids Falstaff “to come near our person by ten mile” (5.5.65), the public, theatrically impressive nature of this command tempts us to agree with Falstaff's conclusion that the rejection is a rhetorical performative ploy: “he must seem thus to the world,” Falstaff asserts. “I shall be sent for soon at night” (lines 78, 89-90). We cannot entirely sympathize with Falstaff here: the antihierarchical chaos he embodies, conceived according to the satiric anti-Puritan model, has rendered him too dangerous a voice for inclusion in the serious business of governance. The moral and political problem—at least for Elizabethan audiences—arises from the fact that, given the sophistic, performative character of Hal's strategies of rule, we cannot fully support the monarchy either.

III

Various New Historicist critics of the past decade and a half, as well as earlier critics, have hypothesized Shakespearean history theater's power to desacralize English kings by presenting kings as humans playing royal roles. Jonathan Dollimore, for example, speaks of a “demystification of political and power relations” in Renaissance tragedy which fostered “a radical social and political realism.⁸⁶ The “rude handling of sacred totems” like the crown “is what [Renaissance] drama is all about” notes Russell Fraser.⁸⁷ Stephen Greenblatt, Leonard Tennenhouse, and David Scott Kastan have all written extensively of the way the staged presentation of royalty affected audiences' reverence toward the monarchy (though their conclusions differ).⁸⁸ And Franco Moretti boldly links Shakespeare's role-playing kings to the mid-seventeenth-century Puritan revolution, saying that tragedies and history plays “[h]aving deconsecrated the king,” it became “possible to decapitate him.”⁸⁹

While I would not support Moretti's direct line of causality between Shakespearean drama and the English revolution of a half-century later (if only to keep Shakespeare from spinning in his grave), I hope I have cast additional light on the process of monarchical desacralization so integral to the political event to which Moretti alludes: the lawful execution of Charles I by the English community of saints. The Henry plays helped demystify monarchy by demonstrating its association with sophistic theatrical tricks such as those used by Falstaff. Paradoxically, the Henriad achieves this effect despite its satire of the Puritans in Falstaff, for Prince Hal's bond with Falstaff and likeness to him, chiefly in the area of casuistic skill, tars royalty with the same satirical brush. (Thus Hal's friendship with Falstaff has, in a way unanticipated by the disapproving Henry IV, “carded,” or adulterated, “his state” [1 Henry IV 3.2.62].) The anti-Marprelate satires used Martin's own style against him, rendering their anti-Puritan pamphlets rhetorically similar to the pamphets of their target. Similarly, Hal uses Falstaffian sophistic skill to reject Falstaffian subversion and to structure and defend his own royal image. But in stooping to Falstaff's level, he compromises the whole show. Thus, though the Henry plays mock Puritans, they also slight the sophistic royal authority of which Puritans were beginning to complain.

These theatrical dynamics prevent the Henriad from being a successful attack on Puritanism through the Falstaff caricature. First, as Poole has argued, non-Puritan audience members probably experienced a festive emotional response to the carnivalesque Puritan onstage, though they might have intellectually disapproved of his hypocrisy; thus the Falstaff image probably softened the anti-Puritan attitudes of mainstream playgoers who recognized the caricature. Second, Puritans in the audience were not likely to accept Falstaff as an embodiment of Puritan values, evidenced by their apparent protest against the use of Oldcastle's revered name. And finally, these same Puritan audience members, whatever they thought of Falstaff, would have found their antihierarchical prejudices confirmed by the theatrical sophistries of Prince Hal/Henry V. For the intellectual, legal, and theological casuistry of which conservatives accused Puritans was a charge radical Protestants (like John Bale) brought against their government as well.⁹⁰ Thus, Shakespeare's Henriad encouraged the skepticism of a people already beginning to doubt the sacred origins of monarchy and to lobby for power at the lower levels of their society.

In “Invisible Bullets: Renaissance Authority and Its Subversion,” Stephen Greenblatt argues that Hal's participation in festive demolishings of rank constituted, for Elizabethans, a deceptive promise of lower-class empowerment. After all, Greenblatt reasons, Hal betrays Falstaff and the Boar's Head brethren once he is crowned king; moreover, the playhouse itself contains whatever subversive energies have been released in the audience by the staged release from ranked social structures. Greenblatt insists, “[W]e are, after all, in the theatre”: the arena of acknowledged make-believe.⁹¹ We (or the Elizabethans) therefore do not expect to see the comic stage carnival reproduced in the outside world. If Greenblatt is correct, then the sympathy the Henry plays generate for the grotesque Puritan Falstaff was harmless sympathy—that is, a tolerance that stopped at the playhouse exit, and did not extend to real London Puritans or their social and religious reforms. The charismatic subversiveness that urged audiences to celebrate Falstaff, and hence the Puritan communities he represented, must simply have evaporated in the London air.

