Editing John Falstaff (section)

===Cobhams===
It is not clear, however, if Shakespeare characterised Falstaff as he did for dramatic purposes, or because of a specific desire to satirise Oldcastle or the Cobhams. Cobham was a common butt of veiled satire in Elizabethan popular literature; he figures in [[Ben Jonson]]'s ''[[Every Man in His Humour]]'' and may have been part of the reason ''[[The Isle of Dogs (play)|The Isle of Dogs]]'' was suppressed. Shakespeare's desire to burlesque a hero of early English Protestantism could indicate [[Roman Catholic Church|Roman Catholic]] sympathies, but [[Henry Brooke, 11th Baron Cobham]] was sufficiently sympathetic to Catholicism that in 1603, he was imprisoned as part of the [[Main Plot]] to place [[Arbella Stuart]] on the English throne, so if Shakespeare wished to use Oldcastle to embarrass the Cobhams, he seems unlikely to have done so on religious grounds.

The Cobhams appear to have intervened while Shakespeare was in the process of writing either ''The Merry Wives of Windsor'' or the second part of ''Henry IV''. The first part of ''Henry IV'' was probably written and performed in 1596, and the name Oldcastle had almost certainly been allowed by [[Master of the Revels]] [[Edmund Tilney]]. [[William Brooke, 10th Baron Cobham]] may have become aware of the offensive representation after a public performance; he may also have learned of it while it was being prepared for a court performance (Cobham was at that time [[Lord Chamberlain]]). As father-in-law to the newly widowed [[Robert Cecil, 1st Earl of Salisbury|Robert Cecil]], Cobham certainly possessed the influence at court to get his complaint heard quickly. Shakespeare may have included a sly retaliation against the complaint in his play ''The Merry Wives of Windsor'' (published after the ''Henry IV'' series). In the play, the paranoid, jealous Master Ford uses the alias "Brook" to fool Falstaff, perhaps in reference to William Brooke. At any rate, the name is Falstaff in the ''Henry IV, Part 1'' [[quarto]], of 1598, and the epilogue to the second part, published in 1600, contains this clarification:

{{quote
|title=''Henry IV, Part 2''
|author=[[William Shakespeare]]
|source=Epilogue.<ref>{{Folger inline|2H4|epilogue|line=28–34|bare=true}}</ref>
|text=<poem>
One word more, I beseech you: if you be not too
much cloyed with fat meat, our humble author will
continue the story, with Sir John in it, and make
you merry with fair Katherine of France, where, for
anything I know, Falstaff shall die of a sweat, unless
already he be killed with your hard opinions; for
Oldcastle died a martyr, and this is not the man.
</poem>
}}