Shakespeare's Oldcastle/Falstaff controversy: Richard James's account

The Legend and defense of the Noble Knight and Martyr Sir John Oldcastle, set forth by Richard James, Bachelor of Divinity, and Fellow of Christ Church College in Oxford.

Aristotle [Greek writing]

To my Noble friend Sir Henry Bourchier

Sir Harry Bourchier, you are descended of Noble Ancestry, and in the duty of a good man love to hear and see fair reputation preserved from slander and oblivion. Wherefore to you I dedicate this edition of Occleve, where Sir John Oldcastle appears to have been a man of valor and vertue, and only lost in his own times because he would not bow under the foul superstition of Papistry, from whence in so great light of Gospel and learning that there is not yet a more universal departure, is to me the greatest scorn of men. But of this more in another place; and in preface will you please to hear me that which follows. A young Gentle Lady of your acquaintance having read the works of Shakespeare made me this question. How Sir John Falstaffe or Fastalf, as he is written in the statute book of Magdalen College in Oxford, where every day that society were bound to make memory of his soul, could be dead in the time of Harrie the fifth, and again live in the time of Harrie the sixth, to be banished for cowardice: Whereto I made answer that it was one of those humors and mistakes for which Plato banished all poets out of his commonwealth. That Sir John Falstaff was in those times a noble valiant soldier as appears by a book in the Herald's Office dedicated unto him by a Herald, who had been with him, if I will remember, for the space of 25 years in the French wars; that he seems also to have been a man of learning, because in a library of Oxford I find a book of dedicating Churches sent from him for a present unto Bishop Wainfleet and inscribed with his own hand. That in Shakespeare's first show of Harrie the fifth [Henry IV, part 1], the person with which he undertook to play a buffoon was not Falstaff but Sir John Oldcastle, and that offence being worthily taken by Personages descended from his title (as peradventure by many others also who put to make an ignorant shift [fol. 2v] of abusing Sir John Fastalf a man not inferior of vertue, though not so famous in piety as the other, who gave witness unto the truth of our reformation with a constant and resolute Martyrdom, unto which he was pursued by the Priests, Bishops, Monks, and Friars of those days. Noble Sir, this is all my preface. God keep you, and me and all Christian people, from the bloody designs of that cruel Religion.

Yours in all observance,

Richard James