Falstaff on Tour: County, Town and Country in the Late Elizabethan Theatre

Why does Falstaff travel to York via Gloucestershire in Henry the Fourth, part two? And why does Shakespeare interrupt his second tetralogy of history plays to take his most famous comic character to Windsor in the Merry Wives? This article uses Falstaff's tour of England in these two plays to explore an idea of the country founded upon local identities rather than on the overarching appeal of nationhood. Drawing upon chorography and social history, it focusses on the association of people and place and offers a view of England from the ground up rather than through the more imposing structures of political narrative and symbolic form.

chorography, a term coined by William Cunningham in 1559 to refer to 'the partes of th' earth, diuided in themselues', with the description of 'portes, Rivers, Hauens, Fluddes, Hilles, Mountaynes, Cities, Villages'. 12 The earliest instance of English chorography, though it does not use the term, is probably Leland's Itinerary, written in the late 1530 s/early 1540 s in response to the dissolution of the monasteries, and the most spectacular example the chorography of Great Yarmouth in Nashe's Lenten Stuffe of 1599. Shakespeare's English histories are chorographical in their blend of history and geography (consider the map that the rebels pore over in 1 Henry IV) and the two plays I want to focus on draw upon this form in particularly striking ways, using local identities to show us a country. It is this combination of history and geography that might give us a more precise meaning to the expression 'deep England'.
I also want to explore two questions in relation to these plays, which will act as ways into the local identities of county and town. The first is: why does Falstaff take a detour via Gloucestershire when heading for York in 2 Henry IV? And the second question addresses the point that will already be apparent, which is that The Merry Wives of Windsor is not a history play: why, then, does Shakespeare take Falstaff on a detour via this, his only English comedy, in the second tetralogy of English histories? Both these questions could be addressed in a technical way with regard to textual status and dates of composition. As far as the first is concerned, in 2 Henry IV 2.1 the Lord Chief Justice instructs Falstaff to enlist forces on behalf of the king with the order to 'take up soldiers in counties as you go' (2.1.185) on his way to join Prince John at York. But when we first see him outside London, in 3.2, he is at his old friend Justice Shallow's farm, listening to him reminisce about their wild youth. The county is not specified at this point, but when Falstaff does get to York in 4.1, he asks Prince John, 'I beseech you give me leave to go through Gloucestershire ' (4.2.79-80), and he does indeed return there, again to Shallow's farm, for the memorable scenes in Act 5. Editors of 2 Henry IV argue that the recruiting scene at 3.2 was written for an earlier draft of the play in which Falstaff was travelling to Shrewsbury, which is certainly plausible, but I shall simply address the text that we have, where Gloucestershire is a real, peopled place, with a central part in the play, providing us with some of the most famous scenes in Shakespeare. 13 So why is Gloucestershire significant? Shallow's farm may be a quiet, rural retreat, but the county is the source of upheaval in the second tetralogy: the port of Bristol in the south west provides an entry point into the heart of England, and Bolingbroke's first rallying point in Richard ' (2.3.8-9). Later in the play, after Richard's murder, we hear that forces rising against the new king 'have consumed with fire/Our town of Ci'cester in Gloucestershire ' (5.6.3-4). And Gloucestershire's pivotal status can be seen from the maps of the period. Falstaff is supposed to be travelling north, but instead he heads west, and the county itself is positioned both on a north/south and an east/west axis. 14 This is clearly illustrated by Saxton's map, which shows the county divided into three strips running north/south; the Forest of Dean in the west, then the Severn valley, and then the Cotswolds (Fig. 1). Saxton does not show roads, but one of the best recorded medieval roads ran north from Bristol to Shrewsbury, and Hal would have travelled this route on his 'march through Gloucestershire' to Bridgnorth in 1 Henry IV (3.2.175-6). At the same time Gloucestershire is also the source of the Thames, running from west to east and connecting the county to London; Leland gives the source as Trewsbury Mead, though others claim Severn  Springs, and Holinshed guides us down the Thames from 'the playnes of Cotteswolde' to the capital '[f]inallye going from thence unto the sea' in chapter 9 of the Chronicles. 15 Gloucestershire is obviously not en route to York, but the fact that Falstaff travels in two directions in the play has a significance of its own, situating the county as a crossroads of the country.
