The image of a character returning from the dead was a potent and enduring one in early English drama, partly because of the inherent dramatic power of the character’s reappearance, and partly because the image had a long theatrical history in biblical drama. From the twelfth through the sixteenth centuries, plays dedicated to Christ’s resurrection were a central feature of the English theatrical landscape.1 Their dramaturgy and its connotations of communitybuilding extended to other plays as well. Elizabethan and Jacobean dramatists who appropriated the motif of Christ’s resurrection often used its iconographic and linguistic elements to underscore themes of reunion, forgiveness, and restoration; Shakespeare’s work in The Winter’s Tale is a good example.2 However, other resurrection moments in early English drama are darker and more ambivalent. Parodic, distorted, and even demonic, these versions are what I call false resurrections, and the examples I shall consider are enacted and produced by characters linked to the Antichrist tradition. In the provincial civic drama of the Chester Coming of Antichrist, performed periodically from the late fifteenth century until at least 1572, and in Shakespeare’s 1 Henry IV, first printed in 1598, Antichrist figures both rise from the dead and raise others.3 While versions of Christ’s resurrection signal communal healing and renewal, the deceit and manipulation of bodies in these false resurrections indicate usurpation of power and abuse of the body politic. As the plays reveal these ‘miracles’ to be illusions, they stage cultural unease about the uses and hazards of performance. This unease initially created a productive tension for the Chester Antichrist play, but changing constructions of Antichrist and concomitant burgeoning antitheatricality led to an interpretative instability that late-sixteenth-century religiopolitical authorities could not allow. The ideological competitions enacted within the world of that play and through that play’s production or censorship provide useful context for thinking about Shakespeare’s work in 1 Henry IV. The false resurrection of his Antichrist figure, Falstaff, shows us Shakespeare’s dual deployment of both theatrical tradition and the Antichrist elements in the conflicted Oldcastle myth to defend the playhouse’s admittedly ambiguous art. In so doing, Shakespeare does not gloss over theater’s power to mislead, but instead places the onus on the interpretative faculties of the viewer.
Richard K. Emmerson provides a clear account of two constructions of Antichrist circulating in medieval and early modern England.4 Both drew on biblical apocalyptic prophesies of a false messiah, and these references had been elaborated on by early theologians until the figure of Antichrist acquired substantial legendary accretions.5 In this legend, which persisted in the Catholic tradition, Antichrist will be a single tyrant who will declare himself the messiah and win the worship of the world’s rulers through false doctrine, marvelous works, and bribes. The marvelous works include raising the dead and Antichrist’s own resurrection. When the Old Testament prophets Enoch and Elijah return from Limbo to preach against him, Antichrist will kill them. He will be destroyed in turn by the Archangel Michael and cast into hell, while Enoch and Elijah will be resurrected and taken to heaven. Opposed to this tradition of the Antichrist as an individual yet to appear were the views of Lollards, who identified the whole contemporary ecclesiastical hierarchy as Antichrist.6 Their understanding was also adopted in reformist rhetoric, which constructed the Pope and his followers, a corporate and ongoing threat to the ‘true’ church, as Antichrist, and rejected the legendary ‘life of Antichrist’. As Bishop John Jewel wrote in his Exposition upon the Two Epistles of St. Paul to the Thessalonians, attempts at such biography were as deceptive as Antichrist himself: ‘These tales haue bene craftily deuised to beguile our eyes, that whilest we thinke upon these gesses, and so occupy our selues in beholding a shadow or probable coniecture of Antichrist, he which is Antichrist indeede may unawares deceiue us.’7 Even though Jewel is speaking of narratives of Antichrist, his imagery demonstrates just how inseparable the figure was from threats of visual duplicity and manipulation, dangers also posed by the theater.
The Chester Coming of Antichrist dramatizes the Catholic legend outlined above, and is the only English play on the subject. The longest play in the Chester cycle, it survives both independently in a manuscript usually dated to the late fifteenth century and in five full cycle manuscripts that postdate the last performance of the cycle by at least fourteen years.8 Few substantial differences distinguish these six witnesses to the text, though other records suggest extensive revisions were made, or at least planned. The cyclic context contributes significantly to the play’s interrogation of dangerous theatricality, for Antichrist’s compelling performance coexists with audience memory of the divine figure he is imitating, creating a kind of double vision for spectators.9 It is perhaps appropriate that the play was performed by the guild of Dyers and Hewsters, experts in altering hue, or appearance.
