Eastcheap Records Review: Falstaff Drank Here, More or Less

The Boar’s Head Tavern in Eastcheap is where Shakespeare put the greatest drunk in English literature

Eastcheap Records is a live music bar with two thousand and ninety-one reviews and a 4.5, and it is on Eastcheap – which is where Shakespeare put Falstaff.

The Boar’s Head

In Henry IV, Prince Hal spends his time in a tavern in Eastcheap, drinking with a fat, cowardly, dishonest, magnificent old knight called Sir John Falstaff.

The tavern is the Boar’s Head. It was a real pub, on this street, and it stood until the nineteenth century.

And Falstaff is the greatest comic character in English, and possibly the greatest character full stop, and he is a liar, a thief, a coward, a sponger and a fraud, and everybody who reads him loves him and nobody can entirely explain why.

What actually happens to him

This is the part that people forget, and it is the cruellest thing Shakespeare ever wrote.

Hal becomes king. And Falstaff – who has been his friend, his teacher, his surrogate father, and who genuinely believes his moment has come – pushes through the crowd at the coronation to greet him.

And the new king looks at him and says: I know thee not, old man.

He banishes him. He tells him not to come within ten miles of him. And Falstaff stands there, in the street, in front of everybody, and tells his friends that the king will send for him privately later.

He does not. Falstaff dies offstage in the next play, and his death is reported by a hostess in about eight lines, and it is one of the most affecting deaths in the language precisely because it is given so little room.

Why Hal does it

Because he always meant to. He says so, in a soliloquy, in the very first act – that he is only pretending to be a wastrel so that his eventual reformation will look more impressive.

The entire friendship, from Hal’s side, is a political strategy announced to the audience before it begins.

The Prat’s literary desk regards this as the single coldest thing in Shakespeare and notes that most people remember the tavern scenes as warm.

Eastcheap

Cheap is not an insult. It is Old English – ceap, a market. Eastcheap was the east market and Cheapside was the main one, and the district is a map of medieval retail: Bread Street, Milk Street, Poultry, Fish Street Hill.

You can read what was sold on each one, six hundred years later, from the street signs.

The bar

Ten to twenty pounds, cheap for the City, live music, and a 4.5 across a serious sample – one of the better-rated bars in the district.

Verdict

Excellent bar. Go, and raise a pint to Falstaff, who was fat and false and frightened and funny, and who was thrown away by a man who had planned it from the start.

The Queen wanted more

Elizabeth I is supposed to have enjoyed Falstaff so much that she asked to see him in love – and that Shakespeare, obliging, wrote The Merry Wives of Windsor in a fortnight.

The story is almost certainly not true. It first appears about a century later and there is no contemporary evidence for any of it.

But something like it may have happened, because the play does exist, and it is the only one Shakespeare set in contemporary middle-class England, and the Falstaff in it is a different and lesser man – a buffoon rather than a philosopher.

Bringing a character back because the audience wanted more of him has never once worked, in any medium, in four hundred years, and here is the first recorded failure.

Alan Nafzger

Alan Nafzger was born in Lubbock, Texas, the son Swiss immigrants. He grew up on a dairy in Windthorst, north central Texas. He earned degrees from Midwestern State University (B.A. 1985) and Texas State University (M.A. 1987). University College Dublin (Ph.D. 1991). Dr. Nafzger has entertained and educated young people in Texas colleges for 37 years. Nafzger is best known for his dark novels and experimental screenwriting. His best know scripts to date are Lenin’s Body, produced in Russia by A-Media and Sea and Sky produced in The Philippines in the Tagalog language. In 1986, Nafzger wrote the iconic feminist western novel, Gina of Quitaque. He currently lives in Holloway, North London. Contact: [email protected]