The most important survey of the country in the period, in both historical and geographical terms, is Camden's Britannia, first published in Latin in 1586 (using the term 'chorographica' in the title), with maps added in 1607, and translated into English by Philemon Holland in 1610. For Camden Gloucestershire is a spent Eden. He quotes William of Malmesbury's description of the county as a fruitful paradise where 'the high ways and common lanes [are] clad with apple trees and pear trees, not set nor grafted by the industry of man's hand, but growing naturally of their own accord', only to say that this is no longer true, because 'the soil is now wearied and become barren with too much fruitfulness'. 16 We might almost hear an echo of this when Falstaff reappears at Shallow's farm in 2 Henry IV 5.3: "Fore God, you have here goodly dwelling, and rich', he exclaims; to which Shallow replies, 'Barren, barren, barren; beggars all, beggars all, Sir John' (5.3.5-8). Shallow's response is a modest demur, but it is illustrated in modern screen interpretations of the play, such as the BBC Hollow Crown, where colour is drained from the landscape in a frozen monochrome in this scene. The Gloucestershire scenes are threaded with intimations of mortality, of course, because they show us old men at the far edge of their lives; but we should also bear in mind that when the play was first performed the country had suffered several failed harvests. Falstaff is a product of what is sometimes referred to as the Black 90 s and Shakespeare's most famous embodiment of conspicuous consumption emerged in the shadow of starvation. 17 It is true that this is not much in evidence on Shallow's farm, despite his modest disclaimer, but there are other reasons why Gloucestershire is not the 'other Eden, demi-paradise' of Gaunt's imagination in Richard II. Unlike that play, 2 Henry IV is written extensively in prose and it gives us real people in a real place. Here are some of them: Master Dommelton, Master Tisick, Master Dumbe, John Doyt, George Barnes, Francis Pickbone, Will Squele, Jane Nightwork, William Visor, Clement Perks. None of these is a character, but their names populate the play with the common people of England. 18  associate with the history plays. Some are clearly fictitious and satirical, while others sound like real men and women, and in the case of the muster scene, where the common people are characters, apparently satirical names turn out to be quite possibly real. For we do in fact have a record of the 'names and surnames of all the able and sufficient men in body fit for his Ma'ties service in the wars within the City of Gloucester and the Inshire of the same' for this period. This was compiled by John Smyth of Nibley, who was appointed steward to the Berkeley family in 1596 and steward to the hundred and liberty of Berkeley the following year, just as Shakespeare was writing the two parts of Henry IV. On his list is one Thomas Warter, a carpenter from Chipping Camden, who is identified as 'fitt to serve with a Calyver', and among Falstaff's recruits is a Thomas Wart: 'Put me a caliver into Wart's hand, Bardolph', Falstaff exclaims (3.2.271). 19 This is quite possibly just a coincidence, but the detail brings us startlingly close to real lives in the 1590 s, as do the tables of occupations that may be drawn from the muster list. That list is part of a longer record book of local husbandry and economic history kept by Smith, who writes that 'out of our forefathers' fields we reape the best frutes of our modern understanding'. 20 When Shallow and his servant, Davy, discuss sowing the hade field with red wheat in 5.1 they might have come straight from the pages of Smith's manuscript. Whatever Shakespeare's initial design for 2 Henry IV may have been, there is no doubt that this is a play with a strong sense of place. This is most vividly realised in Shallow's farm, but the London scenes, as well as Shallow's reminiscences of Clement's Inn and Mile End are also topographically precise; there are references to country fairs; and some of the characters who do not actually appear are given local identities, such as 'John Doyt of Staffordshire' or 'Will Squele, a Cotsole [Cotswold] man', while others are associated more precisely with a particular neighbourhood. At the beginning of 5.1 Davy refers to two local litigants and urges Shallow to take sides: 'I beseech you, sir, to countenance William Visor of Woncote against Clement Perks a'th' hill' (5.1.36-7). These two men were located by the early nineteenth-century scholar Richard Webster Huntley, author of a book about Cotswold dialect, who identifies Woncote as Woodmancot in the parish of Dursley, and writes: This township lies at the foot of Stinchcombe Hill, still emphatically called "The Hill" in that neighbourhood on account of the magnificent view which it commands. On this hill is the site of a house wherein a family named "Purchase", or "Perkis", once lived, which seems to be identical with "Clement Perkes of the Hill".