In his entrance, Antichrist takes advantage of audience expectation to position himself as Christ. In the previous play, prophets summarize elements of his Antichrist legend as well as signs of Doomsday, culminating with the hope that God will give the audience grace to ‘come to the blysse that lasteth aye’ (22.337). For an audience not equipped with cast lists and speech headings, the prophets’ final line, ‘Hee comes! Soone you shall see!’ (22.340) could easily signal Christ’s descent for the Last Judgment. Instead, Antichrist enters. He introduces himself first in Latin, as the Father and Son have done in plays 1, 2, 13, 20, and in English proclaims himself to be the Christ, taking twentyfour lines before he distinguishes himself from the historical (and in his view, troublesome) Jesus. As David Mills notes, the audience is deceived, just as the four kings representing the world’s rulers soon will be.10 The character’s danger to the social body is already clear, not only within the world of the play, but also without.
The cyclic context works to Antichrist’s advantage again as he appears to surpass Christ’s accomplishments in raising the dead. Though Antichrist performs other apparent miracles, such as turning trees upside down and orchestrating a fraudulent Pentecost, his false resurrections are most important to the play; they are the performances that both win the kings’ allegiance and ultimately cause his downfall. In Play 13, audiences had already seen Christ raising a single man, Lazarus, and heard the testimony, ‘By verey signe nowe men maye see |that thou arte Godes Sonne’ (13.476–7, emphasis mine).11 Antichrist echoes these words in his offer of a doubly impressive miracle—he will bring two corpses back to life:
This ‘postee’, or power, would eclipse that of Jesus, who shares power with his Father and the Spirit, and prays to his Father before commanding Lazarus to come forth (13.442–9). In contrast, Antichrist takes sole credit for his marvelous acts of resurrection and deliberately uses them as a bargaining chip:
These repeated offers of a ‘verey signe’ of ‘maistrye’, ‘godhead’, and ‘postye’ unshared with any other person of the Trinity (‘all through my owne accorde’) are fulfilled when the dead men do come forth from their tombs: ‘Tunc resurgent mortui de sepulchris’ (23.104SD). As I shall demonstrate below, his adjective ‘marveylouslye’ might trigger some suspicion about the feat, but assuming that the resurrection is staged in a convincing manner, the accomplishment suggests to spectators as well as the kings onstage that Antichrist deserves veneration.12
Antichrist’s displays of power continue in his own resurrection, but here audience memory of Christ’s resurrection just a few plays earlier provides a less supportive framework; it primes the spectators to distinguish Antichrist’s marvelous performance from Christ’s messianic power, even if the four kings cannot. In their responses to Antichrist’s death, the kings resemble Christ’s followers after his Crucifixion. Like Joseph of Arimathea, who mourned, ‘A, sweete Jesu, sweete Jesu’ as he removed Christ from the cross (16A.440), Tertius Rex calls Antichrist ‘this sweete’ as he prepares to bury him (23.142). Secundus Rex hopes that Antichrist may ‘save’ them ‘from disease’ (23.141), echoing Maria Jacobi’s lament for Christ as ‘my helpe, my heale’ (18.318). But these expressions of mourning are framed and undercut by Antichrist’s elaborate stage-management of his own resurrection for maximum public effect. He grandstands, Bottom-like, both at his death and at his emergence from the tomb: ‘I dye, I dye! Nowe am I dead! … I ryse! Nowe reverence dose to mee’ (23.133, 165).13 Though the kings are convinced by this display, spectators could recognize it as a one-man show, notably unsupported by divine or natural wonders. The stage direction, ‘Tunc Antechristus levat corpus suum surgens a mortuis,’ suggests none of the typical theatrical accompaniments to Christ’s resurrection: noise of thunder, a bright light that terrifies the soldiers guarding the tomb (usually achieved in performance with rosin or gunpowder), or angelic testimony. The Chester Resurrection, for example, involves two angels, who sing ‘Christus resurgens a mortuis,’ and the guards who awaken after Christ’s exit exclaim repeatedly about blinding light and shaking in fear (18.153SD, 187–9, 209–11, 272). Poor Antichrist must create his own bombastic thunder, proclaim his own resurrection, and even cue the proper response of ‘reverence’ from the kings (23.165). Insistent showmanship substitutes for the supernatural authority and mystery of Christ’s resurrection moment. Leslie H. Martin has argued that this ‘ludicrous and anticlimactic’ performance creates a comic eschatology for the Chester cycle.14 Certainly Antichrist’s narration of his death and resurrection sound more comic than the lines that accompany his earlier feats. However, if the audience has been taken in during Antichrist’s first speech, and marveled, even despite themselves, at the raising of two men, their position of superiority is compromised. If they can see ‘the man behind the curtain’ at this point, they can also attest to the power of his illusions, a power still enthralling the kings onstage.
