I Cornell University W Library Pj The original of tiiis book is in the Cornell University Library. There are no known copyright restrictions in the United States on the use of the text. http://www.archive.org/cletails/cu31924079597229 All books are subject to recall after two weeks Olin/Kroch Library DATE DUE i4QV...L^Ma^k 1 - ■ - - ■ APRj i i m GS'LORD PRrNTED tN U.S.A. Cornell University Library reformatted this volume to digital files to preserve the informational content of the deteriorated original. The original volume was scanned bitonally at 600 dots per inch and compressed prior to storage using ITU Group 4 compression. 1997 CORNELL UNIVERSITY LIBRARY .1 THE Joseph Whitmore Barry dramatic library THE GIFT OF TWO FRIENDS OF Cornell University 1934 Zhc tTrial of Sir 5obn jfalstaff WHEREIN THE FAT KNIGHT IS PERMITTED TO ANSWER FOR HIMSELF CONCERNING THE CHARGES LAID AGAINST HIM; AND TO ATTORNEY HIS OWN CASE BY A. M. F. RANDOLPH "Go thy waySy old Jack ; die when thou wilt, if manhood, good manhood, be not forgot upon the face of the earthy then am I a shotten herring. There live not three good men unhanged in England; and one of them is fat and grows old: God help the while I a bad world, I say. I would I were a weaver ; I could sing psalms or any thing. A plague of all cowards^ I say still. . . . Play out the play : I have much to say in the behalf of that Falstaff. ' ' King Henry IV., Part I., Act II., Sc. 4. G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS NEW YORK LONDON 27 WESTTWENTV-THIRD STREET 24 BEDFORD STREET, STRAND 1893 Copyright, 1893 BV A. M. F, RANDOLPH Entered at Stationers' Hall, London BY G. P. Putnam's Sons Electrotyped, Printed, and Bound by Ube Tftnicbecbocfter press, IRew Ifforli G. P. Putnam's Sons TO HON. DANIEL W. WILDER, from his youth up, a true shakespeare-lover, who suggested to me that i put falstaff between book-covers, and who has aided and abetted me in so doing, these pages are dedicated. The Author. PREFACE. Falstaff has been so thoroughly bewritten that whoever attempts to say anything new of Sir John will soon find that he can do little more than borrow the thoughts of Shakespearian scholars, criss-cross what they have written about the fat knight, scrib- ble at random in the narrow margins of their ample pages, and make a cento of quotations therefrom.* This book is the result of an endeavor, not simply to repeat what critics have said of Sir John, but rather to put him in such a predicament that he must speak for himself and serve as his own com- mentator, and, in so speaking, interweave into his discourse, as far as it is possible, the very words which he uses, here and there, in the dramas wherein * " Opinions," says Augustine Birrell, " no doubt, differ as to how many quotations a writer is entitled to, but, for my part, I like to see an author leap-frog into his subject over the back of a brother." — Obiter Dicta (second series). Am. ed., p. 224. " If that severe doom of Synesius be true — 'it is a greater offence to steal dead men's labours [lucubrations], than their clothes' — what shall become of most writers?" — Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy. vi Preface. he plays his part ; and, further, to give his com- panions, Bardolph, Nym, Poins, Peto, Pistol, Mrs. Quickly, Justice Shallow, and the rest — each and all — a chance to do the like. Royal Hal must, of course, be counted out of this group, for it is to be presumed that the order which he made on his coro- nation-day, banishing Falstaff, on pain of death, " Not to come near our person by ten mile," re- mained in full force and effect ever after. More- over, King Hal, having rid himself of his unyoked humors, and thrown off his loose behavior, and being no longer " engraffed to Falstaff," was prepar- ing to invade France and win a glorious victory at Agincourt. To enable Falstaff to realize his own words dur- ing the scene wherein Sir John and Hal act, inter- changeably, the part of the King and the Prince, to wit, " Play out the play : I have much to say in the behalf of that Falstaff," he is supposed to have been " had up " before Shallow and Silence, two of the King's justices of the peace in the county of Glou- cester, to answer an information wherein many and grievous public offences were formulated against him. It may be objected that the two Gloucester- shire justices had no jurisdiction of Falstaff in Eastcheap, London ; that Justice Shallow was plainly prejudiced against Sir John ; that many of the so-called crimes charged against him were not crimes at all, and frivolous ; that the justices could not have examined him in the unique manner stated; and that the account of the trial is full of anachro- nisms of thought and language, and so forth. It may Preface. vii be answered that the supposed trial is hardly more irregular in many respects than Falstaff's first ex- amination before Chief Justice Sir William Gas- coigne. Granting that this great magistrate had the right to intercept Sir John on a London street, and tax him with having refused to obey the summons served upon him to attend at his Lordship's cham- bers, that he might answer the information laid against him on account of the robbery at Gadshill, still it plainly appears in the report of the examina- tion that the legal altercation between the Chief Justice and Sirjohn was not conducted according to any known code of criminal procedure. In this very amusing interview, the questions and answers are, in the main, impertinent to the felony charged against Sir John ; and, as soon as he has made a sufficient answer to the threat of the Chief Justice to " lay him by the heels," that magistrate partly pulls off his judicial robe and thenceforth acts the part of Prcefedus Morum, or " superintendent of manners," in dealing with the defendant. Granting, also, that when Falstaff was brawling with Officers Fang and Snare, who were trying to arrest him for debt at the suit of Dame Quickly, the Chief Justice had the right to intervene and command the belligerents to keep the peace, still the main controversy between Sir William and Sir John on that occasion is more personal than judicial in its character. In the report of Falstaff's examination before Justices Shallow and Silence, the truth of his decla- ration to Prince Hal that he was " no coward," viii Preface. seems not to have been seriously brought in question. But whoever has read Maurice Mor- gann's Essay on the Dramatic Character of Sir John Falstaff* — written specially to vindicate the fat knight's courage — will probably think that, on this particular issue, judgment ought to go in favor of Falstaff. The critic, if he looks into this book, may pro- nounce the circumstantial story of the discovery of the manuscript notes of Falstaff's examination be- fore Shallow and Silence, JJ., as well as the trial itself, as all " too thin," f and render judgment ac- cordingly. * Croker, in a note to his edition of BoswelTs Life of John- son, says that Johnson, being asked his opinion of this essay, answered : " Why, sir, we shall have the man come forth again ; and, as he has proved Falstaff to be no coward, he may prove lago to be a very good character." f English writers have frequently referred to the phrase " too thin ''as "a notable Americanism " ; but, as a matter of fact, it has a most reputable English paternity. The Rev. Dr. William Cave, who was bom in 1637, in his Life of St. Athanasius, used the expression in the following connection : " For procuring a synod to be called at Antioch, Eustathius is charged as heterodox in the faith, though they knew that to be too thin to hold water." And many years later. Lord Chan- cellor Eldon used this phrase in his opinion delivered in the case of Peacock v. Peacock, 16 Vesey's Chancery Rep. 49. The point under discussion was whether " partnership, without any provision as to its duration, may be determined without previ- ous notice.'' The eminent jurist decided that the question was one for the court and jury to act upon, summing up his opinion in these words : " I cannot agree that reasonable notice is a subject too thin for a jury to act upon ; as in many cases juries Preface. ix It may be so as to the entire book — except the excerpted parts thereof ; but I will only say, as law- yers sometimes say when they proffer evidence which they surmise that the court will regard as unimportant, " I offer it for what it is worth." A. M. F. R. and courts do determine what is reasonable notice.'' Here the expression was applied in what we term its slang sense. In Shakespeare's ^i!»^ .^^»?'j' VIII., Act V., sc. ii., the King says : ' ' You were ever good at sudden commendations, Bishop of Winchester. But know, I come not To hear such flattery now ; and in my presence. They are too thin and bare to hide offences." CONTENTS. PAGE The Fat Knight.— His Character.— What the Critics have Said of him i II. The Gadshill Robbery.