But the logic of this argument is flawed in two ways. The first is the argument's failure to acknowledge that imaginative transformations acquired in the playhouse, or anywhere, cannot be easily discarded. If comic catharsis is deeply experienced, then, as Gene Fendt writes, “the audience of the comedy”—or the comic history—“can go forth into its world, carrying the green world's heart within them.” Thus drama transforms “the community's moral imagination”:⁹² in the words of former West German chancellor Willy Brandt, the “so-called illusions” of theater “are an integral part of our reality.”⁹³

The second flaw is the argument's neglect of another question. What influence do sympathetic stage characters exert on audience members already disposed toward the ideas these characters represent? When Puritanical audience members, disdainful of absolutism, confronted a comic hero who playfully revealed the monarchy's dependence on sophistical theater, were their antimonarchical prejudices not reinforced?

This question's answer depended, no doubt, on the individual audience member: on what his or her strongest prejudices were, on what notions he or she was most willing to hear supported. The histories, with their heteroglossic accommodation of multiple voices and viewpoints, must have functioned to support a variety of political leanings. The Henry plays, like most Shakespearean histories and tragedies, are finally politically ambivalent. They mix a Puritanical awareness of the questionable legitimacy of kings and a Puritanical scorn for corrupt hierarchs with a recalcitrant reverence for the royal mystique. At times Shakespeare seems intent on theatrically appropriating the antiprelatical feeling of the Elizabethan Puritans—which was gradually becoming a disaffection with monarchy as well—for the monarchy or royal family itself: we see this appropriation when pious Prince John of Lancaster chastises the Archbishop of York, “th' [imagin'd] voice of God himself,” for “misus[ing] the reverence of [his] place” (2 Henry IV 4.2.19, 23), and when the crooked bishops of Henry V are seen complaining of the king's Robin Hood-like redistribution of their wealth “to relief of lazars, and weak age / Of indigent faint souls past corporal toil” (1.1.15-16). This flattering portrayal of the younger Lancastrians' social conscience must have strengthened some audience members' reverence for the monarchy, even as it fed Puritan contempt for the bishops. In portraying the royal family's support of the people against evil prelatical designs, Shakespeare appeals to a Puritan royalism, despite the comically degrading presentation of Puritanism his plays have also provided through the character of Falstaff.

But by the close of the 1590s, “Puritan royalism” was fast becoming an oxymoron. The gradual Puritan disaffection with monarchy was due partly to the queen's refusal to support wished-for Puritan reforms aiming at increased congregational power. But it stemmed also—and more deeply—from the public's dawning realization of the theatrical character of the entire hierarchical apparatus of her government, and the loss of faith that realization entailed. Thus the Henry plays' disclosure of its kings' theatrical strategies assisted the process of Puritan disenchantment with monarchy and with the dissemination of power from above, despite these plays' often reverent treatment of Hal/Henry V himself. If kingship—as the Henry plays implied—was a theatrical tour de force, then inborn regality was a contradiction in terms. A public who believed that their monarch ruled not by divine right but by performative skill might suffer him, or her, when that monarch showed not only theatrical virtuosity but concern for and responsiveness to public will (as, for the most part, does Shakespeare's Henry V). But the presentation of the king as performer sets the stage for his dismissal if and when he does not.

Notes

1. Jonas Barish, The Anti-theatrical Prejudice (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981). The capitalization of “puritan” should not mislead readers into the assumption that the “godly” were a unified sect.

2. Salvian and “Anglophile-Eutheo” (Anthony Munday), A Second and Third Blast of Retrait from Plaies and Theaters (London, 1580; reprint, New York, Johnson Reprint Co., 1972), 89.

3. John Rainolds, The Overthrow of Stage-Playes: By the Way of Controversie between D. Gages and J. Rainolds (London, 1599; reprint, New York, Johnson Reprint Co., 1972), 9.

