"Banish All the Wor(l)d": Falstaff's Iconoclastic Threat to Kingship in I Henry IV

Sir John: Well, if old king Harry had liv'd, this king that is now, had made thieving the best trade in England.

K. Henry [Prince Hal]: Why so?

Sir John: Because he was the chief warden of our company. It's pity that e'er he should have been a king, he was so brave a thief. (3.4)15

The same linking of religious with political satire occurs in the 1601 publication of The Mirror of Martyrs or the life and death of that thrice valiant Capitaine and most godly Martyred Sir John Oldcastle knight Lord Cobham. The Mirror of Martyrs, attributed to J. Weever, offers several stanzas justifying Cobham's defiance of the church while maintaining the validity of a king, even a tyrannical one who is misled by his prelates. When King Henry asks Cobham to obey the dictates of the Catholic Church, Cobham in the poem recounts:

I answerd in humilitie,

(Because I knew kings were the Lords annoynted)

To him I yielded all supremacie,

As Gods sword-bearing minister appointed:

My body, goods, my life, my loue, my land

Were his to vse, distribute, or command.

[. . .]

If tyrants will, vsurpt authoritie

Must be obey'd, what reuerence me behoued

To giue this king, this tyrants enemie,

Feared for loue, and for his virtues loued,

Whose honours ensigne o're the world had spred him,

In warres, and peace, if church men had not led him. (D4^sup r-v^)16

While the first stanza quoted here espouses the traditional notion of divine right, the subsequent stanza qualifies the king's authority with the critique of the king's tyranny prompted by his ecclesiastical counselors. Even this tribute to Sir John Oldcastle yokes the tyranny of church and state. Links between the historical iconoclast Cobham and the literary character Falstaff may thus be forged through evidence in historical accounts and in literary texts contemporaneous with Shakespeare's play. Furthermore, it appears that critiques of ecclesiastical authority are also linked to commentary on the Lancastrian counterfeiting of monarchy. It now remains to be seen what "counterfeits" Falstaff seeks to deface in Shakespeare's play and what forces gather to erase him.

Some of these false shows are anticipated in Richard II by Richard's suspicion that kingship is composed of the iconographic symbols of state, such as the scepter, crown, and throne: the images of authority to which since the age of ten he had become accustomed. Although Richard arguably fails to learn the lesson that accidentals (material possessions) do not make a king, he ironically comes closer to this understanding than the Lancastrian princes who replace him in the skepticism he voices about ceremony:

The potential for insight is dropped here when Richard hears news of the forces deserting him and determines to surrender to Bolingbroke's "fair day" (218). Again in 3.3, Richard's litany of the accoutrements of office demonstrate both the power of these totems (relics?), but also his skepticism that these iconographic symbols of kingship may preserve his rule:

The first play of the second tetralogy is already making the case for a divorce of the accoutrements of office from the office itself. When Bolingbroke, in his blunt, Machiavellian way, asks Richard to renounce the throne and step aside for more competent leadership, one feels a chilling Puritan breeze blowing away the regalia of state. However, subsequent plays of the tetralogy suggest that, far from denouncing the trappings of state, Henry and his son ardently desire them. After unseating a king whose sense of divine right of kingship is dependent on the flatterers who protect the myth of state, Henry inaugurates his own myth, with as much fanfare, regalia, and iconography as sustained Richard.17