Faulconbridge, Bastard-Son to Richard the First. 10. Faulconbridge...First] Pope,+, Var. '78, '85. Philip, his bastard Brother, begotten by K. Richard. Cap. Philip Faulcombridge, his half-brother. Coll. Falconbridge...First Dyce, Hal. Huds. ii, Words. Philip, the bastard, ΙΟ his half-brother Cam.+. Philip Faulconbridge, his half-brother...First. Mal. et cet. 10. ...the First.] ...the First; afterwards knighted by the name of Sir Richard Plantaganet. Han. lead him the more easily to the path of humanity, wherein from that point on he remains. In his whole development I cannot detect any psychological inconsistency; although Hubert protests too much in saying: 'Within this bosom, never entered yet The dreadful motion of a murderous thought.'-[IV, ii, 265]. The blinding of Arthur was even worse than murder, granting that the implied intention be taken for the actual deed. He wished actually to commit a crime, but he could not. A better nature lived concealed in him beneath a repulsive exterior, as he himself tells the king. To portray his conversion, and its accompanying inward struggle, in Act IV, Scene i, as well as his grief over Arthur's death demands a capital actor, wherefore this rôle should be entrusted only to a character-actor of the first rank. Hubert should be represented as a man between fifty and sixty, of plebeian bearing, with dark, baleful features and hoarse, rough voice. His innermost thoughts must be reflected in his looks. 9. Bigot] FRENCH (p. 9): This baron has almost always been incorrectly called Robert Bigot, but history does not record any Earl of Norfolk, of the family, who bore that Christian name. The first of this family, Roger Bigot, came over with the Conqueror, and was rewarded with numerous lordships in Essex and Suffolk. His son, Hugh Bigot, was steward to King Stephan, who gave him the Earldom of Norfolk, which was confirmed to him by Henry II. He died in the Holy Land in 1177, leaving by his wife, Juliana, daughter of Alberic de Vere, his eldest son, Roger Bigot, second Earl of Norfolk, the personage in this play. He enjoyed the favour of Richard I, but was one of the twenty-five Barons against King John. 10. Faulconbridge] STEEVENS: Though Shakespeare adopted this character of Philip Faulconbridge from the old play [The Troublesome Raigne] it is not improper to mention that it is compounded of two distinct personages. Matthew Paris says: 'Sub illius temporis curriculo, Falcasius de Brente, Neusteriensis, et spurius ex parte matris, atque Bastardus, qui in vili jumento manticato ad Regis paulo ante clientelam descenderat,' &c., [ed. Luard, iii, 88]. Paris, in his History of the Monks of St Albans, calls him Falce, but in his General History, Falcasius de Brente, as above. Holinshed says that 'Richard I. had a natural son named Philip, who, in the year following, killed the viscount de Limoges to revenge the death of his father.' [This assertion by Steevens, that Shakespeare's Faulconbridge is compounded of two distinct characters mentioned in widely separated passages by two chroniclers, has been accepted heretofore without question. Steevens was doubtless influenced only by the slight similarity in the two names; nevertheless, even at the risk of being accused of presumption, I must say that I regard any such deduction as open to grave objection. Falcasius de Breauté, not de Brente, as Steevens gives it, was a man of evil reputation during the reigns of John and Henry III. He was a man of great courage but of savage and cruel nature, and was chosen by King John to be Warden of the Welch Marches. On one occa [10. Faulconbridge] sion he pillaged the town of St. Albans and exacted a large sum of money from the Abbot; later he was employed by John in his raid upon the Barons, and, having taken Bedford Castle, John, through fear of him, gave it over to Falcasius. His name was among those proscribed for banishment in Magna Charta. In the reign of Henry, for various offences, he was besieged in Bedford Castle by the outraged barons in 1224; it was taken and, though he escaped, the castle was razed to the ground. His delayed sentence of banishment was put into effect and three years later, in 1227, he died in exile. The passage quoted by Steevens is an addition by Matthew Paris to Roger of Wendover's account of the siege of Bedford Castle, and the King therein referred to is Henry III, not John; Giles translates it thus: 'About this time there was one Faulkes de Breaute, a native of Normandy, a bastard by his mother's side, who