I have called attention to the independent power Antichrist claims because it is crucial to the ontological status he wants for his resurrections. Though he first accomplishes them ‘marveylouslye’ (95), he later defends his authority to the prophets ‘Enock’ and ‘Elias’ by citing his ‘myracles and marveyles’ (406). However, Elias quickly contradicts him: ‘The were no myracles but mervelles thinges |that thou shewed unto these kinges |through the fyendes crafte’ (410–12). While Antichrist elides the miraculous with the marvellous, Elias invokes a common medieval distinction; Gareth Roberts observes that ‘demonological works often quote the tag Mira non miracula (wonders, not miracles),’ and both Augustine and Aquinas provided influential arguments for the difference.15 Marvels relied on illusion to deceive human senses, but the demons or magicians who performed them still worked within the natural laws of God’s creation. As Caroline Walker Bynum explains, marvels, or mirabilia, were ‘natural effects we fail to understand’, whereas miracles, or miracula were “‘unusual and difficult” (insolitum et arduum) events, “produced by God’s power alone on things that have a natural tendency to the opposite effect.”’16 Resurrection from the dead was one such miraculous phenomenon. By insisting on his sole responsibility for his works, Antichrist argues that his power alone has reversed the natural process of death; that his resurrections are divine miracles, rather than demonically-assisted deceptions of human senses.
However, both the truth of the prophet’s distinction and the illusory nature of the resurrections are quickly proved. Enock asks ironically to see these ‘miracles’ (537), requesting that the risen men consume a meal: ‘Yf thou bee so micle of might | to make them eate and drynke, | for verey God we will thee knowe’ (547–9). Again, the cycle’s true resurrections can prepare the audience for such a request. The restored Lazarus reappears in Play 14, dining at the home of Simon the Leper, and in Play 19 Christ demonstrates his true corporeal resurrection by eating ‘rosted fyshe and honye’ (19.194). Just before the stage direction ‘Tunc commedit’, Jesus explains, ‘[A] ghooste to eate hath no powere, | as you shall see anon’ (19.197–9). His words refer to the meal he is about to share with his disciples and also function as a prophecy, fulfilled in the Antichrist play when the supposedly risen men are unable to eat bread blessed by Elias. Indeed, neither can even look at it, and Primus Mortuus is frightened by its ‘prynt’—the mark of the Cross, as on a host (579). Their bodies have been marvelously animated through witchcraft, not miraculously resurrected by divine power. Unable to tolerate either physical or spiritual sustenance, they are a woefully ineffectual—though superficially convincing—imitation of human life.
The evidence of these dead men (and it is worth noting that their speech headings throughout the play are Primus and Secundus Mortuus) also exposes the horror underlying false resurrection at another’s hands: the fear of invasion or penetration and manipulation. In this respect, the bodies of the dead men are a synecdoche for the body politic that Antichrist has begun to control through his performance. It is fitting, then, that his body is staged and manipulated in turn at the end of the play. Two demons physically divide his soul and body and carry them off (678SD); Primus Demon even operates the corpse like a gruesome puppet, turning the head for one last look at the audience: ‘A, fellowe, a dole looke that thow deale | to all this fayre companye, hence or thou wend’ (695–6).17 Antichrist’s death earlier in the play was never subjected to scrutiny, but here it is impossible to avoid. Like the Wicked Witch of the East, he’s ‘not only merely dead, [he’s] really most sincerely dead.’ His manipulation of corpses, of the four kings, and of the Chester audience through ‘miracles’ has come to a grisly end.
The self-conscious theatricality of Antichrist’s false resurrections may remind us that dramatizations of biblical stories or saints’ lives were also ‘miracles’; Antichrist’s mimesis of episodes in Christ’s life is a kind of miracle-playing.18 Through the Antichrist play, the cycle scrutinizes the potential perils of its own performative undertaking. Its condemnation of false miracles corroborates some of the criticisms of miracle-playing expressed in other works. As early as the fourteenth century, preacher Robert Mannynge had decried extra-liturgical performances of ‘myracles’ as ‘a syght of synne’ contributing to worldly pomp rather than heavenly glory. In particular, Mannyng argues against performances in ‘weyys or greuys’, that is, ways and graves—the streets and churchyards where various kinds of plays and revelry took place.19 Antichrist’s false resurrections, which contribute to his ‘great renowne’ (23:130), are literally performed in ways and graves, being staged in the streets of Chester, and with the props of sepulchers and a tomb. The performance also resembles those opposed by the anonymous Lollard authors of the Treatise of Miraclis Pleyinge, who argue that miracle-playing dangerously distracts attention from the true works of God.20 Such performances are categorically unable to move the audience to true contrition and conversion, insist the authors. While Christ wrought ‘efectual’ and ‘ernest’ miracles, those who ‘usen in bourde and pleye the miraclis and werkis that Crist so ernystfully wroughte to oure helthe … errith in the byleve, reversith Crist, and scornyth God.’21 This list of behaviors could also stand as a summary of Antichrist’s offenses in the Chester play—erring in belief, ‘reversing’ Christ, and scorning God.