— Falstafi before Chief Justice Sir William Gascoigne. — Pleadings. — To "Lay by the Heels." — Sir William as Censor Morum. — Sir John Exhorted to be Honest. — Arrested for Debt at Suit of Mrs. Quickly. — Reprimanded and Discharged by the Chief Justice. — Prince Hal Becomes King. — "Woe unto My Lord Chief Justice!" . . .19 IIL Shakespeare. — Critical Comments on his Genius. — ^As Great in Describing Weakness as Strength. — Shallow and Silence, the Gloucestershire Justices. — Their Mental Calibre. — Silence, the Shadow of a Shade of Shallow. — Little is Known of Shakespeare's External Life 34 IV. The Fat Knight " Leers" upon King Hal Passing by. — The "Sweet Boy" Sentences the "Greasy Knight.'' — The Chief Justice Sends him to Prison. — A Judg- ment without " Cold Considerance " . . .49 xi xii Contents. V. PAGB The Merry Wives of Windsor. — The Oily Old Lewdster of Intolerable Entrails, not the Incomparable Jester of Eastcheap. — Mrs. Quickly, Shallow, Slender, Evans. — Gentle Master Fenton. — "Sweet Anne Page." — Mated and Married 57 VI. Falstaff, Too-Too Old.— Not Free from "The Rusty Curb of Old Father Antic, the Law." — Examination before Shallow and Silence, JJ. — Sketch of the Shallow Family. — Robert Shallow, a. Prodigal S-n, Reforms and Emigrates to Virginia. — Buys Land, Marries, and Founds a Family, One of the " F. F. V.'s." — Becomes a Jjlstice of the Peace in a Unique Way. — His Prosperity and Death. — Rise and Fall of the Shallow Family in Virginia. — 'Squire " Shall- Owe " in Kansas. — The Genius of Drouth. — Trans- lated by a Cyclone. — Manuscript Notes of Falstaff's Trial, How Discovered and Deciphered. — Summary of Charges Formulated against the Fat Knight . 7a VII. Falstaff's Trial. — Court Held at the Boar's Head Tavern. — Shallow and Silence, JJ., on the Bench. — Sir Hugh Evans, Clerk. — Information Read. — Plea, "Not Guilty." — Tavern-Haunting. — Confession and Avoid- ance. — Unique Procedure. — Mrs. Quickly Inter- pleads. — "Shall I Not Take Mine Ease in Mine Inn?" — Question Taken under Advisement. — Be Merry.— " A Pottle of Sack Finely Brewed," a Good Phrase. — Drunkenness. — Bardolph Sworn as a Wit- ness for the Crown. — Committed for Contempt . 114 VIII. Falstaff Given Leave to Speak for Himself. — Vindicates his Good Name which has been Most Horribly Contents. xiii PAGE Hurted. — Declares that he has Ever Striven to Make the Three Justinian Precepts the Guide of his Life, but has Often Failed. — The More Flesh, the More Frailty. — Was Called a Coward by Prince Hal ; to Resent the Insult, High Treason. — Bardolph as a Bootlegger. — An Emergency in the Fat Knight's Life. — Water-Ordeal in the Thames, as a Cure for Concupiscence. — Some Sack, Francis. — Sir John is Made an Ass of at Heme's Oak. — Likes not the Welsh Movement Cure for Sinful Fantasy. — Does not Forgive Parson Evans. — The Falstaff Family, Ancient and Honorable. — Domesday Book. — Doctor Dionysius Digamma, alias "Old Yarmouth,'' the Head-Matt 3r of the Yarmouth Grammar-School ; Jack Falstaff and Hugh Bardolph, his Disciples. — Priscian's Grammar. — In Vino Veritas, — Bardolph Released by Justice Shallow. — Master Slender has Crossed the Pons Asinorum. — Yarmouth Bloaters. — Hiatus in MS. — The Falstaff Family of Scandinavian Origin. — The Soul Never Dwells in a Dry ftace. — Sir Johannes Olt-f Falstaff, the Founder of the Family in England, before Wilhelmus Conquestor Came Over. — Census of his Children, and Sketch of their Careers. — Seal-Ring of Sir John's Grandfather ; the Amethyst Prevents Intoxication. — Hardnut Falstaff, Surcharged with Sack. — A "Chestnut" as an Heir- loom in the Family. — Hiatus in MS. — Falstaff's Scandinavian Thirst. — Some Sack, Francis. — Eulogy of Sack. — A Merry Night in Shallow's Orchard.-^ Court Adjourns for Dinner 131 IX. Falstaff in the Prisoners' Dock ; the Justices Come Not. — A Cup of Sack, Francis. — Sir John Inspects the Sufficient Men Offered by Shallow for Soldiers. — A Whoreson Cold and Cough Caught on the King's Coronation-Day, have Made Peter BuUcalf a Diseased xiv Contents. PACR Man whom the Doctors Cannot Cure. — Doctor Pill- garlic's Emetic-Cathartic Nearly Killed him. — Fal- staii's Advice, to Give Doctors and Druggers the Go-By. — Some Sack, Francis. — Pauca Verba Desunt in MS. — A Late Discovery in Physianthropy. — Sickness and Pain are Figments of the Imagination ; all Diseases are Mere Beliefs ; Mind, not Matter, Cures Disease. — Falstaff Prescribes for Bullcalf an Unmedicated Pellet, Mentalired with the Highest Attenuation of Belief. — Its Marvellous Effects. — Brave Bullcalf Deserves an Invalid's Pension for Ringing in the King's Affairs. — Office and Coat- of-Arms for Bullcalf. — Falstaff, Having the Wars for his Colour, will Turn Diseases to Commodity, and his Pension shall Seem the More Reasonable. — Prince John of Lancaster Never Befriended Sir John at Court ; but the Knight will O'ershine that Princeling in the Clear Sky of Fame. — Old Jack's Pension Long in Arrears ; his Poverty. — To Marry, or Not to Marry, Mistress Ursula Griselda Distaff, that is the Question ; Cross-Examination of Sir John and Ursula. — Qucere : Are not Many Matches Made in Hades? — What Sir John Fustilugs would Do if Well Wived. — Quoit the Devil Down Stairs, and so forth. — His Very Bitter Words to the Rag- ged Recruits. — Some Sack, Francis. — All Drink on Falstaff's Score, and in Honour of Old King Cole. — Pistol's Bombastic Style of Speech; Falstaff's Advice — Talk Like a Man of this World. Is Life Worth Living ? It Depends on the Liver. — Sir John Orders Pistol and Nym to March Mouldy and the Other Hogrubbers Home to Gloucestershire. — If they Return to London, the Penalty and Coat-of-Arms. — Dialogue between Falstaff and his Page. — His Soliloquy on Money. — Is Found Fast Asleep in the Court-Room ; cannot be Awakened ; is Moved and Put to Bed in the Dolphin-Chamber . . . .172 Contents. xv PAGE Falstaff Drinks after the Manner of Bacchus. — Bill of Fare for Breakfast. — Blessings on Dame Quickly and Doll Tearsheet. — Love Grows Cool without Bread and Wine. — Sir John Drops into Poetry. — "Whoa, Pegasus, Whoa ! I Say." — Morals upon his Predica- ment in the Dolphin-Chamber. — His Enemies Gird at him. — Falling Sickness Befalls Falstaff ; it Befell Julius Caesar. — A Sudden Death Most Desirable. — Sir John has Found the Fountain of Youth and Drinks Thereat. — Shallow and Silence Fuddled. — Sir John Acts as a Learned Justicer. — Fears Not a PrcEtnunire 228 XI. Peto as a Witness. — Tavern-Reckoning Found in Fal- staff's Pocket, Read in Evidence. — His Answer ; Declares that Hostess Quickly Gave him a Quittance for All his Debts to Her. — Justice Shallow Refuses to Lend Sir John Forty Pound with which to Buy a Horse.— Did Peto Steal the Seal-Ring of Falstaff 's Grandfather? — A New Way to Pay an Old Debt. — The Boar's Head not a Bakery, but a Drinkery. — Peto as a Pickpocket. — Every Man's House is his Castle. — Slender's Opinion of the Law. — The Boar's Head as a "Castle." — Peto's Contempt of Court. — Falstaff Conceals his Contempt for the Court. — Filliping with a Three-Man Beetle. — Sir John Sees a White Pigeon, a Herald of Death. — Charon and the Styx. — Some Sack, Francis. — Charges that Peto Forged the Tavern-Reckoning. — Hiatus valdh dejlendus in MS. .... 242 XII. Nym and Pistol Quarrel. — Bardolph as a Peacemaker. — g«aj-2-Partnership. — Pistol Will a Sutler Be. — Sir John Shaked of a "Burning Quotidian Tertian"; xvi Contents. PAGE Dies and Goes to Arthur's Bosom. — Bardolph, Pistol, and Nym Shog to France. — Bronze Figure of Falstaff at Stratford. — Fate of the Fat Knight's Followers. — Dowden's Critical Comments 270 XIII. Llewellyn Jones, a Shakespeare-Lover. — How he Read the Player-Poet. — Became a Man of One Book. — Idolized the Fat Knight. — Grew Falstaffian in Body. — Soliloquy at Night, Timed by Shrewsbury Clock. — Killed by The Great Cryptogram. — His Will. — Design for a Falstaff Monument. — Epitaphs ; Quota- tions to Choose from 281 Index 293 SIR JOHN FALSTAFF. The Fat Knight. — His Character. — What Critics have Said of Him. ' In comic power Shakespeare culminates in Fal- staff. Sir John is perhaps the most substantial and original, the most witty and humorous, all- around rogue that ever was portrayed. He presents a most portly presence in the mind's eye, and his figure is drawn so definitely and individually, that even to the mere reader it conveys the clear impression of personal acquaintance. This Miles Gloriosus seems to have as veritable a place in his- tory as Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, Richard of the Lion Heart, or even Shakespeare himself ; and he so comes home to our apprehension and credulity that the historic persons in King Henry IV., compared with him, appear to be idealized characters, and created to set him off to better ' ( — advantage. \His jokes come upon us with double force and relish because of his ponderous person, as he shakes his fat sides with laughter, or " lards the lean earth as he walks along," or goes before 2 Falstaff. his page bearing his sword and buckler, " like a sow that hath overwhelmed all her litter but one." Sir John Paunch is himself " a tun of man," for whom " the grave doth gape thrice wider than for other men." He is not " such stuff as dreams are made on "; and if we approach and touch him, he does not burst like a bubble, and is not " melted into air, into thin air." Hath not Sir John " hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions ? " Is he not " fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer, as a Christian is ? " This enormous wallet of flesh, this " sweet creature of bombast," habitually enriches his discourse with allusions to eating and drinking ; takes his ease in his inn ; lugs his own larder about with him ; and yet this " huge bombard of sack " is not made of a " clay that gets muddy with drink " ; his sensuality does not sodden and brutify his faculties, but it quickens their temper and edge, gives wings to his imagination, and fills it with "nimble, fiery, and delectable shapes." Sir John Fustilugs, though corpulent beyond measure, and always intent upon cherishing his body with eating, drinking, and sleeping, is not fat-witted ; * nor have his brains * It is frequently averred that fat is deadening to the brain, and consequently a foe to intellectual activity. But is this so ? Some of the greatest men the world has ever known were plump even to obesity. Napoleon was decidedly ei7ibonpoint. Dr. Johnson was fleshy even to flabbiness. So was his bio- graphical shadow, Boswell. Balzac, the great French novelist. The Fat Knight. 