ABSTRACT
Written by Michael Drayton, Richard Hathaway, Anthony Munday and Robert Wilson, the Oldcastle play was clearly a reply to the treatment of Sir John Oldcastle in Shakespeare’s Henry IV plays, in which the protoProtestant martyr figure of Oldcastle was recast as the fat hypocrite, evil counsellor, carnivalesque clown and vice figure subsequently known as Falstaff.1 Oldcastle and the Lollards played a central role in the Foxeian version of the history of the true church and thus in the still dominant semi-official Elizabethan Protestant account of the origins of the Protestant national church. Not only that, but as a number of scholars, most notably Kristen Poole, have pointed out, at crucial moments, Falstaff/Oldcastle’s discourse parodies that of the puritan godly, and the whole notion of the fat puritan epitomises a central theme in contemporary anti-puritan satire which saw hypocrisy – with the outward forms of godliness used to hide an addiction to the sins both of aversion and concupiscence – that as in fact a good deal more intense than anything espoused by the soi disant ‘godly’s’ supposedly ungodly neighbours.2