had lately come on a scurvy horse, with a pad on his back, to enter the King's service' (vol. ii, p. 454). As far as can be determined by an examination of the various passages in which Falcasius is mentioned in Wendover and in Paris, this is the only one wherein he is called Falcasius de Brente, and Luard, in his careful edition of Paris's Chronica Majora, prepared for the Rolls Series of English Chronicles, uniformly gives the name throughout his Index as Fawkes de Breauté. It is reasonable to conjecture that as he was illegitimate he received this name from the district in Normandy whence he came, and this is slightly corroborated by the fact that there is a small town, Bréauté, in the district of Caux. This is, however, a minor point and is pure surmise on my part; that which is more important is, whence arose the changes in his name from Brenté, as given by Paris; Brenté, as it appears in the quotation by Steevens; and Breauté, as given by Luard? At first sight the simplest solution would seem to lie in a confusion of the written n and u; but curiously enough Fuller, in his Worthies, among those of Middlesex says: 'Falcatius, or Falke de Brent, was a Middlesex-man by his nativity, whose family so flourished therein in former ages (remaining in a meaner condition to this day) that an antiquary [Norden] will have the rivulet Brent, which denominateth Brentford, so named from them; which is preposterous in my opinion, believing them rather named from the rivulet' (ed. Nuttall, vol. ii, p. 321). Fuller then gives the history of Falcasius as related by Paris; in another passage (vol. i, p. 137) he calls him Falco or Falkerius de Breantee, and again the confusion between n and u confronts us-Breauté, Breantee (the é of the French name will account for the ee). We seem to have wandered far from Shakespeare and Faulconbridge in this discussion, but the question is not as irrelevant as, at first sight, it appears, and I should not have gone so fully into the mere spelling of the name were it not that both LLOYD, in his Critical Essay on King John, and FRENCH, in his Shakspeareana Genealogica, have adopted Steevens's suggestion that Falcasius de Brente was the prototype of Faulconbridge; neither, be it said, referring to Steevens as their authority. I fear that Lloyd has, however, read both Wendover and Paris to but little advantage he admits that his examination has been cursory-when he says of Falcasius that 'he was a great figure for good or ill, but ever for energy as servant of King John.' Both historians are singularly reticent as to any good actions, and equally in agreement as to his evil deeds. 'Wicked robber,' 'iniquitous thief,' 'traitor' are but a few of the epithets applied to Falcasius. The passage which Lloyd quotes from Paris refers to John's appointment of Fawkes to the Wardenship of the Welch Marches, and is-like that given by Steevens-an addition by Paris to Wendover's account of the year 1212. Later, [10. Faulconbridge] it is quite true, John made use of Fawkes in his expedition against the Barons, but Paris distinctly says that John through fear of Fawkes was quite under his domination. Few, I think, will agree with Lloyd that from Fawkes de Brente to Faulconbridge is an easy transition, yet, as has been said, this slight similarity in sound suggested this to Steevens and to Lloyd, coupled with the fact that Fawkes and Philip were bastards, and both on one occasion plundered an Abbey. On the other hand, there is not the slightest similarity in their characters. The pride of bearing and intense love of king and country shown both by the Philip of the older play and the Faulconbridge of Shakespeare are quite lacking in the reprehensible robber Fawkes de Breauté or de Brenté. This question of the exact spelling of the name is one which I must leave for some student of history to decide, and it is to be regretted that French, whose volume on the historical characters in Shakespeare's plays is such a valuable contribution to the subject, should not have thrown a little more light on this puzzling question. Foulke de Breante is the name which French assigns to the prototype of Faulconbridge, accepting without question the conclusions of Steevens and Lloyd. On the authority of Sir Nicholas Harris Nicolas, French says that Foulke de Breante was a baron by tenure, one of the managers and disposers in King John's will, and also one of the noble persons named in the first great charter of Henry III. But all this merely tells us more in regard to Falcasius or Foulke; it has not given us any more valid reasons for identifying him with Faulconbridge. We must have grounds more relative than any so far presented.