Even within these texts, however, the antitheatrical criticism exists alongside explicit support for biblical drama, and these endorsements illuminate the objectives of the Chester play. The authors of the Treatise of Miraclis Pleyinge lay out their arguments in response to proponents of drama, some of whom were members of their own community.22 These proponents are quoted as urging performance of an Antichrist play, and though the author dismisses the legitimacy of such a performance, his argument paradoxically provides some justification for staging that character’s misleading illusions. He fumes, ‘thes men that seyen, “Pley we a pley of Anticrist and of the Day of Dome that sum man may be convertid therby,” fallen into the herisie of hem that, reversing the aposteyl, seiden, “Do we yvel thingis, that ther comyn gode thingis.”’23 By ‘yvel thingis’ the Treatise author means performance itself, but we can also apply the sentiment to the strategy of bracketing Antichrist’s false resurrections within the framework of the Chester cycle. While the Chester false resurrections exemplify misleading performances, or ‘yvel thingis’, they also point toward other ‘gode thingis’: cycle moments that dramatize sound miracles, such as Christ’s Resurrection. Robert Mannynge had approved of church plays on that sacred subject, which could ‘make men be yn beleuë gode | Þat he ros with flesshe and blode.’24 The juxtaposition of both kinds of resurrection implies that the theater of Antichrist is dangerous, not theater per se. Peter Travis has argued that the profane drama of the character is in fact a crucial means for redeeming the drama of the rest of the cycle. The defeat of Antichrist thus stands for the defeat of profane drama: ‘what survives after this comic purgation is the dramatic world intact, purified by its self-profanation, its identity and value as a “sign” now to be judged in context with that other surviving and more sacred sign, the sacrament of the eucharistic Host.’25
Travis’ argument (and perhaps the very inclusion of the false performances of Antichrist within the cycle itself) assumes a certain fixity in the associations of Antichrist; he explains, ‘Antichrist’s art, [Chester audiences] knew, was evil; the playwright’s art, they assumed, was good’.26 Yet the changing identification of Antichrist in the sixteenth century could destabilize the audience’s ability to make this distinction. Like most biblical dramas, the Chester plays were probably written by Catholic clerics. Could ‘the playwright’s art’ still be considered good by those who recognized the Catholic clergy as Antichrist?27 If a community can stage and contain the dangers of drama by identifying those dangers with Antichrist’s fraudulent miracles, then it is vital that its members agree on who, or what, Antichrist is.
The documents of the Chester cycle reveal a city that made and remade its civic religious drama as its social, religious, and political contexts changed, a process that Mills has called ‘recycling the cycle’.28 Among the changes to the plays was an attempt to clarify the contested identity of Antichrist. The text as we have it presents a traditional version of the Antichrist legend, but a post-Reformation announcement of the cycle known as the Late Banns promises a new didactic element: a ‘Doctor that godlye maye expownde | Whoe be Antechristes the worlde rownde aboute.’ Furthermore, ‘Enocke’ and ‘Helye’ were to show how ‘Christes worde … | Confowndethe all Antechristes and, sects of ya t degree’.29 As Emmerson has argued, this announcement promotes a reformist understanding of Antichrist as a present-day multifarious threat, rather than a future individual. The Banns may have been read before the City Council in 1572 to promote a performance that faced significant opposition; annals for that year record that ‘the whole Playes were playde thoughe manye of the Cittie were sore against the settinge forthe therof’.30
However, crucial evidence from the letter-book of Christopher Goodman, one Puritan Cestrian ‘sore against’ the performance also suggests that the changes were not actually performed—that the Banns were a gesture to pacify the play’s opponents.31 Goodman had written to Henry Hastings, the earl of Huntingdon, who was Lord President of the Council of the North, complaining of the upcoming performance, and although both the earl and Archbishop Grindal of York subsequently wrote to the Mayor and to the Bishop of Chester, ordering that the performance be suspended, the plays went on as scheduled nonetheless. The performance is justified in the annals by the claim that the ‘Inhibition … sent from the Archbishop to stay them … Came too late’.32 Goodman’s letter-book indicates, however, that he had delivered the letter before the production.33 Writing to the Archbishop twice after the performance, Goodman sends ‘notes of such absurdities as are truly collected out of their old originall, by the which your wisdoms may easily judge of the rest’. Though some corrections have been made, Goodman acknowledges, they were neither made nor approved by the authorities. More tellingly, the plays have not yet been so ‘played for the most part as they have been corrected’.34 The ‘absurdities’ Goodman finds in the Antichrist play highlight the character’s performances of resurrection—they include Antichrist’s return to life and his final defeat, as well as Elias blessing the bread that reveals his animation of corpses.35 If these elements of the traditional Antichrist legend remained in the 1572 performance, they would coexist uncomfortably with the reformist content advertised in the Late Banns. At the very least, such a play would be one of those that Goodman describes as ‘so corrected not much bettered’.36
