Messenger-If Sir John Fastolfe had not played the coward France before Rouen. An Alarum: Excursions. Enter Sir John Fastolfe and a Captain. Captain- Whither away Sir John Fastolfe, in such haste? Fastolfe-Whither away? to save myself by flight; we are like to have the overthrow again. Captain-What! will you fly, and leave Lord Talbot? Fastolfe-Ay, all the Talbots in the world to save my life! (Id., III., ii., 1.) Paris. A Hall of State. Enter the King, Gloster, Bishop of Winchester, York, Suffolk, Somerset, Warwick, Talbot, Exeter, the Governor of Paris, and others. Enter Sir John Fastolfe. Fastolfe-My gracious sovereign, as I rode from Calais, To haste unto your coronation A letter was delivered to my hand, Writ to your grace from the Duke of Burgundy. [Plucking it off.] . . . Pardon, my princely Henry and the rest. (Id., IV., i., 9.) Now, if Shakespeare had ever heard or known of a record to the effect that Sir John Fastolfe was such a poltroon as that, I can well understand why he held the name in pickle for a coward, and so found it ready when a substitute for Oldcastle was wanted. And it would have been a stroke of policy on his part so to have employed it. For the true English audience loves nothing quite so much as successful military or naval valor. Only to such as Marlborough, Nelson or Wellington do they rear columns, which, like Nelson's in Trafalgar Square, far overtop and look a long way down on the mere bric-a-brac Edwards and Henrys and Georges. Had Sir John Falstaff been an unsuccessful hero even, perhaps the ignominy with which Shakespeare treats him would be intelligible, since even Gordon was left to be disembowelled by savages and his memory to perish when once with all his courage he could not command success. But Sir John appears from the record to have been a singularly successful warrior. Not only did he capture the division of the Duke D'Alençon, and take the duke himself a prisoner, at Agincourt, but at the siege of Orleans, in October, he achieved a veritable coup, by provisioning the besiegers, although he headed but a handful of troops and was opposed by largely superior numbers. Now, it is rather hard to suppose that the pen that was to draw the Falstaff of the first and second Henry IV., and of The Merry Wives of Windsor could have ever so tamely sketched so distinguished a real character, Mr. Morgan, indeed, conjectures that it was on account of the animosity of the Talbot family to Gen. Sir John Falstaff on account of the affair at Patay that Shakespeare, when compelled to take the name of Oldcastle out of his plays, substituted for it that of Falstaff "thus conciliating two powerful families by a single Shakespearian stroke."* But this does not account for the difference in the handling of the same Falstaff in the Henry VI. and in the Henry IV. The one a modern reference of two or three lines, the other, the creation of the first comic character in literature! I may add, however, that he would be a very bold or a very exasperating critic who should assert that the famous Scene 4 of Act II. of the first part, where Somerset, Suffolk and Warwick, Plantagenet and the lawyers formally pluck the white and red roses and inaugurate at once the symbolism and the strife that were to saturate English soil with so much costly blood, was not written by William Shakespeare. I think on the whole that it would be safer to accept Mr. Morgan's dictum:† "A play assigned to Shakespeare during the period when the London publishers were struggling to secure the opportunity of bringing out a Shakespeare play, and which shows internal evidence of Shakespeare's own hand, must be his." We may be led into error by accepting it, but we will avoid more than we make, because taking commercial as well as literary tastes together into the estimate of probability, the outcome must surely be safer than when confining ourselves exclusively to either. In the third part of Henry VI., at line 1 of Scene I of Act III., we have a curious proof of the carelessness of the early compositors, and yet of how fortunate their carelessness was, so far as we are concerned, their blunders throwing interesting side-lights upon our data of those days. It seems that besides those mentioned in the First Folio there was an actor named Sinclo. Now this Sinclo, it seems, took the part of one of the players in the Induction to the Taming of the Shrew, and of one of the game-keepers in 3 Henry VI. (III., i., I, being, "Enter Sinklo and Humphrey with crosse bowes in their hands," and Gabriel the "Messenger" (I., iii., 48) in the same play. And that this messenger was supposed to enter as if out of * "Shakespeare in Fact and in Criticism," p. 261. + Bankside Ed., Vol. XIV., p. xiii. See Bankside Edition, Vol. II., The Taming of the Shrew, line 97. In the quarto he is called "a boy." breath with haste we know from the fact that at his second entrance (II., i., 42), the stage direction is "enter one blowing." But to return to Sinclo, who appears to have been a utility actor of wide range. Sinclo (or Sinklo, sometimes written Sink) took the part of the first of the three beadles who arrest Doll Tearsheet at 2 Henry IV., * where the stage direction is in the quarto: "Enter Sinklo and three or four officers." And that he was a spare, lean man, rather than short and fat (as beadles ought to be), we know from the unspeakable Doll's threat, "Thou thin man in a censer, I will have thee soundly swinged," etc. It is interesting to note that the fact that material errors like these could have remained unnoticed and uncorrected for twentythree years is therefore not only an illustration of the extreme carelessness in anything except the mechanical part of their employment of the early printers, but of the hurried