4. See David Bevington, Tudor Drama and Politics (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1968), 256-57 and 293-99; and Paul White, Theatre and Reformation: Protestantism, Patronage, and Playing in Tudor England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), for discussions of Puritan involvement in Tudor theater. A session at the 1996 Medieval Congress in Kalamazoo, Michigan, included papers that also stressed the interrelationships between early Puritan reform and theater, notably Alexandra Johnston's “Parish Drama and Parish Crisis in England: 1535-65”; William R. Streitberger's “New Models for Court Drama: 1535-62”; and Peggy Knapp's “Traces of the Medieval in Early Protestant Polemical Drama.”

5. Munday, A Second and Third Blast of Retrait, 3.

6. Douglas Tallack, Twentieth-Century America: The Intellectual and Cultural Context (New York: Longman, 1991), 324.

7. Arthur J. Klein, Intolerance in the Reign of Elizabeth, Queen of England (Port Washington, N.Y.: Kennikat Press, 1917; reprint, 1968), 134. Although J. Sears McGee has more recently argued that Anglicanism and Puritanism were mutually exclusive religious categories in Renaissance England (The Godly Man in Stuart England: Anglicans, Puritans, and the Two Tables, 1620-1670 [New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976]), the evidence compiled by Klein and the later author Patrick Collinson demonstrates that in the Elizabethan period, no such clear distinction obtained. See Patrick Collinson, The Elizabethan Puritan Movement (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1967), esp. 28; and also Collinson, Godly People: Essays on English Protestantism and Puritanism (London: Hambledon Press, 1983), 98.

8. Collinson, The Elizabethan Puritan Movement, 51-52, 125-29. I am indebted to Collinson not only for providing a detailed and impeccably researched history of Elizabethan Puritanism but for making available passages from difficult-to-obtain Puritan documents.

9. Ibid., 51.

10. As Bevington writes, as late as 1603, “The great London public”—a significant portion of which was Puritan—“was reluctant to abandon the theater as a forum in which to express its political and religious aspirations” (Tudor Drama and Politics, 294). Bryan Crockett also maintains that “there can be little doubt that the audiences at the sermons and plays of the [Elizabethan] period overlapped considerably.” See Crockett's “‘Holy Cozenage’ and the Renaissance Cult of the Ear,” Sixteenth-Century Journal 24, no. 1 (spring 1993): 63, as well as Crockett's book, The Play of Paradox: Stage and Sermon in Renaissance England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995). Martha Tuck Rozett makes a similar argument in The Doctrine of Election and the Emergence of Elizabethan Tragedy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), 15-25.

11. Alice Lyle-Scoufos provides an extensive exploration of the links between Falstaff and Oldcastle in Shakespeare's Typological Satire: A Study of the Falstaff-Oldcastle Problem (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1979). Among other things, she finds much joking about Oldcastle's martyrdom—he was burned at the stake—in the Henry plays' characters' references to Falstaff's roasting, burning, and melting (76-77). Other studies that note Falstaff's resemblance to the image of the Puritan martyr or contemporary Puritan reformer are John Dover Wilson, The Fortunes of Falstaff (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1944), chap. 2; and David Bevington, Tudor Drama and Politics, 257. John Dover Wilson also investigates the possibility that Henry V's Fluellen was based on Roger Williams, suspected author of the Marprelate tracts, in Martin Marprelate and Shakespeare's Fluellen (1912; reprint, Folcroft, Penn.: Folcroft Press, 1969).

12. Kristen Poole, “Saints Alive! Falstaff, Martin Marprelate, and the Staging of Puritanism,” Shakespeare Quarterly 46, no. 1 (spring 1995), 49, 8 n.

13. Thomas Pendleton, “‘This Is Not the Man’: On Calling Falstaff Falstaff,” Analytical and Enumerative Bibliography, n.s. 4 (1990): 59-71, esp. 68-69.

14. Poole, “Saints Alive!” 58.

15. Ibid., 54.

16. Ibid.

17. Ibid., 59.

18. All quotations from William Shakespeare are from The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. Blakemore Evans (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1974).

19. Poole, “Saints Alive!” 70.

20. Ibid., 75.

21. See Collinson's account of the Munzer rebellion and its reputation, The Elizabethan Puritan Movement, 480 n.

    In regard to the image of popular military revolt presented by Falstaff's unfortunate soldiers, I disagree with Kristen Poole's statement that “[i]n Shakespeare's account Oldcastle's qualities as traitor and militant religious leader are dispersed among other characters in the plays” (i.e., that Falstaff does not embody these qualities). See Poole, “Saints Alive!” 69.

