Shakespeare and the Carriers
If any solid apology can be offered for the unnatural Tragi-comic mode of writing, the richness of humour in many scenes of this play, must stand for justification; but this of the Carriers is so exceedingly low, and we may add indecent, that it should be cast aside; nay, and might be, without any injury to the plot; indeed it is an injury to let it stand, being the lowest degree of farce.1
Francis Gentleman's notes on the 1774 Bell's acting edition of 1 Henry IV, Act 2, scene 1, leave no doubt as to his opinion of "this [scene] of the Carriers." The scene is admittedly something of an oddity, comprising two conversations between five lowly characters who barely feature elsewhere in the play: two carriers, an inn's ostler and chamberlain, and the criminal Gadshill. Gadshill is involved in the highway robbery in the following scene, and one of the carriers appears with the sheriff as they pursue Falstaff to the tavern in Eastcheap, but otherwise the characters disappear. Cutting the scene therefore allows for some helpful cast pruning: as early as the 1620s, when Sir Edward Dering drafted his abridgment of 1 Henry IV (adding about one-quarter of 2 Henry IV), the carriers' scene was among the casualties; together with a reworking of the robbery scene (2.2), the cut allowed him to drop all five characters.2 And yet there is evidence that some early readers regarded the scene [End Page 431] as important, even quotable. In a commonplace book that includes an extract from the play, lines from the exchange between Gadshill and the chamberlain were selected for inclusion, much to the annoyance of the manuscript's recent editor Hilton Kelliher, who complains that "Falstaff, the presiding comic genius of Shakespeare's play, surprisingly provided not one sentiment worthy of record. Why Falstaff's ribald wit should have served his turn any less than the rather contrived humour of Gadshill and the Chamberlain is not immediately apparent, unless it was simply too subversive for his purposes."3 When in 1700 Thomas Betterton "Revived [the play], with Alterations," he cut the king's opening speech to ten lines, eliminated Lady Percy and Glendower's daughter from 3.1, cut all of 4.4 and much of 5.4 and 5.5, but included the carriers' scene intact.4 Moreover, as we shall see, in the contemporary riposte to Shakespeare's portrayal of Oldcastle—the Admiral's Men's 1599 Sir John Old-castle, written by Michael Drayton, Richard Hathway, Anthony Munday, and Robert Wilson—the inn scenes involving carriers and ostlers are greatly extended.5
The consensus of twentieth-century critics was that these comic scenes have an important but subordinate relationship to the main plot. Fredson Bowers, for instance, believed that the inn and robbery scenes in 1 Henry IV constituted "the mimic world of the underplot," part of "the larger unity as a form of parody of the main plot." Bowers, moreover, was keen to assert, "This action has no independent ideological significance in itself."6 More recently, Arden3 editor David Scott Kastan objects that this "desire to assert the play's formal coherence" effectively "subordinat[es] subplot to main plot, commoners to aristocrats, comedy to history" and argues that the play is "less willing to organize its disparate voices into hierarchies than such demonstrations of the terms of its putative unity would allow" (15). Here, I build on Kastan's thesis to provide a specific reading of the carriers' contribution to the play, which, as I shall propose, [End Page 432] is by no means expendable, and which calls into question the possibility of such hierarchical distinction. Explicitly and articulately, the Gadshill robbery shows how an unholy alliance between career criminals and their high-ranking protectors preyed on a crucial infrastructure of early modern England that has been largely lost to view: the network of carriers and carriers' inns on which so much communication depended...