-MOBERLY, in a note on the first appearance of the name in the text, says that it is 'the anglicized form of "Falkenberg," much as "Bridgwater" is a corruption of "Burgh Walter." The family is not the same as that of Lord Fauconberg, Cromwell's son-in-law, which belonged to the North Riding of Yorkshire, and had the family name of Bellasys.' Again he says (Introd., p. xi.): 'Of the Faulconbridges of that time [the thirteenth century], one is recorded as having lost his estates for rebellion against King John, but having been restored by Henry III. Another may perhaps be the "Falco" of whom we read as "ravening like a lion" during John's expedition to Yorkshire. . . . Dugdale has no record of the time when the family settled in England.'-I regret that I am unable to identify Moberly's reference to the Faulconbridge who lost his estates in the time of King John; that name does not appear in the pages of Wendover, Paris, or Holinshed, but-surgit amari aliquid-can it be that the arch-traitor, free-booter, and villain, Falcasius de Breauté, is once more obtruding his unwelcome presence in borrowed robes? There is, however, a Eustachius de Faulconbridge mentioned by Stow (Survay of London, ed. 1618, p. 904) in that part of his work treating of the Spiritual Government under the year 1221, and Stow quotes Paris as his authority for calling Faulconbridge Treasurer of the Exchequor; in 1223 he was elevated to the see of London and-here is a curious coincidence-Stow says that Falcatius de Brent was delivered to the custody of Faulconbridge in 1224. Does not this somewhat militate against the suggestion that the name Faulconbridge is one formed from Falco de Brente or, rather, that one name suggested the other? Camden (Remains, p. 174) also alludes to this preferment of Eustachius from Treasurer to Bishop, and the name, in the margin, is there printed 'de Fauconberge'a corroboration, if one be needed, of Moberly's derivation of the name.-The original note by Steevens has, I fear, been submerged beneath this sea of historical data; let us return, therefore, to that point. As regards his other quotation Steevens Robert Faulconbridge, suppos'd Brother to the Bastard. 9 II 11. suppos'd...Bastard] Pope,+. half...bastard. Var. '78, '85. Son of a Sir Robert Faulconbridge. Cap. et cet. (...Falconbridge Dyce, Hal. Huds. ii, Words.) is quite correct in saying that Holinshed gives the name of Philip to Richard, Cœur de Lion's illegitimate son; the passage which Steevens quotes, in part, reads thus: "The same yere [1199] Philip, bastard sonne to King Richard, to whome his father had given the Castell and honor of Coinacke, killed the vicount of Limoges, in revenge of his father's death' (ed. 1585; vol. iii, p. 160, col. b).— MALONE quotes a passage from the continuation of Hardyng's Chronicle, 'One Faulconbridge, therle of Kent, his bastarde, a stoute-hearted man' (fol. 24, b. ad ann., 1472), and suggests tentatively that this induced the author of the Troublesome Raigne 'to affix the name of Faulconbridge to King Richard's natural son.' He adds: 'Who the mother of Philip was is not ascertained. It is said that she was a lady of Poictou, and that King Richard bestowed upon her son a lordship in that Province. In expanding the character of the Bastard Shakespeare seems to have proceeded on the following slight hint in the original play: "Next them, a bastard of the King's deceased, A hardie wild-head, rough, and venturous."'— STAUNTON Considers that the latter part of this note by Malone has too long passed unchallanged. 'How far this statement is justifiable,' he adds, ‘let the reader determine after perusing only a few extracts from the earlier work. . . . We miss in the original the keen but sportive wit, the exuberant vivacity, the shrewd worldliness, and the military genius of Shakespeare's Bastard; but his arch-type in the old piece was the work of no mean hand.' -Malone's quotation from Grafton-although it refers to a later period-is certainly more to the purpose than all the passages from Paris and Wendover in regard to Foulke de Breauté or Falcasius de Brente, since it does not necessitate any violent change either in sound or spelling. We must not, however, lose sight of the fact that the mere question of the name or its invention is of but slight importance as regards Shakespeare's Faulconbridge; that name he