This chapter discusses the collaboratively written First Part of Sir John Oldcastle (1599) as a response to Shakespeare’s irreverent transformation of the eponymous Lollard martyr into Falstaff. Oldcastle restores the Lollard martyr to his heroic stature and is therefore often read in terms of a moderate, that is, politically loyal and conformist form of Puritanism. However, the play arguably, in its representation of nonconformity and a conditional form of political obedience, is more radical than is usually assumed and voices a nuanced challenge to royal supremacy over the Church of England. As this chapter further suggests, the play’s nonconformist ethos therefore also contributes to a more ambivalent conception of theatricality than the one embodied by Shakespeare’s Falstaff, a conception of theatricality that is defined by a self-reflexive distrust in the space between seeming and being.

This chapter discusses Shakespeare’s Falstaff as an anti-martyr in the two parts of Henry IV. The character of Falstaff isloosely based on the fifteenth-century Lollard martyr John Oldcastle and was indeed once called Oldcastle in performance. Even though Shakespeare transforms the martyr into a cowardly dissembler, who has very little to do with the Lollard martyr, countless allusions to Oldcastle’s martyrdom provide a meaningful interpretative framework for Falstaff’s ‘better part of valour’. However, this does not mean that Shakespeare mocks the Proto-Protestant as part of a Catholic or anti-Puritan campaign. On the contrary, in contrast with the politically subversive martyr figure in 2 Henry IV, Archbishop Scrope, Shakespeare’s transformation of the Lollard martyr rather amounts to a defence of the Elizabethan ideal of outward conformity. Falstaff’s dissimulation, insofar as it can be read as a rejection of martyrdom, is a form of political obedience. Moreover, Falstaff’s dissimulation also entails a defence of theatrical dissimulation that aligns Shakespeare’s theatre closely with the religious policies of the Elizabethan government.

Editors and critics have struggled to place The Merry Wives of Windsor within the framework of Shakespeare’s chronicle history plays, and it is often said that the Falstaff of Merry Wives is a different character from that of the histories. Merry Wives can be seen as part of a multiverse, of incompatible timelines in which characters are both entirely familiar and somehow altered. In the multiverse of Merry Wives, both public and private histories are apparently erased. While the history plays are burdened by almost pathological remembrance and rumination, the world of Merry Wives shows the advantages of amnesia.

Focuses on Shakespeare’s Interregnum reception in print and wider culture, arguing he was more popular in theory than in practice because, although much was (mis)attributed to him, few of his plays were reprinted during the 1640s and 1650s. Systematically examines the stationers who together held the rights to the thirty-eight plays in the modern Shakespeare canon but who, for various reasons, did not publish them. Describes the importance of dramatic novelty for the Interregnum playbook market, and the consequent neglect of "old" Shakespeare, whose texts were frequently printed and reprinted before the Interregnum. Argues that stationers’ interest in new plays ensured the survival of many plays in the early modern dramatic corpus. Also explains the timing and appearance of full-length Interregnum Shakespeare editions (The Merchant of Venice, Othello, King Lear, Lucrece), and the significance of Shakespeare’s continued circulation in the abbreviated forms of commonplace books, drolls, book list catalogues, and other printed allusions to Shakespeare’s name, his characters and play titles. Demonstrates Shakespeare’s elastic cultural associations in this period, and how "Shakespeare" came to be a dramatic category in its own right.

In his history plays, Shakespeare shows how the hierarchical shame- and honor-based political system called monarchy leads to an endless cycle of violence. But he also shows us through the character of Falstaff and his famous speech about honor how debunking or satirizing honor has no effect on honor- and shame-driven personalities. In the context of current US politics, this can explain the inability of the two sides to hear one another. Henry V, often celebrated as a national hero, becomes a killing machine when he ascends to power, pursuing wars that are as futile as they are bloody. In contrast, Henry VI, the exception that proves the rule, adheres to the guilt ethic of Christianity, which renders him powerless to protect himself from the violence generated by the shame culture in which he lived. Richard III shows the power of shame and humiliation to stimulate violence on a scale that ultimately consumes him as well.

Taking its lead from a famous scene in 2 Henry IV and drawing upon the latest historical scholarship, this chapter surveys the modernization of England’s military capacity during the reign of Elizabeth I. By contrast with the success of England’s naval revival, the parallel effort to overhaul the antiquated county militia system and to create armies for service abroad achieved only partial success. While bows and bills were gradually replaced by guns and pikes and a proportion of each county’s militia was formed into “trained bands,” the sheer scale of the effort meant that the modernization of England’s military capacity on land always remained a frustratingly incomplete endeavor. Even so, Elizabeth’s privy council and the lord lieutenants of the counties made greater progress in this effort than has typically been recognized and managed to sustain war on multiple fronts over a period of more than twenty years.

Focussing on Welles’ canon of completed Shakespeare films, this chapter uses specific sequences to identify his characteristic cinematic poetry. It argues for the interest of Macbeth (1948), Othello (1952), and Chimes at Midnight (1965) as creative acts of critical interpretation, and treats them as visually dynamic Shakespearean criticism. In Macbeth, Welles’ cinematography addresses questions of the central character’s agency, describing him as both puppet and perpetrator, and tracing the chiaroscuro balance between Macbeth and Lady Macbeth. Othello’s much-discussed problems of production have the effect of prioritising the visual, in a tragedy demanding ‘ocular proof’, and the radical bricolage of the film’s construction has parallels with the improvisatory energy of Iago within the play. In Chimes at Midnight Welles participates in a centuries-old critical debate about the moral character of Falstaff and the question of reformation in the cycle of history plays, replacing this telos with an extended, melancholic farewell to Falstaff himself.

Chapter 2 examines the concept of prodigality and the impulse to seize the moment through the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century prodigal son as a temporally subversive denier of delay. I begin with metatheatrical moments that define the prodigal’s denial of futurity in Shakespeare’s second tertralogy. I argue that the action of the prodigal’s riotous living, which challenges hierarchies of age, is paradoxically figured as a period of delay: it is a rejection of social maturation that threatens to feminise the prodigal as ineffectual. I go on to examine five Prodigal Husband plays that constitute a specific sub-genre of city comedy: Thomas Heywood’s How a man may chuse a good wife from a bad (1601-2) andThe Wise Woman of Hoxton (c.1604), the anonymous The London prodigall (1603-5) and The faire maide of Bristow (1603-4), and George Wilkins’ The miseries of inforst mariage (1605-6). In these plays, we see prodigality enforced by the older generation in order to disempower the young. However, when the prodigal son’s repentance is delayed, and he becomes a prodigal husband, he poses a threat to the stability of the marital unit, and potentially to systems of patriarchal control.

Chapter Seven considers The Merry Wives of Windsor (c. 1600), Shakespeare’s only play explicitly set in contemporary England which also addressed the historical freight of mirth. Merry Wives juxtaposes historical with theatrical nostalgia in the person of Falstaff, embodying not just past carnival but more recent stage history. Translating the drama of repetition and disappointment into the register of theatrical experience, the play uses the structures of audience familiarity to make a bold claim for something new.