Oldcastle, Sir John (Chamberlain's)
Historical Records
Letters
8 March 1599/1600: Letter from Rowland Whyte to Sir Robert Sidney
Whyte provides details of a dinner given by the Lord Chamberlain (George Carey) during the visit by Louis Verreyken, a diplomat in the service of Archduke Albert (Collins, II. 174-6; esp. 175-6):
"All this Weeke the lords haue bene in London, and past away the Tyme in Feasting and Plaies; for Vereiken dined on Wednesday, with my Lord Treasurer, who made hym a Roiall Dinner; vpon Thursday my Lord Chamberlain feasted hym, and made hym very great, and a delicate Dinner, and there in the After Noone his Plaiers acted, before Vereiken, Sir John Old Castell, to his great Contentment. This Day the Lords are going to Court. My Lord Harbert wil be here vpon Wednesday, he must be the honorable Instrument of much good to your Lordship, and I find your Lordship wilbe thoroughy delt withall vpon your Return, by 600 [Earl of Nottingham] in the Matter I soe often mentioned vnto you; if yt bring you Honor, and Contentment to all Parties, I shall thinke my self happy to haue bene the first Motioner of yt." (signed "Baynards Castell, this Saturday, 8 of March 1599")
Court Records
Dramatic Records of the Lord Chamberlain's Office, Players Warrant and Schedule, 17 March 1630/1
- At the [Co]ck-pitt ... The 6 of Ianuarie ... Olde Castle.
- JSTOR
Henry Herbert, Court Plays acted by the King's Men, 1638-9
- At the Cocpit the 29tg of may the princes berthnight ... ould Castel
- Internet Archive
Theatrical Provenance
The dinner party described by Rowland Whyte was given by George Carey, who succeeded to the title of Lord Hunsdon when his father, Henry Carey, died on 22 July 1596. He also acquired patronage of his father's company, known as the Chamberlain's Men, even though he did not himself become Lord Chamberlain until 17 March 1597 on the death of Lord Cobham. George Carey lived in Blackfriars in London, and presumably he entertained Louis Verreyken there on 8 March. If the play performed was indeed a play about Sir John Oldcastle (and not the Falstaff character [see below]), it belonged to the repertory of the Chamberlain's Men in their first year at the Globe, 1599-1600.
Probable Genre(s)
History
Possible Narrative and Dramatic Sources or Analogues
John Foxe describes the execution of Sir John Oldcastle in Lincoln's Inn Fields in 1419 (Actes and Monuments... or Booke of Martyrs. The Variorum Edition. Sheffield: hriOnline, 2004. Web).
The Oxford DNB includes the life of Oldcastle.
In October 1599, the Admiral's Men purchased a part one of a play on the life of Sir John Oldcastle from Anthony Munday, Michael Drayton, Robert Wilson, and Richard Hathway; they paid additional moneys in earnest on the second part. In early November Munday and his collaborators were given 10s. on the performance of the play for the first time. The first part of the Admiral's play was printed in 1600, advertising itself as a first part on the title page. Sometime between 19 and 28 December, Michael Drayton was paid 80s. for the rest of the second half. The company laid out 30s. "to macke thinges" for the second part, which presumably was then staged. It is now lost.
In August 1602 Worcester's Men paid Thomas Dekker 40s. plus another 10s. in September for "new a dicyons" to "Oldcastle" (Greg, I.179, 181). In addition the company bought apparel for the production including "a sewt for owld castell" (Greg, I.179).
The relationship of these plays for the Admiral's Men and Worcester's Men to the play given by the Chamberlain's Men in March 1600 at the London residence of their patron is unclear, but the general biographical matter of the title character must have been shared.
References to the Play
References to a discrete play called "Oldcastle" in the repertory of the Chamberlain's Men are complicated because of evidence that Shakespeare initially named Prince Hal's tavern companion in 1 Henry IV "Oldcastle" but changed the name to "Falstaff" when the Cobham family objected (Lord Cobham was Lord Chamberlain, but not also the Chamberlain's company patron, for less than a year in 1596-7). Traces of the name change are in the printed texts of 1 Henry IV (e.g., "my old lad of the castle" 1.2.41). By a Shakespeare-centric scholarly tradition, references to "Oldcastle" were interpreted as references to "Falstaff" and therefore to the extant Shakespearean first part of the Henriad. Nathan Field, a player and dramatist, joined the King's Men c. 1615. His linking of "fat knight" and "Oldcastle" appears to show that the Falstaff-Oldcastle name switch persisted in the company's collective memory.
Nathan Field's Amends for Ladies (Q1618) alludes to Oldcastle with the line, "The Play where the fat Knight, hight Old-castle/ Did tell you truly what his honour was?" (iv.3) (as quoted by Chambers, 1.382).