3 and bowels exchanged places. There is a natural activity about this " fat-kidneyed rascal" — "the veriest varlet that ever chewed with a tooth " — which for lack of proper employment, shows itself in a sort of swell or bustle, that seems to corre- spond with his bulk, as if his mind had inflated his body, and demanded a habitation of no less cir- cumference. Thus conditioned, he puffs and blows and rolls like a whale, scattering the smaller fishes, but affording, in his turn, noble contention to Poins and Prince Hal, who may, in the part they play with this deboshed sea-monster, be compared to the thresher and the sword-fish. Sir John Sack-and-Sugar would not be in char- acter if he were not so fat as he is. The very pinguidity and ponderosity of his person are the most felicitous correspondents to the unlimited opulence of his imagination ; and but for this con- junction the character would be inharmonious, incomplete, and disjointed, if not inherently im- possible. Imagine, if you can, either that " very was so stout that it was a day's exercise to walk around him, and he was encircled with bandages as if he were a hogshead. Rossini, the composer, was a regular Jumbo, since for six years he never saw his knees. Jules Janin, the prince of critics, broke every sofa he ever sat down upon. Lablache, the Italian singer, was charged three fares when he travelled. Dumas pcre was stout, and Sainte-Beuve was cursed with the stomach of a Falstaff, as Renan was. Eugene Sue had such an aversion to his growing corpulency that he drank vinegar to keep it down, and yet he wrote The Wandering jfew. A man is not necessarily fat-witted because he has a boundless stomach. — The Churchman, New York. 4 Falstaff. genius of famine," Justice Shallow, or that iota subscript in the great alphabet of humanity, his cousin Silence, in the character of Falstaff. With such a physical structure as theirs, even Shake- speare could not make them " not only witty in themselves, but the cause that wit is in other men." The oily old rogue lives in conformity with the Epicurean maxim, " Take thine ease, eat, drink, and be merry." He does not distress himself with the question, " Is life worth living ? " nor ask whether marriage is a failure, nor declare what he would do if he were a woman, nor inquire, like Pontius Pilate, " What is Truth ? " He is never at a loss ; he devises a shift for every difficulty. To furnish evidence that he had borne himself bTavely in the Gadshill exploit, he hacked his sword with his dagger, and said to his companions that " he would swear truth out of England " but he would make Prince Hal believe it was done in fight with the travellers having fat purses. Lies sprout out of him, fructify, increase, and beget one another. In the affair on Gadshill, he declares that he fought alone against two rogues in buckram suits. The next moment he is at half-sword with four men. Presently in his narrative we have seven, then eleven buckram men, reinforced by " three misbegotten knaves in Kendal green," all at once upon poor old Jack. The incomprehensible lies that this same fat rogue tells : " how thirty, at least, he fought with ; what wards, what blows, what extrem- ities he endured " — " these lies are like their father that begets them ; gross as a mountain, open, pal- pable." When cross-examined and unmasked, he Critical Comments. 5 does not lose his temper, and is the first to laugh at his boastings. To Hal he says : " By the Lord, I knew ye as well as he that made ye. Why, hear ye, my masters : Was it for me to kill the heir appar- ent ? Should I turn upon the true prince ? Why, thou knowest, I am as valiant as Hercules : but beware instinct ; the lion will not touch the true prince. Instinct is a great matter ; I was a coward on instinct. I shall think the better of myself, and thee, during my life ; I, for a valiant lion, and thou, for a true prince. But, by the Lord, lads, I am glad you have the money. Hostess, clap to the doors ; watch to-night, pray to-morrow. Gallants ! lads ! boys ! hearts of gold ! All the titles of good fellowship come to you ! What, shall we be merry ? Shall we have a play extempore ? " When Hostess Quickly tells Prince Hal that Fal- staff said the other day that Hal owed him a thou- sand pound, " Sirrah," said the prince to him, " do I owe you a thousand pound ? " Sir John answers : " A thousand pound, Hal ! a million : thy love is worth a million ; thou owest me thy love." The dialogue continues : Hostess. Nay, my lortl, he called you Jack, and said he would cudgel you. Fal. Did I, Bardolph ? Bard. Indeed, Sir John, you said so. Fal. Yea, if he said my ring was copper. Prince. I say 't is copper ; darest thou be as good as thy word now ? Fal. Why, Hal, thou knowest, as thou art but man, I dare ; but as thou art prince, I fear thee as I fear the roaring of the lion's whelp. Prirue. And why not as the lion ? 6 Falstaff. Fal. The king himself is to be feared as the lion ; dost thou think I '11 fear thee as I fear thy father ? Nay, an I do, I pray God my girdle break. " Falstaff," says Dr. Johnson, " unimitated, unim- itable Falstaff, how shall I describe thee ? thou compound of sense and vice ; of sense which may be admired, but not esteemed ; of jjdcf which may be despised, but hardly detested. \ Falstaff is a character loaded with faults, and wim those faults which naturally produce contempt. He is a thief and a glutton, a coward and a boaster ; always ready to cheat the weak, and prey upon the poor — to terrify the timorous, and insult the defenseless. At once obsequious and malignant, he satirizes in their absence those on whom he lives by flattering. He is familiar with the prince only as an agent of vice ; but of this familiarity he is so proud as not only to be supercilious and haughty with common men, but to think his interest of importance to the Duke of Lancaster. Yet the man thus corrupt, -thus despicable, makes himself necessary to the prince that despises him by the most pleasing of all qualities, perpetual gayety — by an unfailing power of exciting laughter, which is the more freely in- dulged, as his wit is not of the splendid or ambi- tious kind, but consists in easy scapes and sallies of levity which make sport, but raise no" envy. It must be observed, that he is stained with no enor- mous or sanguinary crimes, so that his licentious- ness is not so offensive but that it may be borne for his mirth. The moral to be drawn from this representation Critical Comments. 7 is, that no man is more dangerous than he that, with a will to corrupt, hath the power to please ; and that neither wit nor honesty ought to think them- selves safe with such a companion when they see Henry seduced by Falstaff." r" Maurice Morgann thus comments on Falstaff 's •character : " It cannot escape the reader's notice that he is a character made up by Shakespeare wholly of incongruities : A man at once young and old, enterprising and fat, a dupe and a wit, harm- less and wicked, weak in principle and resolute by constitution, cowardly in appearance and brave in reality, a knave without malice, a liar without deceit, and a knight, a gentleman, and a soldier, without either dignity, decency, or honour. This is a char- acter which, though it may be decompounded, could not, I believe, have been formed, nor the ingredients of it duly mingled, upon any receipt whatever ; it required the hand of Shakespeare him- self to give to every particular jiart a relish of the whole, and of the whole to every particular part ; alike the same incongruous, identical Falstaff, whether to the grave Chief Justice he vainly talks of his youth and offers to caper for a thousand, or cries to Mrs. Doll, ' I am old ! I am old ! ' although she is seated on his lap, and he is courting her for busses. How Shakespeare could furnish out sentiment of so extraordinary a composition, and supply it with such appropriate and characteristic language, humour, and wit, I cannot tell ; but I may, however, venture to infer, and that confidently, that he who so well understood the uses of incongruity, and that 8 Falstaff. laughter was to be raised by the opposition of qual- ities in the same man, and not by their agreement or conformity, would never have attempted to raise mirth by showing us cowardice in a coward unat- tended by pretense, and softened by every excuse of age, corpulence, and infirmity. And of this we cannot have a more striking proof than his furnish- ing this very character, on one instance of real ter- ror, however excusable, with boast, braggadocio, and pretense, exceeding that of all other stage cow- ards the whole length of his superior wit, humour, ; and invention."