Huntley also points out that Hotspur's reference to Berkeley Castle standing 'by yon tuft of trees' in Richard II (2.3.53) is 'the exact picture of the castle as seen from "the Hill"', being 'shut in on one side, as viewed therefrom, by an ancient cluster of thick lofty trees'. 21 That glimpse of a real place in the lyrical landscape of the earlier play points us towards the more localised environment of Henry IV, and the Gloucestershire scenes of part two in particular, prompting one editor of the play (René Weis) to suggest that 'Shakespeare was familiar with this particular area' (Fig. 2). 22 The association of people and place in 2 Henry IV is part of a wider texture of social memory which presents history as oral tradition. Oral tradition has strong ties to a sense of community and local identity, so it blends with the chorographical character of the play which gives us history from the ground up, but it also encompasses the 'common voice', represented here by Rumour, and it blurs distinctions between fact and fiction. 23 The sub-plot of 2 Henry IV -more an undercurrent of the ordinary life of the community than a 'plot' -amounts to a dramatization of the social memory of England, combining the collective memory of shared cultural experience with individual reminiscence. In what is surely the most extraordinary demonstration of bricolage in Shakespeare, personal memories are interwoven with scraps of popular literature, from the old songs which evoke a mythologised England of Robin Hood and King Arthur to the modern mythology of the theatre, delivered in snatches in the high, astounding style of Pistol. All this is punctuated by drunken exclamations and the reiteration of the term 'merry', which appears 21 times in the play.
But there is another kind of remembering at work that looks forwards rather than backwards and which takes the form of the memento mori. We might see night-time in Shallow's orchard as Gaunt's 'other Eden', but it is a merry England of convivial hospitality at its last gasp. The 'last year's pippin' that Shallow offers to Falstaff at the beginning of 5.3 is not fresh fruit but akin to one of those 'old, withered apple-johns', which Hal has earlier likened to Falstaff himself and which he cannot abide. In 1 Henry IV he had claimed that Bardolph's red face acted as a memento mori, since it reminded him of hell-fire 21   But while Gloucestershire may seem to represent the old world in 2 Henry IV, the county was also the seedbed of the new. In the period just before the fictional events of the play, the Berkeley family employed John of Trevisa to translate scholarly Latin texts into English. These included the Polychronicon, a universal history which in Trevisa's translation also references the towns and villages near Berkeley and which became the first historical work to be printed in English. 25 In that publication Caxton claims that Trevisa translated the Bible into English, and it is also possible that he wrote one of the manuscripts of Piers Plowman, so the area was fertile ground for proto-Protestantism. 26 The most striking illustration of this is that William Tyndale was probably born at Melksham Court near Stinchcombe and baptized at North Nibley: the Tyndale family were from the same neighbourhood as Shakespeare's Visor and Perks, as well as the much grander Berkeley family and their steward John Smith. If the local identities inscribed in 2 Henry IV help to reorientate the history play towards middle England, it was 'the language spoken in the Vale of Berkeley … middle England in the largest possible sense', as Tyndale's biographer David Daniell puts it, that provided the vernacular foundations for the his English Bible. 27 Camden refers to language as the 'surest proof of peoples originall' and just as Gloucestershire (to quote Camden again) is the 'source or first head' of the country's principal river, so it is the source of the principal linguistic marker of English national identity. 