22. As Munday wrote, “Nothing entereth in more effectualie into the memorie, than that which commeth by seeing. … the tokens of that which wee have seen, saith Petrarch, sticke fast in us whether we will or no” (A Second and Third Blast, 95-96).

23. While sixteenth-century Puritan writings such as the Marprelate tracts and John Field and Thomas Wilcox's 1572 An Admonition to the Parliament cautiously avoided direct criticism of the monarch, arguments regarding the legitimacy of rebellion were already brewing in the 1580s and 1590s, as is evidenced by the great energy devoted to refuting such arguments. For example, Richard Bancroft's 1593 Daungerous Positions and Proceedings, Published and Practised within this Island of Brytaine makes reference to seditious books which claim that “The authoritie, which Princes have, is given them from the people: Kings, Princes, and governours, have their authoritie of the people; and (upon occasion) the people may take it away again” (London: J. Windet and J. Wolfe, 1593).

24. Collinson, The Elizabethan Puritan Movement, 399, 435. See also Lawrence Stone, The Causes of the English Revolution (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1972), 62-75, 97-98, 103-5, and 114, for a similar argument; and Walter Cohen, “The Merchant of Venice and the Possibilities of Historical Criticism,” in Materialist Shakespeare: A History, ed. Ivo Kamps, (New York, Verso, 1995), 71-92.

25. Poole, “Saints Alive!” 54.

26. Munday, A Blast of Retrait from Plaies and Theaters, 88.

27. William Prynne, Histrio-Mastix: The Player's Scourge or, Actor's Tragedy (London, 1633; reprint, New York: Johnson Reprint, 1972), introduction.

28. Thomas Nashe, The Returne of Pasquill, vol. 1 of The Works of Thomas Nashe, 5 vols., ed. Ronald B. McKerrow (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1966), 91.

29. Martin Marprelate, Theses Martinianae, in The Marprelate Tracts (1588-1589; reprint, Leeds: Scolar Press, 1967).

    Christopher Hill also notes that Martin's chief intent was to subvert hierarchy (i.e., not to moralize against social decadence). See The Collected Essays of Christopher Hill; vol. 1, Writing and Revolution in Seventeenth-Century England (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1985), 77.

30. John Field and Thomas Wilcox, An Admonition to the Parliament in W. H. Frere and C. E. Douglas, Puritan Manifestoes: A Study of the Origin of the Puritan Revolt (1572; reprint, London, Church Historical Society, 1954), 10.

31. Collinson, The Elizabethan Puritan Movement, 120, 148, 150.

32. John Lyly, Pappe with an Hatchet, 412 in The Complete Works of John Lyly, 3 vols., 3:388-422 (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1967), 412. (Robert Greene was a possible collaborator in this work.)

33. Nashe, The Return of Pasquill, 83.

34. Quoted in Collinson, The Elizabethan Puritan Movement, 144.

35. Quoted in Patricia Crawford, Women and Religion in England, 1500-1720 (New York, Routledge, 1993), 55.

36. From the Norwich Diocesan Archives and quoted in Collinson, The Elizabethan Puritan Movement, 34-41.

37. Ibid., 341.

38. See Anthony Munday, The Downfall of Robert Earl of Huntington (London, 1598; reprint Oxford: Malone Society Reprints, Oxford University Press, 1965), and The Death of Robert Earl of Huntingdon (London, 1601; reprint, Oxford: Malone Society Reprints, Oxford University Press, 1967).

39. “Like that of Cromwell, the name of Huntingdon had compelling topical associations for the English elect: the third Earl of Huntingdon had been, as a candidate for succession to the throne during the 1560's, the hope of many ardent Protestants fearful of Elizabeth's untimely death, and his brothers had served the Puritan cause in Parliament throughout the Reign” (Bevington, Tudor Drama and Politics, 295.)

40. See Michael Drayton, Richard Hathway, Anthony Munday, and Robert Wilson, Sir John Oldcastle, Part 1 (1600), in The Oldcastle Controversy, ed. Peter Corbin and Douglas Sedge (New York: Manchester University Press, 1991), 36-144.