* "^ Schlegel, in his Lectures on Dramatic Art and I Literature, remarks : " Under a helpless exterior, / Falstaff conceals an extremely acute mind ; he has always at command some dexterous turn whenever any of his free jokes begin to give displeasure ; he is shrewd in his distinctions, between those whose favour he has to win and those over whom he may assume a familiar authority. He is so convinced that the part which he plays can only pass under the cloak of wit, that even when alone he is never altogether serious, but gives the drollest colouring to his love-intrigues, his intercourse with others, and to his own sensual philosophy. Witness his in- imitable soliloquies on honour, on the influence of wine on bravery, his descriptions of the beggarly vagabonds whom he enlisted, of Justice Shallow, * An Essay on the Dramatic Character of Sir John Falstaff, pp. 146, 147, (London ed. 1777). " No piece of eighteenth- century criticism of Shakspere is more intelligently and warmly appreciative than is this delightful essay.'' — Dowden. Critical Comments. 9 etc. Falstaff has about him a whole court of amusing caricatures, who by turns make their ap- pearance, without ever throwing him into the shade. The adventure, in which the prince, under the dis- guise of a robber, compels him to give up the spoil which he had just taken ; the scene where the two act the part of the king and the prince ; Falstaff's behaviour in the field, his mode of raising recruits, his patronage of Justice Shallow, which afterwards takes such an unfortunate turn : — all this forms a series of characteristic scenes of the most original description, full of pleasantry, and replete with nice and ingenious observation, such as could only fin^ a place in a historical play like the present." Verplanck says : " In his peculiar originality, Falstaff is to be classed only with the poet's own Hamlet and the Spanish Don Quixote, as all of them personages utterly unlike any of those whom we have known or heard of in actual life, who, at the same time, so impress us with their truth that we inquire into and argue about their actions, motives, and qualities as we do in respett to living persons whose anomalies of conduct perplex obser- vers. Thus Falstaff's cowardice or courage, as well as other points of his character, have been as fruit- ful subjects for discussion as the degree and nature of Hamlet's or Don Quixote's mental aber- ration." Richard Grant White, in his Studies in Shake- speare, pp. 29—31, writes : " In Henry IV. we have the highest manifestation of Shakespeare's humor ; but not in Falstaff only, whose vast unctuosity of lo Falstaff. mind as well as body has, to the general eye, un- justly cast his companions into eclipse. Prince Hal himself is no less humorous than Falstaff, while his wit has a dignity and a sarcastic edge not observable in the fat knight's random and reckless sallies. Falstaff, however, is peerless in a great y measure because he is reckless, and because Shake- speare, fully knowing the moral vileness of his creature, had yet, as a dramatist, a perfect intel- lectual indifference to the character of the person- age by whom he effected his dramatic purpose. But besides these principals, the attendants upon their persons and the sateUites of their blazing /intellects, Poins, Bardolph, Nym, Pistol, Mrs. -^ Quickly, Justice Shallow, Silence, and the rest, form a group which for its presentation of the humorous side of life has never been equalled in litera- ture. It surpasses even the best of Don Quixote, as intellectual surpasses practical joking. This history, take it all in all, is the completest, although far from being the highest, exhibition of Shake- speare's varied powers as poet and dramatist. No other play shows his various faculties at the same time in such number and at such a height. The 1 greatest Falstaff is that of the Second Part. He is "^ in every trait the same as he of Part First ; but his wit becomes brighter, his humor more delicate, richer in allusion, and more highly charged with fun ; his impudence attains proportions truly heroic. As the Falstaff of Part Second of Henry IV. is the best, that of The Merry Wives is the least admirable of all the three. In this comedy the Critical Comments. 1 1 Falstaff is comparatively feeble, and the laughter provoked by the scenes in which he appears is in a great measure due to practical joking. This de- terioration in the fat knight's quality, and in that of the pleasure that he gives, agrees with and sup- , ports the tradition that the comedy was written ,in compliance with the request of Queen Elizabeth, that Falstaff should be shown in love. It is not reasonable to suppose that the man who conceived Falstaff would, without external and superior sug- gestion, present him as a lover, or had conceived him as capable of the amorous passion ; and his part of this comedy, charming in other respects, has all the air of being produced under constraint." Hazlitt, in his Characters of Shakespear s Plays, says : " Sir John is old as well as fat, which gives a melancholy retrospective tmge to his character ; and by the disparity between his inclinations and his capacity for enjoyment, makes it still more ludicrous and fantastical. The secret of Falstaff's wit is for\ the most part a masterly presence of mind, an abso- rutff seTf-jfdssession,- which" nothing can disturb. His repartees are involuntary suggestions of his self-love ; instinctive evasions of everything that threatens to interrupt the career of his triumphant jollity and self-complacency. His very size iloats him out of all his difficulties in a sea of rich conceits ; and he turns round on the pivot of his convenience, with every occasion and at a moment's warning. His natural repugnance to every unpleasant thought or circumstance, of itself makes light of objections, and provokes the most extravagant and licentious 1 2 Falstaff. answers in his own justification. His indifference to truth puts no check upon his invention, and the more improbable and unexpected his contriv- ances are, the more happily does he seem to be delivered of them, the anticipation of their effect acting as a stimulus to the gayety of his fancy. The success of one adventurous sally gives him spirits to undertake another ; he deals always in round numbers, and his exaggerations and excuses are ' open, palpable, monstrous as the father that begets them.' " Furnivall says : " Of Falstaff, who cai) say enough ? He is the incarnation of humour and lies, of wit and self-indulgence, of shrewdness and im- morality, of self-possession and vice, without a spark of conscience or reverence, without self- respect, an adventurer preying upon the weaknesses of other men. Yet all men enjoy him — so did Shakspere, and he carried his delight in success- ful rogues to the end of his life. See how in Winter's Tale he bubbles and chirps with the fun of that rascal Autolycus, and lets him sail off suc- cessful and unharmed." Dowden in his Shakspere: A Critical Study of His Mind and Art, * comments : " Sir John, although, as he truly declares, ' not only witty in himself, but the cause that wit is in other men,' is by no means a purely comic character. Were he no more than this, the stern words of Henry to his old companion would be unendurable. The cen- tral princ iple of Falstaff's method of living is that *Am. ed., pp. 325, 326. Critical Comments. 1 3 the facts and laws of the world may be evaded or set at defiance, if only the resources of inexhausti- ble wit be called upon to supply, by brilliant in- genuity, whatever deficiencies may be found in character and conduct Therefore, Shakspere' condemned Falstaff inexorably. Falstaff, the in vulnerable, endeavours to coruscate away thei realities of life. But the fact presses in upon Fal- staff at the last relentlessly. Shakspere's earnest- ness here is at one with his mirth ; there is a certain sternness underlying his laughter. Mere detection of his stupendous unveracities leaves Sir John just where he was before ; the success of his lie is of less importance to him than is the glory of its invention. ' There is no such thing as totally de- molishing Falstaff ; he has so much of the invul- nerable in his frame that no ridicule can destroy him ; he is safe even in defeat, and seems to rise, like another Antaeus, with recruited vigour from every fall.' (Morgann.) It is not ridicule, but some stem invasion of fact — not to be escaped from — which can subdue Falstaff. Perhaps Nym and Pistol got at the truth of the matter when they discoursed of Sir John's unexpected collapse: Nym. The king hath run bad humours on the knight ; that 's the even of it. Pistol. Nym, thou has spoke the right ; His heart is fracted and corroborate." * Charles Cowden Clarke, in his Shakespeare- Characters, says : " With the genial spirit in which * " Strange to say, no critic has attempted to make sense of corroborate." — ROLFE. 