One ambiguous reference present in four manuscripts hints at the awkwardness involved in retooling the Antichrist play for a changing ideological context. In these witnesses to the text, the tyrant refers to Enock and Elias as ‘lowlers’ or ‘loullords’ (428) who won’t leave him alone; they ‘ever be readye [him] to repreeve | and all the people of [his] lawe’ (430–1). The outburst may simply classify the two prophets as idle beggars, and indeed two other manuscripts replace the term with ‘lossilles’, meaning ‘rogue’.37 In the context of the play’s other references to heresy, however, the line also suggests that Antichrist is identifying the play’s two spiritual authorities with Lollardy. In performance, the line might offer a sop to reformers, along the lines of the promises in the Banns: Enock and Elias, spiritual forefathers of true Christians, are also spiritual forefathers of the reformist movement. Who better than a pair of ‘loullords’ to show how ‘Christes worde … | Confowndethe all Antechristes and, sects of ya t degree’? Such an incorporation of reformist ideas would unfortunately be undercut by Elias’ use of a miraculous host to destroy Antichrist’s illusions. More conservatively, the dissonance between this Lollard epithet and the prophets’ priestly actions might be presented as further evidence of Antichrist’s spiritual ineptitude: he is so ignorant of the truth that he confuses heresy and orthodoxy. The multivalence of this single reference, coupled with the documents promising textual revision, demonstrate the contested construction of Antichrist—and the contested position of theater as a medium for sacred truths.
Revised or not, The Coming of Antichrist was probably last staged in 1572, for the final cycle production in 1575 left out some plays ‘which were thought might not be Iustified for the superstition that was in them’.38 Ironically, if the play did function as a pre-emptive containment of fraudulent performance, then its omission could, paradoxically, contribute to the perceived threat of the cycle. The 1575 production earned Chester’s mayor a summons to the Privy Council in London to account for his city’s repeated insubordination. Suspicion of performances could no longer be limited to the false resurrections of Antichrist—the whole cycle was now a dangerous form of theater, and a threat to the city’s civic body.
By 1575, the traditional legend dramatized in the Chester Antichrist play had fallen out of favor in official church doctrine, and tension between latesixteenth-century Protestantism and biblical drama soon resulted in the virtual disappearance of that genre. However, the iconoclastic anxieties explored through the Antichrist pageant and evident in Christopher Goodman’s correspondence had corollaries in the London public theater as well. As Michael O’Connell has demonstrated, antitheatricalists levelled their charges of idolatry at both the regional biblical drama and the secular productions of the capital. To watch a play at the Globe, the Rose, the Blackfriars, whatever its content, was to fall captive to false images, to take for truth a show as dangerous as the equally spectacular Catholic mass.39 As in the Chester Antichrist, reflexive moments of metadrama in the London theaters reveal playwrights’ responses to these iconoclastic pressures,40 and the connection between false resurrection and antitheatricalism persisted as that particular topos was handed down to Shakespeare’s commercial theater.
In 1 Henry IV, Falstaff’s false resurrection is particularly interesting because the character is partially generated from the figure of Sir John Oldcastle, remembered alternately by Tudor audiences as either an embodiment or an opponent of Antichrist. In fact, Annabel Patterson’s description of Oldcastle’s story could as easily apply to the legend of Antichrist: it is ‘one of those cultural icons in which are epitomized a society’s conflicting and shifting values’.41 Shakespeare braids elements of the Oldcastle myth together with features of the stage Antichrist in a character unrepentantly, charmingly, and sometimes treacherously theatrical. Rising from his apparent death on the Shrewsbury battlefield, Falstaff adds the stage Antichrist to the repertory of types that contribute to his capacious character—‘the festive Lord of Misrule, … the devil, the Vice, the braggart soldier or miles gloriosus, the parasite, the fool, and … the grotesque Puritan’.42 As an Antichrist figure, he creates his own resurrections by manipulating stage conventions of ‘dead’ and ‘living’ bodies. I want first to demonstrate how Antichristian dramaturgy like that of the Chester play informs these moments, and then explain how that dramaturgy interacts with elements of the Oldcastle myth to create a clever response to Puritan antitheatrical prejudices.