41. Collinson, The Elizabethan Puritan Movement, 391.

42. Prynne, introduction to Histrio-Mastix.

43. See Jonas Barish's chapter on Puritanism in The Anti-theatrical Prejudice for the seminal discussion of Puritan resistance to “feminization.” I briefly discuss Puritan misogyny in Grace Tiffany, Erotic Beasts and Social Monsters: Shakespeare, Jonson, and Comic Androgyny (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1995), 58-61.

44. Nashe, The Returne of Pasquill, 83.

45. Field and Wilcox's Admonition is an appeal for the Anglicans' return to “olde church” practices (9).

46. Nashe, The Returne of Pasquill, 89.

47. Ibid., 77.

48. Thomas Nashe, A Countercuffe Given to Martin Junior, in vol. 1, The Works of Thomas Nashe, 5 vols., ed. Ronald B. McKerrow (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1966), 1:62.

49. Stephen Greenblatt, “Invisible Bullets: Renaissance Authority and Its Subversion, Henry IV and Henry V,” in Political Shakespeare: New Essays in Cultural Materialism, ed. Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1985), 34-43.

50. David Bevington notes that “Shakespeare's awareness of and concern with the widening split between the private theater and the Puritan-leaning citizenry are tactfully evident in such plays as Twelfth Night (1600-1601) and As You Like It (1599-1600),” although he argues against any close thematic connection between As You Like It and Munday's Huntingdon plays (Tudor Drama and Politics, 297).

51. Louis Montrose, “The Place of a Brother in As You Like It: Social Process and Comic Form,” in Materialist Shakespeare, ed. Ivo Kamps (New York: Verso, 1995), 39-70. (Montrose does not discuss the likeness of comic communities to the anti-Marprelate caricatures of Puritan communities, though he notes, as do numerous critics, the social leveling by which the former are characterized.)

52. A letter to Lord Burghley, the queen's secretary, written in 1572, quoted in Collinson, The Elizabethan Puritan Movement, 144.

53. Martin Marprelate, Hay any Worke for Cooper? (London, 1588; reprint, Leeds: The Scolar Press, 1967), 4-5.

54. Nashe, The Returne of Pasquill, 77.

55. Collinson, The Elizabethan Puritan Movement, 447.

56. Ibid., 292.

57. John Jewel, Certaine Sermons Preached before the Queenes Majestie, and at Paules Crosse. Whereunto is Added a Short Treatise of the Sacraments (London: C. Barker, 1583).

58. John Bale, Select Works (London, 1544), ed. Henry Christmas (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1849; reprint, New York, Johnson Reprint Co., 1968), 19, 21, 37.

59. John Foxe, Actes and Monuments (London, 1559-96; New York: AMS Press, 1965), 3:321.

60. As Collinson writes, Martin's “distinctive polemical methods” owed much to a “martyrological technique” originating with John Foxe and others (The Elizabethan Puritan Movement, 394).

61. Martin Marprelate, Hay any worke for Cooper? 21.

62. In calling Falstaff a late incarnation of the anti-Marprelate caricatures of Puritans, I do not mean to deny that numerous other literary and dramatic traditions are involved in the design of his character. For what is still the best discussion of these, see John Dover Wilson's The Fortunes of Falstaff (New York: Macmillan, 1944), 15-35. Finally, of course, Falstaff is himself greater than the sum of his parts.

63. Lyly, Pappe with an Hatchet, 396.

64. See Gary Remer, Humanism and the Rhetoric of Toleration (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1996), 181.

65. Alice Goodman has shown that Socrates' Renaissance reputation derived from the image of him as sly Sophist, which originated with Aristophanes and which was popularized by Erasmus (see Alice Goodman, “Falstaff and Socrates,” English 34, no. 149 [summer 1985]: 97-112). Despite the fact that Plato's Socrates protested vehemently against Sophists and their rhetorical manipulations, numerous Renaissance authors chose to portray him as sophistical himself. For example, Philibert de Vienne's 1547 The Philosopher of the Court, translated in 1575 by George North, calls Socrates “the greatest dissembler in the world” (97-98).

66. Collinson discusses the importance of the Puritan sense of the inward call to ministry (The Elizabethan Puritan Movement, 336).