14 Falstaff. his sweet nature was conceived, Shakespeare con- trives to throw in some dash of feeling — a motion of our common humanity — some extenuation, even in his worst characters ; for, whatever they were besides, they were also men, and unmitigated evil belongs only to the origin of all evil — not to human nature. With the accurate perception, however, jj \ of true morality, he has not imparted to the char- acter of Falstaff — attractive as it is for its sociality, wit, humour, and imagination — any of those in- trinsic qualities which would set him up as an object of imitation — of course in his convivialities, his roystering, and other laxities ; but he has as- sociated them with the meaner vices of profligacy, turning these to the fullest account in completing the character. Gross as the knight is, and won- derfully as the poet has relieved that grossness by the most brilliant flashes of wit and drollery, no mortal, it is to be presumed, ever arose from read- ing the plays in which he shines with a less firm appreciation of the wealth of virtue in all its senses; still less could any one desire to mimic his propen- sities. This cannot be said of some modern creations that might be instanced, which, from their sneers at sympathy and mutual confidence — their constant depreciation of the most generous feelings of our nature, inducing suspicion and dis- trust of all human profession, would go to sap the - foundations of what alone can support the social fabric." From John Payne Collier's Diary, it appears that Coleridge gave the following character of Falstaff : Critical Comments. 15 " He was no coward, but pretended to be one merely for the sake of trying experiments on the credulity of mankind: ihe was a liar with the same object, and not because he loved falsehood for itself. He was a man of such pre-eminent abilities, as to give him a profound contempt for all those by whom he was usually surrounded, and to lead to a determination on his part, in spite of their fancied superiority, to make them his tools and dupes. He knew, however low he descended, that his own talents would raise him, and extricate him from any difficulty. While he was thought to be the greatest rogue, thief, and liar, he still had that about him which could render him not only respect- able, but absolutely necessary to his companions.^ It was in characters of complete moral depravity, but of first-rate wit and talents, that Shakspere de- lighted ; and Coleridge instanced Richard the Third, Falstaff, and lago." By the way, Ignatius Donnelly has ciphered out and completely demonstrated — to his own satis- faction, at least, — not only that Francis Bacon was the real author of the plays which William Shake- speare, in his lifetime, claimed as his own ; which all his personal friends, as well as his personal ene- mies, believed to be his ; and which have been accepted as his for nearly three hundred years ; but also that the fat Shakespeare was gross and coarse in his nature and life, a glutton in his diet, and fond of the bottle ; that he was not devoid, however, of a certain ready wit ; that he was the original Falstaff ; that, before sickness broke him 1 6 Falstaff. down, he acted on the stage his own shameful character in the disguise of Falstaff — a farce inside of a comedy ; that sweet Anne Hathaway was the model from which Bacon drew Mistress Quickly ; and that the statesman-philosopher shared with the player-poet the theatrical profits realized from Shakespeare's Plays. (7%^ London street. It happened thus: When Sir John had, as Widow Quickly said, "eaten her out of house and home, and put all her substance into * 1\\e. penny and all the royal coins then had impressed upon them the sign of the cross. 28 Falstaff. that fat belly of his," that poor lone, lorn landlady- brought her action against that organized appetite and omnivorous boarder, to recover " a hundred mark" long overdue on his board bill at the Boar's Head tavern. In regard to this debt she says: " I have borne, and borne, and borne, and have been fubbed off, and fubbed off, and fubbed off, from this day to that day, that it is a shame to be thought on. There is no honesty in such dealing; unless a woman should be made an ass and a beast, to bear every knave's vi^rong." When the two officers. Fang and Snare, rein- forced by this irate hostess, were about to arrest Falstaff at her suit, Snare, who seems to have been of a cautious, retiring nature, and, in cases of danger, rather reluctant to "stand to 't," says: "It may chance to cost some of us our lives, for he will stab." And Fang, who appears, according to his own estimate of himself, to have had plenty of grip and grit in reserve, and ready for use in an emergency, replies : "If I can close with him, I care not for his thrust. . . . An I but fist him once; an a' come but within my vice, — " While these three Furies were at Pie-corner, and lying in wait for the delinquent debtor ■v^rho was about to be on his way to York, the plaintiff widow of East- cheap exclaims : "Yonder he comes : and that arrant malmsey-nose knave, Bardolph, with him. Master Fang and Master Snare, do me, do me, do me your offices." When Hostess Quickly and the officers begin to close in on him, Falstaff says : " How now! whose mare 's dead ? what 's the mat- Before the Chief fustice. 29 ter ? " At once Sheriff Fang bristles up himself and shouts : " Sir John, I arrest you at the suit of Mistress Quickly"; and thereupon he tries to arrest the knight by installments. But Sir John resists arrest, orders the varlets away, directs Bar- dolph to draw his sword and cut off Mr. Fang's head, and throw Mrs. Quickly into the gutter. Whereupon she screams: "Throw me in the chan- nel! wilt thou? wilt thou? thou bastardly rogue! Murther! murther! Ah, thou honey-suckle [homi- cidal] villain! wilt thou kill God's officers and the king's? Ah, thou honey-seed rogue! thou art a honey-seed, a man-queller, and a woman-queller." And so the war of words worsens until the Chief Justice appears on the scene, commands the be- ligerents to keep the peace, asks Sir John why he is brawling here, and tells him that he should have been well on his way to York. The poor plaintiff interpleads, and states her case with a " tempest of exclamation"; and then his lordship says to the defendant debtor: "Are you not ashamed to enforce a poor widow to so rough a course to come by her own?" Falstaff answers: "My lord, this is a poor mad soul; and she says up and down the town that her eldest son is like you : she hath been in good case, and the truth is, poverty hath distracted her. But for these foolish officers, I beseech you I may have redress against them." The Chief Justice replies : " Sir John, Sir John, I am well acquainted with your manner of wrenching the true cause the false way. It is not a confident brow, nor the throng of words that come with such more than 30 Falstaff. impudent sauciness from you, can thrust me from a level consideration; you- have, as it appears to me, practised upon the easy-yielding spirit of this woman, and made her serve your uses both in purse and in person. . . . Pay her the debt you owe her, and unpay the villainy you have done her; the one you may do with sterling money, and the other with current repentance." Falstaff rejoins : " My lord, I will not undergo this sneap without reply. You call honourable boldness impudent sauciness; if a man will make courtesy and say nothing, he is virtuous. No, my lord, my humble duty remem- bered, I will not be your suitor. I say to you, I do desire deliverance from these officers, being upon hasty employment in the king's affairs."* And the Chief Justice says: "You speak as having power to do wrong ; but answer in the effect of your reputation, and satisfy the poor woman." Falstaff takes Hostess Quickly aside, glozes and pacifies her, tells her not to pawn her plate and the " fly-bitten tapestries " of her dining-chambers as she proposes to do to raise money, persuades her to withdraw her action against him, accepts her invitation to supper where he is to meet that "honest, virtuous, civil gentlewoman," Doll Tear- sheet, and sends the plaintiff widow away under the escort of red-nose Bardolph, whom he directs to " hook on, hook on." In the meanwhile Chief * ' ' Falstaff claimed the protection legally called quia profeciurus (see Coke upon Littleton, 130 a). This is one of the many examples of Shakespeare's somewhat intimate ac- quaintance with legal forms and phrases." — Knight. Before the Chief yusiice. 