28 In a parallel process of reorientation, Gloucestershire's pivot from a North/South to an East/West axis is also a pivot from the old to the new. This is the direction that Shakespeare takes Falstaff in The Merry Wives, down the Thames to Windsor. The Arden 3 editor Giorgio Melchiori dates this play to 1600, after Henry V, but there is no consensus about this, and in their magisterial catalogue of early modern British drama Wiggins and Richardson place it in 1597. 29 I shall be literal-minded about it and argue that after the announcement of Falstaff's death in Henry V (1599) it would be strange for him to reappear on stage a year later. Besides, there is a narrative connection with 2 Henry IV in that the 'competence of life' which Hal promises him at the end of that play is evident in Falstaff's new status as one of the poor knights of Windsor, alluded to in Mistress Quickly's quip about 'pensioners' (2.2.73); and with Henry V in that shortly after her 'pensioners' remark 25  Pistol eyes her up as a marriage prospect, which is duly realised in that play. So I think it makes more sense to see The Merry Wives as following on immediately from 2 Henry IV. Like that play, it is written extensively in prose and it does, in fact, advertise its Gloucestershire connections. 30 As we saw at the start, Shallow is described as a Justice of the Peace of that county; his nephew Slender says he's heard that Page's greyhound has been 'outrun on Cotsall [Cotswold]' (1.1.83); he tells Anne Page that he loves her 'as well as I love any woman in Gloucestershire' (3.4.44), and he claims acquaintance with 'the best in Gloucestershire' in the final act (5.5.177-8). But Windsor is not Gloucestershire, and it is a town not a county, so what is Falstaff doing here and can we 'read' Windsor in the same way that we can read the county? The town and its environs are certainly pictured for us with every bit as much topographical specificity as the county: the Host tells Page and Slender 'go you through the town to Frogmore' while 'I will bring the Doctor about by the fields' (2.3. 67-8, 71) in order to meet up with Ann Page who has gone to a farmhouse in Frogmore for a meal with friends; Simple goes looking for Doctor Caius through 'the Petty-ward, the Park-ward, every way: Old Windsor way, and every way but the town way' (3.1.5-7); laundry is taken down to Datchet Mead by the Thames, which is how Falstaff ends up in the river; and at the climax of the play all the company are gathered in Windsor little park, around Herne's oak, to give Falstaff his come-uppance. Then there are the buildings: notably the Garter Inn, where the Gloucestershire visitors, including Falstaff, are staying, and the households of the Windsor residents, the Pages and the Fords. At the heart of the play is the domestic space, presided over by Mrs Alice Ford, into which Falstaff forces his great bulk. This is Middle England, the bourgeois (or perhaps more properly, 'burgess') environment of a prosperous Tudor town. 31 It brings to mind other Berkshire towns further up-river, such as Reading and Newbury, memorialised by Thomas Deloney at exactly the same time; yet the comparison is not exact, for while Deloney celebrates the work ethic as a way to get wealth, in The Merry Wives we see Page and Ford at leisure, planning to go hawking and arranging breakfasts. The only business matter that we hear of is Page's plan to marry off his daughter. And anyway, this is not a predominantly male world: unlike Shallow's Gloucestershire, which seems to be completely devoid of women, even among the servants, and unlike Deloney's eponymous Jack of Newbury and Thomas of Reading, it is the wives who give this play its title and who are in charge here, along with Meg Page's resourceful daughter. 32 Nowhere in 30 The Merry Wives has the largest proportion of prose of any of Shakespeare's plays (90%  'press, coffer, chest, trunk, well, vault' (4.2.57).