67. Nashe, The Returne of Pasquill, 86-88.

68. Ibid., 88.

69. Collinson, The Elizabethan Puritan Movement, 392.

70. Martin Marprelate, Hay any worke for Cooper? 3-4.

71. Lyly, “A Whip for an Ape,” in The Complete Works of John Lyly, 418-22.

72. Falstaff plans to rob the “pilgrims going to Canterbury with rich offerings” (1 Henry IV 1.2.126) (though he ends up robbing the king instead). The plot owes something to Bale's account of Oldcastle's condemnation of pilgrimages (see Bale, Select Works, 38). Henry IV as a whole thwarts the upper classes' interest in holy pilgrimages; the highest such thwarted design is, of course, Henry IV's plan to invade Jerusalem, which he finally gives over near the close of part 2 (4.5.234-35).

73. Michael Platt also notes Falstaff's Socratic sophistry in “Falstaff in the Valley of the Shadow of Death,” 171-202 in Falstaff, ed. Harold Bloom (New York: Chelsea House Publishers, 1992), 180. Among the numerous other critics who have noted the likeness between Falstaff and Socrates are Alice Goodman (cited in n. 65 above); John Robert Moore in “Shakespeare's Henry V,” Explicator 1 (1942): item 61; Monroe M. Stearns, “Shakespeare's Henry V,” Explicator 2 (1943): item 19; and John Dover Wilson, ed., Henry V (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1947), 147.

74. Nashe, The Returne of Pasquill, 90.

75. Harold Bloom, Ruin the Sacred Truths: Poetry and Belief from the Bible to the Present (Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 1989), 84.

76. Prynne, Histrio-Mastix, 263.

77. Lyly, Pappe with an Hatchet, 411.

78. Martin Marprelate, Hay any Worke for Cooper, 21.

79. Poole, “Saints Alive!” 54.

80. Lyly, Pappe with an Hatchet, 402, 409.

81. See Joan Webber, “Celebration of Word and World in Lancelot Andrewes' Style,” in Seventeenth-Century Prose, ed. Stanley E. Fish (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971), 337.

82. Crockett, “‘Holy Cozenage,’” 46, 49, 46.

83. Ibid., passim.

84. It might, of course, be argued that Falstaff learns his evasive speaking from Hal, and in fact Falstaff himself accuses Hal of corrupting him in various ways (1 Henry IV 1.2.90-95; 2 Henry IV 1.2.145). Yet with whomever the “damnable” argumentative style (1 Henry IV 1.2.90) originates, Hal's and Falstaff's credibility is mutually undermined by it.

85. Greenblatt, “Invisible Bullets,” 43-44.

86. Jonathan Dollimore, Radical Tragedy: Religion, Ideology and Power in the Drama of Shakespeare and His Contemporaries (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 5.

87. Russell Fraser, introduction to Russell Fraser and Norman Rabkin, eds., Drama of the English Renaissance New York: Macmillan Publishing Co., 1976), 3.

88. See especially Greenblatt, “Invisible Bullets”; Leonard Tennenhouse, “Strategies of State and Political Plays: A Midsummer Night's Dream, Henry IV, Henry V, Henry VIII,” in Political Shakespeare: New Essays in Cultural Materialism, eds. Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1985); and David Scott Kastan, “Proud Majesty Made a Subject: Shakespeare and the Spectacle of Rule,” Shakespeare Quarterly 37, no. 4 (winter, 1986): 459-75.

89. Franco Moretti, “‘A Huge Eclipse’: Tragic Form and the Deconsecration of Sovereignty,” Genre 15 (spring and summer, 1981): 8.

90. Peggy Knapp's “Traces of the Medieval in Early Protestant Drama,” a conference paper cited above, discussed Bale's critiques of Anglican sophistries.

91. Greenblatt, “Invisible Bullets,” 34-43.

92. Gene Fendt, “Resolution, Catharsis, Culture: As You Like It,” Philosophy and Literature 19 (1995): 251. In this article Fendt also acknowledges the Greenblattian view of comic release, which (in Fendt's words) likens catharsis to “circling a track for an hour … it's hypnotic, we forget our problems; but then the hypnotic or incantatory effect ends and we wake to the world going on apace. This is the explanation of comic catharsis of all those who think of art as mere entertainment,” Fendt notes, but he adds that if the explanation is true, “there is no reason to study the humanities rather than watch football.” A staged fiction of lower-class empowerment would be more likely to “face” audiences “with the complete inadequacy of their own daylight world, and such comedy is likely to be as socially upsetting as Plato is said to have feared” (251).

93. Willy Brandt, speaking at the municipal theater in Dusseldorf, Germany, 17 September 1972.

I would like to thank Western Michigan University for a Faculty Research and Creative Activities Support Fund grant, which helped me to do research for this article.