preparation of the actors' copies from which these printers set up. And it is probably to this habit of preparing plays for the night's presentation hurriedly, and without stopping to assign names to characters (since there were no playbills, it could really make no difference so the parts were effectively cast), that we doubtless owe the name Curtiss, given to one of Petruchio's servants in the "Taming of the Shrew;" otherwise the introduction of an English name into an Italian play (where even Baptista as a male name is accurately used, showing an unusual familiarity somewhere with Italian nomenclature) might still puzzle us. In this same play we have the first speech in Scene 1 of Act III. given now to a messenger (or servant) assigned to Nicke (or Nick) in the folio; and, as there is known to have been a Nicholas Tarleton among the actors of that period, he is conjectured to have been the one alluded to as cast for this part in the Midsummer Night's Dream. And again, in the Midsummer Night's Dream,† note where, when the pageant with which the horny-handed Bottom Troupe is escorted before the duke, the stage direction is: Enter Tawyer with a trumpet before them. This Tawyer was probably another Sincklo, a useful utility man whose name, however, was not illustrious enough to be included. in the famous First Folio list. In that list we have the name of Richard Cowley, who played Dogberry, as we learn from the fact that in the Much Ado About Nothing may still be read: "Jacke Wilson" for "Balthazar; "+" Andrew" and "Cowley" for " Dogberry; ""Kempe" for "Verges" etc. And so in the Merry Wives of Windsor, although * Bankside Ed. (Vol. XIII.), line Q. 2812—the stage direction reads “ Enter Sincklo and three or foure officers;" the opposite first folio line, F. 3153, being "Enter Hostesse Quickly, Dol Tearsheete and Beadles." + Bankside, Vol. VIII. See F. line 1919. See Q. 1905; F. 1996: Q. 1907; F. 1998: Q. 1912, F. 2000: M.D. passim this scene. § Bankside, Vol. I., line 2448 F. et seq. Pistol has disappeared from the stage (along with the landlord, Nym, and Bardolph) for the transformation scene at Herne's Oak, the stage business in the folio prints invariably "Pist" as a direction to the speeches of the Puck or Hobgoblin-an error easily accounted for if we suppose this part doubled with that of Pistol-as it easily might have been in the old play. So "Broome" for "Brooke" in that play may not be a misprint, but the real name of an actor. These errors, to be sure, sometimes give us such interesting bits of insight into Shakespeare's green-room that we cannot but be very thankful for the blunderings of the printers. It seems, for example, that there were three actors of minor parts in the company: Sinclo, Humphrey (perhaps the Humphrey Jeaffes mentioned by Henslowe) and Gabriel by name (possibly Gabriel Harvey, an actor also mentioned by Henslowe), whose lines found their way into the hands of the First Folio printers. C. W. T. SHAKESPEARE AT OXFORD. SIR WILLIAM D'AVENANT lived and died declaring that he was Shakespeare's own son. Whether or not Sir William was that kind of wise child who-according to Gobbo-knoweth his own father, we have only opinion evidence it would seem. But without any statement of the evidence upon which Sir William based his declaration, the Scotch verdict of not proven must content us. The only known facts are that Shakespeare, on his journeys between London and Stratford, found the Crown Inn at Oxford, near Carfax-a picture of which forms the frontispiece of the January issue of SHAKESPEARIANA—a comfortable place to break his thoroughfare in, and that this Crowne Inne or Taverne was kept by John Davenant, or D'Avenant (the spelling his son, Sir William, preferred), whom Aubury says "was a grave and discreet citizen," whose wife was a very beautiful woman, “and of a very good witt, and of conversation extremely agreeable;" and that, of the seventeen contemporary notices of him which Dr. Halliwell-Phillipps has preserved in his "Outlines," four make insinuations respecting the relations between Shakespeare and Mrs. Davenant. A careful reading of the transcripts of these notices shows that all, or nearly all, of them speak of John D'Avenant's austere melancholy disposition, but always commendatory of his discretion, stability and worthiness, which led to his being chosen mayor of Oxford (in the term of which office he died). Further, these notices which, enlarging upon John D'Avenant's solemn and saturnine disposition, allude always to the sprightly disposition of the wife, and that of their three sons, Robert, William and Nicholas, William only resembled in this the mother. Several of the authorities cited speak of Shakespeare's finding the Crowne Inne attractive, either on account of the good wine or of Mrs. D'Avenant's charms, as if it might have been either (and all these notices are contemporary and rather unnecessarily lay in the allusion to the alternative above hinted at). Sir William's own story, and the wellknown story of "my godfather Shakespeare" and the admonition not to "take God's name in vain," etc., are all that is ascertainable as to the verity of the rumor. As to the story about the boy and his godfather, it was undoubtedly, as Dr. Halliwell-Phillipps points out, a very old Joe-Millerism. But there is no reason in that why the story, well known as it was, should not have been applied to Shakespeare, by his admonisher in this instance. The recurrence of the story in “Wit and Mirth Out of Taverns," by John Taylor (the so-called "Water Poet"), 1629, is as follows: "A boy whose mother was noted to be one not overladen with honesty, went to seek his godfather, and enquiring for him, quoth one to him, 'Who is thy godfather?' The boy repli'd |