The dominant theme of the main plot-line is of a very large man being squashed into very small spaces; but there is in fact nowhere that the fat knight can hide. And this is really the point. The domestic space that the play so carefully depicts, along with the town of Windsor itself, will not accommodate Falstaff. The word itself -'accommodate' -is in fact bandied about in 2 Henry IV: 'a soldier is better accommodated than with a wife', Bardolph pronounces, and then, not very helpfully, '"Accommodated": that is, when a man is, as they say, accommodated, or when a man is being whereby 'a may be thought to be accommodated, which is an excellent thing' (3.2.77-80). In The Merry Wives Falstaff is accommodated, as ever, in a pub, but this play also goes to some lengths to show that he is not welcome in the home. One of its most memorable images is of Falstaff ejected from the Ford household in a buck-basket, submerged under a pile of dirty washing, and deposited in the river. In his own painful recollection he is. compassed like a good bilbo in the circumference of a peck, hilt to point, heel to head; and then, to be stopped in like a strong distillation with stinking clothes that fretted in their own grease … And in the height of this bathwhen I was more than half stewed in grease, like a Dutch dish -to be thrown into the Thames and cooled, glowing hot, in that surge. (3.5.102-11) Falstaff is cooked and laundered. This is women's work. It represents the triumph of the domestic at the same time as it expels this gross intruder upon it. Falstaff is the alien body both in the Ford household and in Windsor itself. One detail about his early life that emerges from Shallow's reminiscences in 2 Henry IV is that he was once page to Thomas, Duke of Mowbray. Jonathan Bate has suggested that this identifies Falstaff with the old religion, which is quite plausible, and it would certainly put further distance between him and his earlier incarnation as Oldcastle, given the Protestant associations of that name. 33 But it also underlines something else: being sent to live in someone else's house as a page emphasises Falstaff's homelessness, right from the start.
So Windsor is everything that Falstaff is not -a rooted, prosperous community of the middling sort, focussed on marriage and the home, where the women are very much in charge. But there is another aspect to the town, which makes it distinctive within Middle England, and this is the fact that it is also a royal seat. Mistress Quickly refers to the time 'when the court lay at Windsor' (2.2.59-60), but there are also signs that the court is in fact at Windsor during the action of the play; certainly, there are explicit references to the Garter Ceremony at Windsor castle in the last act when Mistress Quickly, dressed as the Queen of Fairies, urges her troop of elves to search the castle (5.5.56 f.). 34 This is not to endorse the old theory that the play itself was written for the Garter Ceremony of 23 April 1597. The Merry Wives is clearly not an aristocratic entertainment. But the vestigial royal presence is undoubtedly part of its detailed social make-up. Hal, does not, of course, appear in Windsor, or in Gloucestershire for that matter, but his influence lingers in the person of Fenton, Anne Page's preferred suitor, whom her father dislikes because 'he kept company with the wild Prince and Poins' and is 'of too high a region' for her (3.2.65-6). The other royal presence is not the historical but the contemporary monarch, Queen Elizabeth, whom Pistol invokes in 5.5 when he instructs the fairy troop to go about its household tasks: Cricket, to Windsor chimneys shalt thou leap: Where fires thou find'st unraked and hearths unswept, There pinch the maids as blue as bilberry -. Our radiant queen hates sluts and sluttery. (5.5.43-6) Pistol refers to the Queen of Fairies, but implicitly, too, to Gloriana herself, recast as a severe, household matron; and though it may seem difficult to reconcile the iconic majesty of the elderly Elizabeth with this domestic role, it would fit this intensely middle-class play, which reinvents royalty in its own image.
Windsor's confident middle-classness gives it the capacity to absorb almost anything that is not quite of its kind, whether this is royalty, the Welsh parson, the French doctor, or the upper-class rake, Fenton. It is, rather strangely, both a model of diversity and also socially and topographically homogeneous. 35  The stag's horns may well be more fitting to the forest than the town, but this is merely a park, and Mistress Page has already domesticated the horns to yokes, the emblem of the steady marriage and the antithesis of both the horny stag and the cuckolded husband. 36 In the end, with all sexual threats removed and the stability of the middle-class marriage in place, even Falstaff is invited to 'laugh this sport o'er by a country fire' (5.5.236).