The stage direction that establishes the conditions of Falstaff’s deception tells us that while Hal and Hotspur fight, Douglas ‘fighteth with Falstaff. He [Falstaff] falls down as if he were dead’ (5.4.76SD). After killing Hotspur, Hal mourns over Falstaff’s body and exits, leaving the bodies behind. Though some contemporary directors have read ‘as if’ to suggest that Falstaff’s counterfeit of death is quickly obvious to those offstage, or even onstage,43 other early modern examples of ‘as if’ stage directions cue an action that the audience is meant to believe.44 By ‘playing’ dead, Falstaff pulls a metatheatrical trick on audience expectation, not unlike that perpetrated by Antichrist at the beginning of the Chester play. Barbara Hodgdon observes:
the pause that invariably follows Hal’s exit certainly invites spectators to believe in both deaths [Falstaff’s and Hotspur’s]: even when ‘Falstaff riseth up’ to fals-ify the illusion, it is only his ability to speak … that codes the moment as something other than a curtain call where, eventually, the two other bodies onstage—the players of Hotspur and Blunt, dressed in armor that counterfeits the King—would also rise to acknowledge spectators’ applause.45
The construction of this trick and the one-two punch it delivers merit further attention. As Hodgdon notes, when Falstaff stands and speaks, we realize first that the play is not over, and then that the character is alive in front of us—the ‘something other than a curtain call’ appears to be his resurrection. The careful staging of Falstaff’s ‘dead’ body magnifies the impact of this moment; his ‘corpse’ lies onstage for thirty-three lines, and is mourned over by a central, trusted character. Hal’s response when he sees Falstaff alive again suggests the shock of the resurrection moment: ‘I saw him dead, | Breathless and bleeding on the ground … Thou art not what thou seem’st’ (5.4.133–4, 137). Dramaturgically, his resurrection is more effective than that of the Chester Antichrist. But our next shock, no less tied to the staging of the body, is that the character was never dead. In this respect Falstaff is more forthright in his deceptions than Antichrist, since he acknowledges (to us, at least) that he faked his demise.46
By taking the audience into his confidence, Falstaff parodies a feature of surviving resurrection dramas. In four such plays Christ emerges from the tomb surrounded by unconscious or sleeping soldiers, and directly addresses the audience. He announces his triumph over death, displays his wounds, and links his passion to the sacrifice of the Eucharist.47 When ‘Falstaff riseth up’ (5.4.111SD), the bodies of Hotspur, and probably Blount, also lie onstage, suggesting resurrection iconography.48 However, Falstaff’s post-resurrection speech mocks the themes treated by Christ at this moment. Its very first sentence ridicules the body as eucharistic sacrament, for Falstaff swears, ‘if thou embowel me to-day, I’ll give you leave to powder me and eat me too to-morrow’ (5.4.111–13). As they invoke processes for preserving a corpse, embowelment and powdering, the lines highlight the fleshliness of the body and set up its consumption as a literal and gruesome act, a distorted version of the Real Presence.49 Instead of experiencing and triumphing over death, Falstaff imitates death and presents that imitation as triumph: ‘to counterfeit dying, when a man thereby liveth, is to be no counterfeit, but the true and perfect image of life indeed’ (5.4.117–19). As Jeffrey Knapp observes, this understanding of representative practice as a life-giving process resonates in some ways with the Protestant view of communion.50 However, in the context of the scene’s iconography, Falstaff’s words function as an attempt to pass off false resurrection as the real thing, a juggling trick worthy of Antichrist. As the ‘true and perfect image of life indeed’ he lays claim to the corporeal reality that theologians were at pains to attribute to Christ’s post-resurrection body, but possesses it through performance of death rather than a miracle.51
The mystery of Christ’s unobserved resurrection, accomplished only in the presence of inert soldiers, presents the opportunistic Falstaff with a chance to ‘resurrect’ another character as well. Standing above Hotspur, he decides to reinvent the rebel’s last moments, and usurp credit for his death: ‘Why may he not rise as well as I? Nothing confutes me but eyes, and nobody sees me’ (5.4.126–7). The remark teases the audience, who of course is observing the whole thing, and also plays with the antitheatrical bias against sight as a means to know truth, for only a witness to the events can contradict the account that Falstaff offers upon meeting Hal. This narrative resurrects Hotspur, only to kill him again for Falstaff’s own glory: ‘we rose both at an instant and fought a long hour by Shrewsbury clock … I’ll take it upon my death, I gave him this wound in the thigh’ (5.4.147–51). The last part of the speech is true: in addition to altering the events of Hotspur’s death, Falstaff debases the corpse with a wound of his own. The success of his story damages Percy’s physical body as well as his lasting reputation—which no doubt would matter more to Hotspur. If losing to Hal wounded Hotspur’s honor, how much worse it is to have been ‘killed’ by Falstaff. The link between Falstaff and Hotspur’s resurrections is underscored by the image of Falstaff carrying Hotspur off the battlefield. This image may prompt the fat knight’s joke ‘I am not a double man’ (5.4.138), a remark which also insists on Falstaff’s claim to life. His soul is still housed within his body; he is no ghost.