3 1 Justice Gascoigne is talking with Master Gower, who has brought news of the King, Prince Hal, and the war in Wales and the north of England. Hav- ing rid himself of Dame Quickly, and forgetting his double declaration just made to her, " As I am a gentleman," the fat knight, with great impro- priety of manners, forthwith intrudes himself into the dialogue between his Lordship and Master Gower. Fal. My lord ! Ch. y. What 's the matter ? Fal. Master Gower, shall I entreat you with me to dinner ? Gow, I must wait upon my good lord here ; I thank you, good Sir John. Ch. y. Sir John, you loiter here too long, being you are to take soldiers up in counties as you go. Fal. Will you sup with me. Master Gower ? Ch. y. What foolish master taught you these manners. Sir John ? Fal. Master Gower, if they become me not, he was a fool that taught them me. — This is the right fencing grace, my lord ; tap for tap, and so part fair. Against this attack, the Chief Justice, losing his temper, parries and riposts with the home-thrust: " Now the Lord lighten thee ! thou art a great fool." /y In this scene, Falstafi" is less distinguished for wit than for effrontery. His whole behavior to Chief Justice Gascoigne, whom he despairs of win- ning by flattery, is singularly insolent, and shows the taint of the vulgar society of the Boar's Head tavern. Prince Hal is, as Sir John supposes, "so much 32 Falstaff. engraffed to Falstaff," that, when the latter hears the old king is as dead as " nail in door," and that " Harry the Fifth 's the man," he throws out threats and promises, and issues commands as follows: Away, Bardolph ! Saddle my horse. Master Robert Shallow, choose what office thou wilt in the land, t' is thine. Pistol, I will double-charge thee with dignities. . . . Master Shallow, my Lord Shallow, be what thou wilt ; I am Fortune's steward — get on thy boots ; we '11 ride all night. O sweet Pistol ! Away, Bardolph ! Come, Pistol, utter more to me ; and withal devise something to do thyself good. Boot, boot. Master Shallow ; I know the young king is sick for me. Let us take any man's horses ; the laws of England are at my commandment. Blessed are they that have been my friends, and woe unto my Ijird Chief Justice ! Lord Campbell thus comments : " Shakespeare has likewise been blamed for an extravagant per- version of law in the promises and threats which Falstaff throws out on hearing that Henry IV. was dead, and that Prince Hal reigned in his stead. But Falstaff may not unreasonably be supposed to have believed that he could do all this, even if he were strictly kept to the literal meaning of his words. In the natural and usual course of things he was to become (as it was then called) ' favour- ite ' (or, as we call it, Prime Minister) to the new king, and to have all the power and patronage of the crown in his hands. Then, why might not Ancient Pistol, who had seen service, have been made War Minister 1 And if Justice Shallow had been pitchforked into the House of Peers, he Before the Chief Justice. 33 might have turned out a distinguished Law Lord. By taking ' any man's horses ' was not meant steal- ing them, but pressing them for the king's service, or appropriating them at a nominal price, which the law would then have justified under the king's prerogative of pre-emption. Sir W. Gascoigne was continued as Lord Chief Justice in the new reign ; but, according to law and custom, he was remov- able, and he no doubt expected to be removed, from his office. Therefore, if Lord Eldon could be supposed to have written the play, I do not see how he would be chargeable with having forgotten any of his law while writing it.'' III. Shakespeare. — Critical Comments on His Genius. — As Great in Describing Weakness as Strength. — Shallow and Silence, the Gloucestershire Justices. — Their Mental Calibre. — Silence, the Shadow of a Shade of Shallow. — Little is Known of Shakespeare's External Life. Criticism on the oceanic-minded Shakespeare is not like circumnavigating a desert islet ; 't is like coasting along and exploring a continent. This myriad-minded man * has left no form of human action or utterance ungilded by his genius. Capable of being all that he actually or imagina- tively saw, this one man in his time played many parts, and, in all of them, he held, as it were, the mirror up to nature. So comprehensive was his genius for the delineation of character that, in his plays, the king and the beggar, the hero and the coward, the sage and the idiot, speak and act with equal truth. He entered into at will, and aban- * " Coleridge has most felicitously applied to him a Greek epithet, given before to I know not whom, certainly none so deserving of it, fivpiovovi, the thousand-souled Shakespeare. " — Hallam's Literature of Europe, Part III., ch. vi. In a note to ch. xv. of his Biographia Literaria, Coleridge says: " Avrfp /nvptovovi, a phrase which I have borrowed from a Greek monk, who applies it to a patriarch of Constan- tinople." 34 Shakespeare s Genius. 35 doned at will, the passions which bless, and those that blast, other natures. He is the only writer who was as great in describing weakness as strength. E. P. Whipple, in his Literature of the Age of Elizabeth, * after stating the few facts certainly known of Shakespeare's personal history, says : " Such is essentially the meagre result of a century of research into the external life of Shakespeare. As there is hardly a page in his writings which does not shed more light upon the biography of his mind, and bring us nearer to the individuality of the man, the antiquaries in despair have been compelled to abandon him to the psychologists ; and the moment the transition from external to internal facts is made, the most obscure of men passes into the most notorious. For this personality and soul we call Shakespeare, the recorded inci- dents of whose outward career were so few and trifling, lived a more various life — a life more crowded with ideas, passions, volitions, and events — than any potentate the world has ever seen. Compared with his experience, the experience of Alexander or Hannibal, of Csesar or Napoleon, was narrow and one-sided. He had projected himself into almost all the varieties of human character, and, in imagination, had intensely realized and lived the life of each. From the throne of the monarch to the bench of the village alehouse, there were few positions in which he had not placed himself, and which he had not for a time * Pp. 33, 34, 53- 36 Falstaff. identified with his own. No other man had ever seen nature and human life from so many points of view ; for he had looked upon them through the eyes of Master Slender and Hamlet, of Caliban and Othello, of Dogberry and Mark Antony, of Ancient Pistol and Julius Caesar, of Mistress Tear- sheet and Imogen, of Dame Quickly and Lady Macbeth, of Robin Goodfellow and Titania, of Hecate and Ariel. . . . Shakespeare could run his sentiment, passion, reason, imagination, into any mould of personality he was capable of shap- ing, and think and speak from that. The result is that every character is a denizen of the Shake- spearian World ; every character, from Master Slender to Ariel, is in some sense a poet, that is, is gifted with imagination to express his whole nature, and make himself inwardly known ; yet we feel throughout that the ' thousand-souled ' Shakespeare is still but one soul, capable of shifting into a thou- sand forms, but leaving its peculiar birth-mark on every individual it informs." Schlegel, in his Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature, says : " Never, perhaps, was there so comprehensive a talent for the delineation of char- acter as Shakespeare's. It not only grasps the diversities of rank, sex, and age, down to the dawnings of infancy ; not only do the king and the beggar, the hero and the pickpocket, the sage and the idiot speak and act with equal truth ; not only does he transport himself to distant ages and for- eign nations, and portray in the most accurate manner, with only a few apparent violations of Shakespeare s Genius. 37 costume, the spirit of the ancient Romans, of the French in their wars with the English, of the English themselves during a great part of their history, of the Southern Europeans (in the serious part of many comedies), the cultivated society of that time, and the former rude and barbarous state of the North ; his human characters have not only such depth and precision that they cannot be ar- ranged under classes, and are inexhaustible, even in conception: No, this Prometheus not merely forms men, he opens the gates of the magical world of spirits ; calls up the midnight ghost ; exhibits before us his witches amidst their unhallowed mysteries; peoples the air with sportive fairies and sylphs : and these beings, existing only in imagina- tion, possess such truth and consistency, that even when deformed monsters like Caliban, he extorts the conviction that if there should be such beings they would so conduct themselves. In a word, as he carries with him the most fruitful and daring fancy into the kingdom of nature; on the other hand, he carries nature into the regions of fancy, lying beyond the confines of reality. We are lost in astonishment at seeing the extraordinary, the wonderful, and the unheard of, in such intimate nearness." Heine writes: "The scene of the action of Shakespeare's plays is the globe itself, — this is his unity of place ; eternity is the period of the action of his pieces, — this is his unity of time ; and in conformity with these two unities is the hero of his drama, who represents the central point, — the unity 38 Falstaff. of interest. Humanity is his hero, a hero con- tinually dying and continually being born, con- tinually loving, continually hating, yet loving more than hating." * Dowden writes : \ " Shakspere does not seem to feel that Dogberry and Verges are creatures of another breed from himself. He stands, it is true, at the opposite pole of humanity; nevertheless, a potential Dogberry element existed even in Shak- spere. ' Common people,' as Mr. Bagehot has happily said, ' could be cut out of Shakspere ' ; just as the robust and prosaic statesman of West- moreland could have been cut out of the great spiritual thinker and poet of the Lake district. Therefore, apart from the interest of sympathy, we have a personal interest in understanding the com- mon features of the most ordinary lives. Our own life is akin to them, and may readily lapse into a resemblance curiously exact. But as long as we can smile at them we are safe; our sense of humor is servant of our passion for perfection. We have no need to grow impatient or indignant with those grotesque portions of humanity; that would un- necessarily disturb the balance of our lives and the purity of our perceptions: we only need to under- stand them and to smile." Shallow and Silence, the Gloucestershire jus- tices, sit with Dogberry and Verges, Slender and * JVit, Wisdom, and Pathos from the Prose of Heinrich Heine, p. 63. f Shakspere : A Critical Study of his Mind and Art, Am. ed., pp. 315, 316. Shallow s Character. 