So we might see The Merry Wives as a reformation comedy, reinforcing stable sexual values and the centrality of the home. In the main plot, the marriage bond survives the assault of the decayed, wandering, upper-class old profligate, and in the sub-plot it is a measure of Fenton's reformation that he is happy to settle down with a daughter of the middle classes, albeit one with plenty of money. At the same time, that union is a measure of the upward social mobility of the new Tudor middle class. These outcomes rest upon what the Gloucestershire visitor, Slender, refers to as 'honest, civil, godly company' (1.1.168), reformation values which are the antithesis of everything that Falstaff represents. 37 It's noteworthy that women are not allowed upstairs at the Garter Inn, Windsor, which is a nicety you cannot imagine being observed at the Boar's Head, Eastcheap. 2 Henry IV may also be seen as a drama of reformation, though in a rather different way, as the prodigal son frees himself from the old Vice; but because the rejection of Falstaff in that play curtails a long saga of merriment, audiences have often felt that the ending has a sour, kill-joy aspect to it. If the Gloucestershire scenes in that play are suffused with nostalgia, rehearsing the death of the merry world, The Merry Wives offers a rejoinder: virtue and festivity are not inimical to each other, and reformation comedy is possible; as Meg Page reminds her friend Alice Ford, 'Wives may be merry and yet honest too' (4.2.100). 38 Falstaff does not expire in Windsor, but in London, back at his old haunt at the Boar's Head tavern. He never reappears in person, and we hear of his death in Henry V from the former Mistress Quickly, now married to Pistol and renamed as the 'Hostess'. The scene is sandwiched between King Henry's exposure of the three traitors and the delivery of his ultimatum to France. In response to Bardolph's wish that he were with the departed Falstaff, 'wheresome'er he is, either in heaven or in hell', she declares, 'Nay, sure, he's not in hell; he's in Arthur's bosom, if ever man went to Arthur's bosom' and then tells of his crying out '"God, God, God!" three or four times', adding 'Now I, to comfort him, bid him 'a should not think of God; I hoped there was no need to trouble himself with any such thoughts yet' (Henry V 2.3.7-10, 18-21). This hilarious piece of bathos deliberately sabotages the ostentatious piety of the play's main plot, and of the previous scene in particular, with its repeated invocations of 'God' as the three traitors are exposed and condemned. Her identification of Falstaff with Arthur is an inspired malapropism for 'Abraham's bosom', which was a kind of waiting room for the afterlife. Reworking the Old Testament reference, she imagines a neutral place of repose, beyond moral judgement, in which 'Arthur' is shorn of the Christian role assigned to him in later literature. If 2 Henry IV is a drama of reformation, and The Merry Wives a reformation comedy, Henry V shows us the reformed king in action, with Falstaff consigned to another world.
The Hostess's memorialisation of Falstaff in death returns us momentarily to the social world of 2 Henry IV and The Merry Wives, with its tableau of reminiscence acting as a counterpart to her earlier account of the marriage proposal in the 'Dolphin chamber' of the Boar's Head (2 Henry IV 2.1.84-102). 39 Falstaff's tour of England in these two plays invites us to see the country from the perspective of two local communities, mapped out in conspicuous detail and peopled by commoners. This is not a mythical England or an England of dynastic struggle, but an England rooted in place and focussed on the lives of the lower and middling sort. This survives in the Bates and Williams scenes of Henry V, where the common soldiers are represented as articulate citizens, giving voice, as it were, to the wretched individuals pressed into military service by Falstaff in the earlier play. And while Falstaff's tour of the country is nominally set in the early fifteenth century, it also shows us what happens to 38  England in the sixteenth century. The local communities of Gloucestershire and Windsor, county and town, encapsulate the old world and the new, with the former's other role as the seedbed of the Reformation acting as a bridge between the two. The social mobility of the second half of the sixteenth century alongside the Protestantization of the country, is captured in 'civil', 'honest', middle-class Windsor, in which Falstaff is so obviously out of place. 40 In the end, we should probably not follow Bardolph and the Hostess in sentimentalizing Falstaff. To draw a parallel with the nineteenth century, we might instead see him more in terms of the 'old corruption' that the Whigs hoped the Great Reform Act of 1832 would sweep away. And as for Elizabethan audiences, much as they loved Falstaff, he also represented what they had left behind.