Critical Commentary
Chambers typifies the scholars of his time by reading the Rowland Whyte's naming of a play called "John Old Castell" as a reference to Shakespeare's Henry IV, part 1: "Henry IV must have been the Sir John Old Castell with which the Lord Chamberlain entertained an ambassador on 8 March 1600, since the players were his men and not the Admiral's" (1.382). Chambers also reads the 1638 performance at the Cockpit as a performance of Shakespeare's Henry IV, part 1 (i.382).
That opinion continues in essays by James G. McManaway and Gary Taylor.
McManaway revisits the Players' Warrant (Folger MS. 2068.7) and Schedule (Folger MS. 2068.8) from the Lord Chamberlain's Office, the latter of which lists the plays given before Charles I from 30 September 1630 through 21 February 1631. Addressing the entry on 6 January of "Olde Castle," he observes that the title "is surely not" the Admiral's play written by Drayton, Munday, Wilson and Hathway (121). Reciting the Whyte and Field references plus the 29 May 1638 performance as evidence of how hard it was "to efface the memory of the surname originally borne" by Shakespeare's Falstaff, he concludes that "even in Shakespeare's own company in the fourth decade after 1 and 2 Henry IV were first performed his fellows thought of the play as Oldcastle" (122). JSTOR
Taylor, who is defending the restoration of the name, "Oldcastle," for Falstaff in the Oxford edition of 1 Henry IV, characterizes the references to the Oldcastle play (above) as "considerable evidence" that 1 Henry IV "was, even after 1597, sometimes privately performed with the original designation intact [of Falstaff as Oldcastle] (90). Observing that "Part 1 was sometimes referred to as 'Falstaff', ... it should not surprise us if the uncensored version were identified as 'Oldcastle'" (90-1). Documenting the alternate title of "Falstaff" for 1 Henry IV, Taylor cites three instances in court records in 1613, 1635, and c. 1619-20 (90n).
Richard Dutton asks, "Was it Whyte or the players themselves, who kept alive the association between Oldcastle and Falstaff?" (106) In answer, he explores two contexts beyond the flap about the character name: Edmond Tilney's allowing 1 Henry IV to be licensed, even though it carried the Oldcastle name; and the possibility that, after the elder Lord Cobham died in 1597, his heir carried on the family's sense of injury (102-7).
In The Shakespearian Playing Companies, Gurr marks Oldcastle "(lost?)" in a list of the Chamberlain's Men's plays (303); in The Shakespeare Company, he appears to have changed his mind and links the Oldcastle performance at the Lord Chamberlain's house with Shakespeare's I Henry IV (170, 283).
Knutson argues for taking Whyte's naming of the play literally (95-7). She questions whether Whyte would have known enough playhouse gossip to know also that the Falstaff character had originally been named Oldcastle. She observes further that Verreyken, as audiencier to the Austrian Archduke, might have seen in the "Oldcastle" play a reminder that his and his patron's Protestant religious positions were more in line with England than Spain. If the Chamberlain's Men did in fact acquire their own celebration of the Cobham ancestor, they had a more robust commercial and political answer to the Admiral's Men' two-part Oldcastle than killing off Falstaff in Henry V.
For What It's Worth
It is worth keeping in mind, in the centrifuge that is Falstaff/Oldcastle scholarship, that the character called "Jockey" in The Famous Victories of Henry V (the character on whom Shakespeare supposedly based Falstaff) was also called "Sir John Old-castle."
There is not a guarantee that the play title, "Sr Iohn Falstafe," given in the Chamber Accounts for 1612-3 refers to 1 Henry IV; it is as likely to refer to The Merry Wives of Windsor, the title of which in quarto advertises Falstaff in advance of the merry wives ("A Most pleasaunt and excellent conceited Comedie, of Syr Iohn Falstaffe, and the merrie Wiues of Windsor"). Subsequent references in court documents to "Falstaff" may also be to the spin-off in which he was the star character. For court documents as late as 1620 and 1638 to make the leap from 1 Henry IV to "Falstaff" to "Oldcastle" puts considerable pressure on a collective memory of the Cobhams' objections. Even if the players were the ones who drew up the schedule of plays in 1620 and 1638, they were themselves a generation away from the original offense, and it bears asking if they would keep that old wound open by substituting the Oldcastle name for Falstaff's.
Also, if the Chamberlain's Men did have their own "Oldcastle" play, they doubled their participation in the "Elect Nation" brand of history play in 1600, at which time (approximately) they acquired Thomas Lord Cromwell (Q1602).
Works Cited
Chambers, E. K. William Shakespeare: A Study of Facts and Problems. 2 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1930.
Gurr, Andrew. The Shakespearian Playing Companies. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996.
— — —. The Shakespeare Company, 1594-1642. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004.
Knutson, Roslyn Lander. The Repertory of Shakespeare's Company, 1594-1613. Fayetteville, AR: University of Arkansas Press, 1991.
Taylor, Gary. "The Fortunes of Oldcastle." Shakespeare Survey, 38 (1985): 85-100.
Site created and maintained by Roslyn L. Knutson, Professor Emerita, University of Arkansas at Little Rock; updated 3 February 2010.