There are no complete manuscripts of any of Shakespeare’s plays from his lifetime, but surviving manuscripts by other playwrights provide information about how plays were written and performed in that era. Masques were entertainments with elaborate costumes and scenery produced for and often performed by the royal court.

In 1619, John Fletcher and Philip Massinger, both of whom wrote for Shakespeare’s company, the King’s Men, wrote a play about the trial (for high treason) of Johan van Oldenbarnevelt, a Dutch politician. Using printed news accounts as their sources, Fletcher and Massinger produced their play within three months of van Oldenbarnevelt’s death.

Francis Meres’s Palladis Tamia, the first critical account of the early plays and poems of Shakespeare, lauds him as an excellent writer of both comedy and tragedy, while the preface of John Webster’s The White Devil testifies to the “happy and copious industry of Mr. Shakespeare.”

In 1606, students from Cambridge mentioned Shakespeare in a play called The Returne from Pernassus, in which the characters discuss contemporary dramatists, with one claiming that few university men “pen plaies well …Why heres our fellow Shakespeare puts them all downe.” The play also includes two characters called “Burbage” and “Kempe,” after actors from Shakespeare’s company.

Appearing in three plays and mentioned in a fourth, the character of Sir John Falstaff has more lines than any other Shakespeare character except Hamlet. Falstaff was a popular character from his first appearance on stage, as evidenced by his prominence on early title pages of Henry IV, Parts 1 & 2. Although he dies offstage in Henry V, in 1602 Shakespeare revived him for a “spin-off”--The Merry Wives of Windsor.

A bawdy knight who keeps company with thieves and prostitutes as well as princes and kings, Falstaff acts as a necessary foil for Prince Hal, who must reject his debauched friend in order to become king. Throughout the plays, Falstaff tells stories that are part history and part literary invention; imitates both the Prince and the King in a tavern; plays dead on a battlefield; hides in a laundry basket; and disguises himself as a woman. Despite his comic nature, at times he is gravely serious, at one point asking Prince Hal the meaning of honor:

Can Honour set too a leg? No: Or an arm?
No: Or take away the grief of a wound? No….
What is Honour? A word…. Who hath it?
He that died a’ Wednesday. Doth he feel it?
No. Doth he hear it? No….
Honour is a mere scutcheon, and so
ends my catechism.
—Henry IV, Part 1, Act V, Scene 1

While Falstaff has remained popular throughout the centuries, not every attempt to capitalize on his popularity proved successful. As early as 1751, William Kenrick wrote a sequel to Henry IV called Falstaff’s Wedding, which was printed in 1760 but, according to Kenrick, “sat in the bookseller’s warehouse” until 1766 when the play was performed for a benefit. Although the play was limited to a single performance, Kenrick claimed that there was “an involuntary roar of laughter, from the beginning to the end of the play.”

In the 1660s, Falstaff was the first Shakespeare character to appear as an illustration, in Francis Kirkman’s The Wits, or Sport upon Sport, a collection of drolls, or skits, that travelling actors could perform.

Because the character symbolized a degenerate lifestyle and was readily recognized, Falstaff appears frequently in 18th- and 19th-century satirical prints mocking political figures. In the print False Liberty Rejected, the Prince of Wales (later King George IV) is depicted as Prince Hal giving a speech in which he rejects Members of Parliament Charles James Fox and Richard Brinsley Sheridan (portrayed as Falstaff and Bardolph, respectively). Later, George’s corpulence often led to his being portrayed as Falstaff: All for Love mocks his infatuation with the married Lady Hertford; while All the World’s a Stage traces his increasing girth.

The character known as “Sir John Falstaff ” was originally “Sir John Oldcastle,” and was based on a real person, a friend of Henry V and member of the “Lollards,” a religious group who promoted reform within the Church. After plotting to kill the king, Oldcastle was executed in 1417. The antiquarian Richard James once noted in a letter that because Oldcastle was a “buffoon” in the plays, his descendant William Brooke, 10th Baron Cobham, took offense: Brooke became patron of Shakespeare’s company, the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, in 1596 and used his stature to get the character’s name changed.

The replacement name that Shakespeare chose was based on another friend of Henry’s – the career soldier Sir John Fastolf. Some remnants of the original name survive, including a reference in Henry IV, Part 1, when Prince Hal refers to Falstaff as “My old lad of the castle.” In this copy of Henry IV, Part 2, the name Oldcastle (“Old.”) still appears on the bottom of the left page.

Oldcastle later became the subject of his own play. Scholars originally ascribed the play to Shakespeare, but now believe it was written by Anthony Munday, Michael Drayton, Robert Wilson, and Richard Hathway.

In the early 17th century, the folio format was usually reserved for subjects like theology or history–not drama, which was considered lowbrow entertainment. What we now call the Shakespeare “First Folio” was the first folio book published in England that consisted entirely of plays. Half of the 36 plays included in the book had never before been printed; without it, plays including Macbeth, The Tempest, and Twelfth Night would not have survived. About 750 copies of the book are thought to have been printed; 235 copies are extant.

The earliest recorded purchaser of the book is Edward Dering, an English antiquary who bought two copies in December 1623. That same year he created a manuscript for an amateur production of Henry IV, Parts 1 & 2. The manuscript is in two different hands, one belonging to Dering, and the other to a professional scribe. Dering altered the text for performance, cutting 3,000 lines of Shakespeare’s text and adding 50 lines of his own creation.

The Newberry’s copy of the First Folio also bears the mark of a 17th-century owner who wrote his name on the title page as “Robert: Wynn: bodescalian.” This probably refers to Bodysgallen Hall, in North Wales, near the town of Llandudno. On the page shown here from The Two Gentlemen of Verona, Wynn has added the phrase “Ann Park is” to the top of the first column. The reader is meant to read this phrase along with the text below:

[Ann Park is]
(That I did love, for now my love is thaw’d,
which like a waxen Image ’gainst a fire
Bears no impression of the thing it was.)