Ironically, this repudiation of doubleness also calls attention to the identification of Falstaff with Sir John Oldcastle or Lord Cobham, and to the accounts of his life, also doubled, or divided, in their ideological underpinnings. Most scholars concur that the name was revised out of the playtext at the insistence of Oldcastle’s influential descendant William Brooke, the 10th Lord Cobham and also Lord Chamberlain from August 1596 to March 1597; however, the suppressed identification continued to survive in popular consciousness.52 Indeed, the Falstaff-like character in The Famous Victories of Henry the Fifth, printed in the same year as the quarto of 1 Henry IV, retained the name of Sir John Oldcastle along with the less flattering nickname of ‘Jockey’. In both of the competing legends of Oldcastle’s life Shakespeare would have found elements of false resurrection and Antichrist references, features which hover behind Falstaff’s Antichrist-like performance on Shrewsbury field, and allow Shakespeare to deflect the designation of Antichrist away from the institution of theater and onto an historic individual.53
The Catholic account of Oldcastle emphasized Lord Cobham as a traitor, heretic, and danger to the realm, justly punished by being hung in chains and burned. This version saw the Lollard knight as a type of Antichrist, complete with false promises of resurrection. Medieval chronicler Thomas Elmham called him a ‘snare of Satan’ or ‘infernal Satellite’, and carefully explained how numbers represented by the letters of his name corresponded to 666, the number of the Beast, while the Carmelite Thomas of Walsingham reported Cobham’s prophecy of his own resurrection.54 The views of such authors influenced John Stow in his Annales; though Stow muted some of the animus of his sources, the enmity emerges in his description of Oldcastle as ‘a most peruerse enimie to the state of the church at that time’.55 Stow also included Oldcastle’s Antichrist-like and unfulfilled intent to ‘rise from death to life again, the third day’ resulting in ‘peace and quiet’ for ‘his sect’.56
The other version, passed on to Foxe through Tyndale and Bale, praised the Lord Cobham as a martyr to the evangelical cause and rehabilitated the prophecy element.57 For these writers, it is the institutional Antichrist of the Catholic Church, not Oldcastle, that deceives with fraudulent shows. Foxe omits Stow’s allusion to an Antichrist who would die and rise, but retains and amplifies the reference to multiple Antichrists that medieval chroniclers offered as evidence of the knight’s heresy. Of the papacy and the religious hierarchy, for example, Foxe’s Lord Cobham testifies, ‘Rome is the very neste of Antichriste. And out of that neste cometh all the disciples. Of whome Prelates, Priestes and Monkes are the body, and these pylde friers are the tayle, whiche couereth his moste fylthy part.’58 Despite this proto-reformist statement, Foxe’s Oldcastle can also be read as Elijah, witnessing against Antichrist. This identification would fly in the face of Protestant disdain for the legendary life. However, the martyrologist later explicitly compares Lord Cobham with Elijah, explaining Oldcastle’s claim to resurrection:
Thys is not to be forgotten which is reported by many that he should say that he should die here in earth after the sort and manner of Helias, the whyche whether it sprang of the common people wythoute cause. or that it was forshewed by him, I thynk it not without good consideration. or yat it sprang not without with some gift of prophecy, the end of the matter doth suffyciently proue. For lyke as when Helias should leaue this mortal life, he was caryed in a fiery charyot into immortality: euen so the order of thys mannes death not beinge muche vnlike, followed the fygure of his departure. For he fyrste of all being lyfted vp vpon the galowes, as into a chariot, and compassed in round aboute wyth flamynge fyre, what other thyng I pray you dyd thys most holy martir of Christ represent then onlye a fygure of a certayne Helias flying up into heauen. The whych went vp into heauen by a fiery chariot.59
The comparison resolutely ignores Stowe’s detail of a resurrection after three days, replacing it instead with the deathless ascension Elijah experiences in 2 Kings 2:1. However, the placement of this apologia after Oldcastle confronts Antichrist’s forces encourages readers to recollect Elijah’s role in the Antichrist legend.
From these competing portrayals of Cobham the all-too-human traitor, who claims he will rise but fails to do so, and Cobham the martyr, whose end is reimagined as a mysterious apotheosis, Shakespeare fashions Falstaff, who performs a resurrection by faking his own demise. His ability to ‘counterfeit’ extends not only to his own death and life, but also to Hotspur’s, and through the latter he is able to usurp honor from both the dead Percy and the living prince.60 By combining the dramaturgy of Antichrist with the Oldcastle myth, Shakespeare turns the tables on Puritan hagiography and implicates the ‘godly’ hero in the same deceptive performances his descendants castigated. Instead of Oldcastle the proto-Puritan champion battling an institutional Antichrist, that dangerous and theatrical Catholic hierarchy, Shakespeare limns Oldcastle as an individual Antichrist figure from the traditional legend, a vehicle, as we have seen in the Chester play, for staging and containing the dangers of theater.