39 Sir Andrew Aguecheek, high among Shakespeare's minor triumphs. One of the finest burlesque por- traits that ever was drawn is Falstaff's delineation of Shallow, a portion only of the entire portrait being as follows : " This same starved justice hath done nothing but prate to me of the wildness of his youth, and the feats he hath done about Turn- bull street; and every third word a lie, duer paid to the hearer than the Turk's tribute. I do remember him at Clement's Inn, like a man made after supper of a cheese-paring. When he was naked, he was for all the world like a forked radish, with a head fantastically carved upon it with a knife. He was so forlorn that his dimen- sions to any thick sight were invisible; he was the very genius of famine; you might have thrust him and all his apparel into an eel-skin: — the case of a treble hautboy was a mansion for him — a court! and now has he land and beefs." Shallow is a garrulous old fellow, full of a sense of the great- ness of his office, " a judge who ever carries the ermine with him off the bench, and lugs it labori- ously around in ordinary life." Twenty Sir John Falstaffs shall not abuse Robert Shallow, esquire, " a gentleman born, who writes himself Armigero, in any bill, warrant, quittance, or obligation, Armi- gero" and who is, moreover, the acstos rotulorum among the justices of the peace in the county of Gloucester. He is given to boasting of the hair- brained deeds and gallantries of his youth, which adventures, probably, were, for the most part, but fancies and figments of his rattle-box brain. His 40 Falstaff. wit is wandering, and he has not the power of steady and concatenated thinking. His line of thought and speech is not straight, nor even cur- vilinear, but zigzag and angular. His talk is tautological, jumping, jerky, disjointed, and incon- sequent, and abounds in commonplace reflections and impertinent digressions. As a more particular instance, take Shallow's account of his early life in London, and the inimitable and affecting, though most absurd and ludicrous, dialogue between Shallow and Silence on the death of old Double: Shal. Come on, come on, come on, sir ; give me your hand, sir, give me your hand, sir : an early stirrer, by the rood ! And how doth my good cousin Silence ? Sil. Good morrow, good cousin Shallow. Shal. And how doth my cousin, your bed-fellow ? and your fairest daughter, and mine, my god-daughter Ellen ? Sil. Alas, a black ousel, cousin Shallow ? Shal. By yea and nay, sir, I dare say my cousin William is become a good scholar ; he is at Oxford still, is he not ? Sil. Indeed, sir, to my cost. Shal. He must, then, to the inns o' court shortly. I was once of Clement's Inn,* where I think they will talk of mad Shallow yet. Sil. You were called "lusty Shallow " then, cousin. * Staunton, in his Illustrative Comments on King Henry IV., says of Clement's Inn: This was so called, says Stow, " because it standeth near to St. Clement's Church, but nearer to the fair fountain called Clement's Well." How long before 1479, nineteenth of Edward IV., it was occupied by students of the law is not known, but that it had been so inhabited for some time previously is quite certain ; and we have the testi- mony of Strype to show that in after-times the roisterers of the Inns of Court fully maintained the reputation which Shallow took so much pride in claiming for himself and his fellow Shallow and Silence. 41 Shal. By the mass, I was called any thing ; and I would have done any thing indeed too, and roundly too. There was I, and little John Doit of Staffordshire, and black George Barnes, and Francis Pickbone, and Will Squele, a Cotswold man ; you had not four such swinge-bucklers in all the inns o' court again. Then was Jack Falstaff, now Sir John, a boy, and page to Thomas Mowbray, Duke of Norfolk. Sil. This Sir John, cousin, that comes hither anon about soldiers ? Shal. The same Sir John, the very same. I saw him break Skogan's head at the court-gate, when a' was a crack not thus high ; and the very same day did I fight with one Sampson Stockfish, a fruiterer, behind Gray's Inn. Jesu, Jesu, the mad days that I have spent ! and to see how many of my old acquaintance are dead ! Sil. We shall all follow, cousin. Shal. Certain, 't is certain ; very sure, very sure : death, as the Psalmist saith, is certain to all ; all shall die. How a good yoke of bullocks at Stamford fair ? Sil. By my troth, I was not there. Shal. Death is certain. Is old Double of your town living yet? Sil. Dead, sir. Shal. Jesu, Jesu, dead ! a' drew a good bow ; and dead ! a shot a fine shoot : John o' Gaunt loved him well, and betted much money on his head. Dead ! a' would have clapped i' the swinge-bucklers: "Here about this Church," he is speaking of St. Clement's, "and in the parts adjacent, were frequent disturbances by reason of the unthrifts of the Inns of Chancery, who were so unruly on nights, walking about to the disturb- ance and danger of such as passed along the streets, that the inhabitants were fain to keep watches. In the year 1582, the Recorder himself, with six more of the honest inhabitants, stood by St. Clement's Church, to see the lanthorn hung out, and to observe if he could meet with any of these outrageous dealers." 42 Falstaff. clout at twelve score ; and carried you a forehand shaft at fourteen and fourteen and a half, that it would have done a man's heart good to see. How a score of ewes now ? Sil. Thereafter as they be ; a score of good ewes may be worth ten pounds. Shal. And is old Double dead ? When Sir John asks the two justices whether they have provided him with half a dozen sufficient recruits, Shallow answers : " Marry, have we, sir. Will you sit ? . . . Where 's the roll ? where 's the roll ? where 's the roll ? Let me see, let me see, let me see. So, so, so, so, so, so, so ; yea, marry, sir. Ralph Mouldy ! Let them appear as I call ; let them do so, let them do so. Let me see ; where is Mouldy ? " When Falstaff says, " We have heard the chimes at midnight," Shallow responds : " That we have, that we have, that we have ; in faith. Sir John, we have ; our watchword was ' Hem, boys ! '*— Come, let 's to dinner ; come, let 's to dinner. — Jesu, the days that we have seen ! — Come, come." At an- other time the justice says to Falstaff, who asks to be excused from staying all night with him : I will not excuse you ; you shall not be excused ; excuses shall not be admitted ; there is no excuse shall serve ; you shall not be excused. — Why, Davy ! \Enter Da-vy^ Davy, Davy, Davy, Davy, Ic t me see, Davy ; let me see ; yea, marry, William cook, bid him come hither. Sir John, you shall not be excused. * " There was an old rollicking song, whose burden. Hem, boys, hem ! still lingered in Justice Shallow's memory. Only one verse of this song is now extant." — Staunton. Shallow and Silence. 43 In Shallow's orchard, Falstaff says : Fore God, you have here a goodly dwelling and a rich. Shal, Barren, barren, barren ; beggars all, beggars all. Sir John ; marry, good air. Spread, Davy ; spread, Davy ; vfell said, Davy. Fal. This Davy serves you for good uses ; he is your serv- ing-man and your husband. Shal. A good varlet, a good varlet, a very good varlet. Sir John — by the mass, I have drunk too much sack at supper ! — a good varlet. — Now sit down, now sit down. — Come, cousin. Clarke, in his Shakespeare-Characters, thus comments : " It is impossible to conceive a stronger contrast, a more direct antipodes in mental struct- ure than Shakespeare has achieved between Falstaff md Shallow ; the one all intellect, all acuteness of perception and fancy, and the other, the justice, a mere compound of fatuity, a caput mortuwn of un- derstanding. Not only is Shallow distinguished by his eternal babble, talking 'infinite nothings' ; but with the flabby vivacity, the idiotic restlessness, that not unfrequently accompany this class of mind (if such a being may be said to possess mind at all), he not only tattles on — ' whir, whir, whir,' like a ventilator, but he fills up die chinks in his sen- tences with repetitions, as blacksmiths continue to tap the anvil in the intervals of turning the iron upon it. But Shakespeare has presented us with a still stronger quality of association in minds of Shallow's calibre, that of asking questions everlast- ingly, and instantly giving evidence that the replies have not sunk even skin-deep with them, rushing on from subject to subject, and returning again to 44 Falstaff. those that have been dismissed. . . . As if it were not sufficient triumph for the poet to have achieved such a contrast as