found ready to his hand in the older play; but how the unknown author obtained it can be answered only by one far abler than the present ED.] 11. Robert Faulconbridge] MARSHALL (Irving's Sh., iii, 209): In the old play Look About You, 1600, the husband of Lady Fauconbridge is called Sir Richard Fauconbridge. That play deals very fully with the intrigue between Prince Richard and Lady Faulconbridge, so that probably there was some story or tradition on the point of which the author of Look About You and the author of the Troublesome Raigne of John both made use. [Inasmuch as there is a period of over ten years between The Troublesome Raigne and Look About You it is probable that the author of the latter comedy made use of certain characters from his predecessor's work. The style and method of Look About You clearly show it to belong to a date close to its first appearance in print, 1600.-Creizenach (p. 185) calls attention to the fact that Lady Fauconbridge is therein represented as the sister of the duke of Gloster, the hero of the piece, and that 'Robin Hood bears a prominent part in the intrigue between Richard and the Lady.'-This is, however, Robin's only appearance in such a character. Neither Ritson nor Child in their exhaustive collections of the Ballads and Legends dealing with the exploits of that Famous Hero-though they refer to this comedy-furnish any source for such James Gurney, Servant to the Lady Faulconbridge. Peter of Pomfret, a Prophet. Lewis, the Dauphin. 13. Prophet.] Prophesier. Cap. supposed prophet. Sta. 15. Lewis, the Dauphin] Dauphin, his Son; afterwards Lewis VIII. Cap. 12 16 Louis,... Dyce, Wh. i, Words. Lewis, the Dolphin Ktly. 16. Arch-Duke...] Duke... Cap. Lymoges. Duke... Cam. Neils. an episode other than the imagination of the anonymous author of Look About You.-ED.] 12. James Gurney] MALONE: Our author found this name in perusing the history of King John, who not long before his victory at Mirabeau, over the French, headed by young Arthur, seized the lands and castle of Hugh Gorney, near Butevant, in Normandy.-WRIGHT: It is more probable that the name Gurney or Gourney was a familiar one to Shakespeare. 14. Philip, King of France] 'Philip II. (surnamed Augustus) ascended the throne of his father in the year 1189, and in the fifteenth year of his age. He soon gave proofs of consummate judgment; for, by his prudence, he dissolved a powerful league which had been formed among some of the greatest princes of France. He was religious, but his mind was not enfeebled by bigotry.... In his twenty-fifth year he made a league with Richard I. of England, founded on the most firm and cordial friendship. Those two young and warlike monarchs, inflamed with the enthusiasm of the times, resolved to make an expedition, with their united forces, to the Holy-Land, and set sail together; but some dissension having arisen between them at Sicily, it increased to a mutual distrust.... [King Philip died at Mantes] on the 25th of July, 1223, in the 58th year of his age and the 44th of his reign. He was a well-made man, but had a defect in one of his eyes. Laborious and active; undertaking nothing without deliberation, but executing what he had undertaken with celerity and ardour, he was, therefore, generally successful, and was honoured by his first historians with the surname of the Conqueror, which has been changed to the more elegant appellation of Augustus' (Sh. Illustrated, i, 83). 15. Lewis, the Dauphin] FRENCH (p. 15, foot-note): Perhaps it is too early to assign the title of 'Dauphin' to the eldest son of a French monarch at this date, as it is generally understood that it came in the next century on this wise: Humbert III, the Count-Dauphin of the Viennois, about the year 1345 bequeathed or ceded his territory to Philip of Valois [Philip VI.] on condition of his eldest son taking the title of Dauphin and the arms of the province. The style had been first assumed circa 1140 by Guy IV, Count of the Viennois, who took the dolphin for his arms from the name of the province, Dauphiny. Philip, son of Philip of Valois, is believed to be the first prince who bore the style and arms of the Dolphin, as he was called, or Delphinus. 16. Arch-Duke of Austria] See note, III, i, 44. OECHELHAÜSER (Einführungen, i, 22): The Archduke of Austria is a character which the Poet found in the older play.... Decked out in the historic lion's skin of Richard he is from the crown of his head to the sole of his foot a cowardly poltroon, in whom there is not a spark of |