The antitheatrical anxieties inherent in the staging of false resurrections render this episode a fitting conclusion to the usurpation and playacting thematized throughout 1 Henry IV. King Henry expresses his desires to cleanse himself of his guilt for usurping the throne from Richard II, and the Prince needs to replace this image of King as usurper with his own kingship. He characterizes his fraternization with Falstaff and the rest of the Boar’s Head crew as a calculated performance, designed to set the stage for a greater role—his ‘reformation’, which will thus ‘show more goodly and attract more eyes’ (1.2.213–14), but his continued association with an Antichrist figure who usurps honor and power taints the premiere of Hal’s role as princely warrior and noble monarch-to-be. Had Shakespeare ended the play with the repudiation of Falstaff found in 2 Henry IV, then the play might have concluded as Travis suggests the Chester cycle ends, with the defeat of profane, Antichristian drama functioning to purify the other drama of the cycle. However, the fact that Hal recognizes and rewards the deception makes him party to these false resurrections. If Falstaff presents a type of Antichrist, then Hal’s remuneration for the performance revises the role of the kings of the world, who eventually recognize the deceiver’s theatrics, repent their misplaced worship, and reject Antichrist. In contrast, by promising to ‘gild’ the lie (5.4.157–8) the Prince hints at a financial return and commits himself to enhancing the impression Falstaff’s specious claim makes on others.61 For Hal, such a reward may simply recognize the boldness of the fat knight’s performance, but it also gives the counterfeits a royal imprimatur as truth. Though the Prince has earlier vowed to cast off ‘plump Jack’ (2.4.479–81), the play concludes with an unsettling affirmation of Falstaff’s false resurrection. In effect, Falstaff succeeds in rising where the historic Oldcastle failed, and wins ‘peace and quiet’—as well as financial profit—through the Prince’s collaboration in the fraud.
We may appropriately feel apprehension at Hal’s indulgent patronage of this last audacious lie; such disquiet not only is a legacy of previous versions of the Oldcastle story, but also serves Shakespeare’s purposes in his own manipulation of the myth. The faults of Oldcastle leak out onto the Prince in other tellings as well; chroniclers who demonized the Lollard knight had to negotiate the King’s demonstrations of affection and mercy, while evangelicals had the awkward tasks of lauding a ‘hero’ who was known as a traitor to the anointed king and representing Oldcastle as morally superior to the spiritually misguided ruler. A similar awkwardness characterizes our last glimpse of the purportedly reformed Hal sanctioning the false resurrection. But the tension of Hal’s final choice in the play and the unease generated by his decision reveal Shakespeare’s deliberate engagement with iconoclasm. He acknowledges theater’s moral malleability and highlights Hal’s failure to act on the knowledge he has already admitted: that Falstaff’s brand of performance, alluring as it is, would create a fault line in the foundation of Hal’s rule. While he gives some credit to the playhouses’ critics by granting that theater can dangerously deceive, Shakespeare cannily qualifies that concession by modeling such a performance on one of their greatest heroes.
Speaking of the Chester Antichrist’s marvels, David Mills notes that the play ‘can be read as a warning of how readily illusion can become delusion when it is divorced from moral function’, and points to the witnesses Enock and Elias, unmaskers of the false resurrections, as ‘an absolute point of reference beyond the self-validating world of illusions’.62 However, such an ‘absolute point of reference’ is not always clear in the shifting religious environments, performance practices, and textual instability of early English drama. When Enock and Elias resemble both Catholic priests and Lollards, and when Hal conspires to promote counterfeits that reference both Antichrist and a ‘godly’ martyr, the audience’s work in discerning moral function of theatrical illusion becomes quite complex. While the Chester play’s antitheatrical ambiguity results from a once-stable set of referents thrown into disarray during its production history, Shakespeare deliberately courts a hermeneutic dilemma, using hagiographic parody to stage an Antichristian performance that invites iconoclastic censure, then licensing it with the prince’s approval.
The tactic prevents us from finding a totalizing understanding of the ethics of Falstaff’s performance in either royal authority or hagiography. Instead we must consider the event such marvels or counterfeits purport to reproduce. Such false resurrections are most dangerous because they fail to perpetuate the values and effects of their supposed model, Christ’s resurrection. Dramatic vitality and divine truth can coincide in theater, as shown in ‘true’ resurrection moments, but instead of reinscribing generosity, self-sacrifice, and healing, the episodes I have discussed here demonstrate usurpation, self-aggrandizement, and violation of others’ bodies. Through the medium of theater they urge audiences to careful consumption of that art as well as skeptical consideration of its critics, just as they urge us to attentive readings of early English drama’s multivocal religious images and subjects.
Versions of this essay benefited from the attention of scholars at the 17th Waterloo Conference on Elizabethan Theater and at the Northfield Medieval and Renaissance Colloquium. I am also grateful to Curtis Perry and John Watkins for their thoughtful editing; I owe a particular debt to John, whose enthusiasm and insight spurred me to a sharper argument.