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sinner who thrust himself upon him, than the rebuke he did? Any other course would have rendered the king's own professed reform absurd.

In Falstaff we have in this Part II. the old wit and humour, the old slipperiness when seemingly caught, the old. mastery over every one, till the triumph should come, when comes catastrophe instead. But we have more of the sharper, the cheat, the preyer on others (the hostess, Shallow, the soldiers at the choosing), brought out. The slipperiness is seen in his answers to the Chief-Justice's attendant, the Chief-Justice himself, the hostess, Prince Hal, and Doll. (His excuse for dispraising Hal before Doll is repeated by Parolles for abusing Bertram to Diana in All's Well.) The scenes with Shallow and Silence, and the choice of soldiers, are of course beyond the reach of praise. We cannot help noting the use that the old rascal meant to make of his power over the young king:

"Let us take any man's horses; the laws of England are at my commandment. Happy are they which have been my friends, and woe unto my lord chief-justice!"

His end here is imprisonment for a time; and worse, to be chaffed by Shallow the despised, and not return it. This prepares us for his fate in The Merry Wives. The moral is the same as that of Love's Labours Lost. What is mere wit so valued by men really worth? Wit

"Whose influence is begot of that loose grace

Which shallow, laughing hearers give to fools."

"The rogues," says Miss Constance O'Brien, "all come to a bad end. Falstaff dies in obscure poverty, Nym and Bardolph get hung in France, Pistol is stripped of his braggart honour, and even the 'boy and the luggage,' as Fluellen puts it, are killed together. Poins alone, the best of the set, vanishes silently, without a word as to his fate; and so that wild crew breaks up and disappears, leaving the world to

laugh over them and their leader forever. (If Falstaff was drawn from a living man, that man must have been a little Irish; no purely English brains work quite so fast.)" The contemporary allusions are still kept up in this play. We have the landlady's disjointed talk, which Dickens has reproduced for us Victorians, the Wincot of The Shrew Induction again, the tradesmen who "now wear nothing but high shoes and bunches of keys at their girdles," the coming in of glass drinking-vessels for silver ones, specially noted by Harrison, the Thames tide in ii. 3. 63, as in the Rape of Lucrece, the University and Inns of Court, the school-boys' breaking-up, the Cotswold man. All through, the play is Shakspere's England. One Amurath succeeded another in 1596. We may also notice the dwelling on special words, as "security," "accommodate," "rebellion," like Falconbridge's "commodity," and Lucrece's "opportunity."

*

* See Harrison's Description of England, edited by F. J. Furnivall (published by the New Shakspere Society, 1877), p. 147.-Ed.

† See R. of L. 1667: "As through an arch the violent roaring tide;" which was evidently suggested by the tide running through Old London Bridge.-Ed.

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his sons.

MOULDY, SHADOW, WART, FEEBLE, and BULLCALF, recruits. FANG and SNARE, sheriff's officers.

MISTRESS QUICKLY, hostess of a tavern in Eastcheap.
DOLL TEARSHEET.

Lords and Attendants; Porter, Drawers, Beadles, Grooms, &c.

A Dancer, speaker of the Epilogue.

SCENE: England.

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