the two intellects of Falstaff and Shallow — in the consciousness and the opulence of unlimited genius, he stretches the line of his invention, and produces a foil even to Shal- low — a climax to nothing — in the person of his cousin, Silence. Silence is an embryo of a man — a molecule — a graduation from nonentity towards intellectual being — a man dwelling in the suburbs of sense, groping about in the twilight of apprehen- sion and understanding. He is the second stage in the Vestiges ; he has just emerged from the tad- pole state. Here again a distinction is preserved between these two characters. Shallow gabbles on from mere emptiness ; while Silence, from the same incompetence, rarely gets beyond the shortest replies. The firmament of his wonder and adora- tion are the sayings and doings of his cousin and brother-justice at Clement's Inn, and which he has been in the constant habit of hearing, without satiety and nausea, for half a century." Hazlitt, in his English Comic Writers, thus com- ments : " In point of understanding and attain- ments, Shallow sinks low enough ; and yet his cousin Silence is a foil to him ; he is the shadow of a shade, glimmers on the very verge of down- right imbecility, and totters on the brink of noth- ing. He has been ' merry twice or once ere now,' and is hardly persuaded to break his silence in a song. Shallow has ' heard the chimes at midnight,' and roared out glees and catches at taverns and Shakespeare s Life. 45 inns of court, when he was young. So, at least, he tells his cousin Silence, and Falstaff encourages the loftiness of his pretensions. Shallow would be thought a great man among his dependents and followers ; Silence is nobody — not even in his own opinion ; yet he sits in the orchard and eats his caraways and pippins among the rest. Shakespear takes up the meanest subjects with the same ten- derness that we do an insect's wing, and would not kill a fly." It has been lamented that we know so little of the man Shakespeare — that his true biography is so brief. More than a century ago, Steevens wrote : " All that is known with any degree of certainty concerning Shakespeare, is, that he was born at Stratford-upon-Avon ; married and had children there ; went to London, where he commenced actor, and wrote poems and plays ; returned to Stratford, made his will, died, and was buried." Dyce says : " Such is the remark made long ago by one of the most acute of his commentators ; and even at the present day, — notwithstanding some additional notices of Shakespeare which have been more recently discovered, — the truth of the remark can hardly fail to be felt and acknowledged by all, except by professed antiquaries, with whom the mere mention of a name, in whatever kind of doc- ument, assumes the character of an important fact." Notwithstanding all the research into the ex- ternal life of Shakespeare, and the commentary which, during the last hundred and fifty years and more has gathered around his Plays, " as the desert 46 Falstaff. sands around the Egyptian Sphinx," all the facts respecting his personal history may be compressed within the compass of a quarto page of his writings — Parnassus crushed into a nutshell. But Shake- speare-lovers will probably continue to peep and botanize upon and around their idol's grave ; and will continue to turn over and over the lamentably small bundle of biographical straw from which every grain of truth and fact respecting Shake- speare's personal history seems to have been threshed long ago. Though we can never know Shakespeare as we know Johnson by means of Boswell's book, yet we can know him if we study his works. Emerson, in his Representative Men, remarks : " Shakespeare is the only biographer of Shakespeare ; and even he can tell nothing, except to the Shakespeare in us. . . . What trait of his private mind has he hidden in his dramas ? One can discern, in his ample pictures of the gentleman and the king, what forms and humanities pleased him ; his delight in troops of friends, in large hospitality, in cheerful giving. ... So far from Shakespeare's being the least known, he is the one person, in all modern history, known to us. What point of morals, of manners, of economy, of philosophy, of religion, of taste, of the conduct of life, has he not settled ? What mystery has he not signified his knowledge of ? What office, or function, or district of man's work, has he not remembered ? What king has he riot taught state, as Talma taught Napoleon ? What maiden has not found him finer than her delicacy ? Shakespeare's Life. 47 What lover has he not outloved ? What sage has he not outseen ? What gentleman has he not in- structed in the rudeness of his behavior ? " On the foregoing, Cushman K. Davis, in his The Law in Shakespeare, thus comments : " All this is true, but it is not the whole truth. We see a man who revered womanhood, who has given us the finest types of manhood, who was generous, gentle, blameless, who saw through shams clearer than Montaigne, who scourged lust, gluttony, lying, slander, cowardice, pedantry, and all personal meanness with more than the wit of Rabelais, and yet who was silent concerning those great agitations for personal right and liberty which so shortly after he died subverted the monarchy, put aside the peerage, overthrew the church, and forever estab- lished that the state is made for man and not man for the state." Mr. Davis further comments : " There is nowhere a hint of sympathy with personal rights as against the sovereign, nor with parliament, then first assuming its protective attitude towards the English people, nor with the few judges who, like Coke, showed a glorious obstinacy in their resistance to the prerogative. In all his works there is not one direct word for liberty of speech, thought, religion — those rights which in his age were the very seeds of time, into which his eye, of all men's, could best look to see which grain would grow and which would not. In all ages great men and great women have died for humanity, but none of these have been commemorated by him. The fire of no martyr gleams in his pages." 48 Falstaff. Corson, in his Introduction to the Study of Shake- speare, remarks : " We really know more of Shake- speare than we know of any other author of the time, either in English or in European literature, who was not connected with state affairs. The personal history of a mere author, and especially of a playwright, as a dramaitic author, whatever his ability, was frequently called, with no influence at Court, was not considered of sufficient importance to be recorded in those days, when the Court was everything, and the individual man without adven- titious recommendations, was nothing." IV. The Fat Knight " Leers " upon King Hal Passing by. — The "Sweet Boy" Sentences the "Greasy Knight." — The Chief Justice Sends Him to Prison. — A Judgment without ' ' Cold Considerance." The last scene of Part Second of King Henry IV. is laid in a public place near Westminster Abbey. There two grooms enter and strew rushes in the path of the royal procession about to come from the coronation. Falstaff and his followers, who, all booted and spurred, have ridden posthaste from Shallow's house in Gloucestershire, enter ; and, in a group, they press and push and thrust and squeeze and elbow and wedge their way well to the very front of the dense crowd — arrectis auribus adstant ■ — assembled to see the newly-crowned King and his train pass by. The fat knight is almost breath- less, but soon recovers his wind and is able to speak : Fa/. Stand here by me, Master Robert Shallow ; I will make the King do you grace. I will leer upon him, as a' comes by ; and do but mark the countenance that he will give me. Pisi. God bless thy lungs, good knight ! J^aZ. Come here, Pistol ; stand behind me. — O, if I had had time to have made new liveries, I would have bestowed the thousand pound I borrowed of you. [ To S/tal/ow.] But 't is " 49 50 Falsi aff. no matter ; this poor show doth better ; this doth infer the zeal I had to see him. Shal. It doth so. Fal. It shows my earnestness of affection, — Shal. It doth so. Fal. My devotion, — Shal. It doth, it doth, it doth. Fal. As it were, to ride day and night ; and not to deliber. ate, not to remember, not to have patience to shift me, — Shal. It is best, certain. Fal. But to stand stained with travel, and sweating with de- sire to see him ; thinking of nothing else, putting all affairs else in oblivion, as if there were nothing else to be done but to see him. Shal. 'T is so, indeed. Presently the trumpets sound, and the many- headed multitude roars with multitudinous tongue. Thereupon enter the King and his train, the Lord Chief Justice among them. Sir John can no longer be silent. Fal. God save thy grace. King Hal ! my royal Hal. Pisi. The heavens thee guard and keep, most royal imp of fame ! Fal. God save thee, my sweet boy ! King. My lord chief justice, speak to that vain man. Ch. y. Have you your wits ? know you what 't is you speak ? Fal. My king ! My Jove ! I speak to thee, my heart ! King. I know thee not, old man : fall to thy prayers ; How ill white hairs become a fool, and jester ! I have long dream'd of such a kind of man, So surfeit-swell'd, so old, and so profane ; But, being awak'd, I do despise my dream. Make less thy body hence, and more thy grace ; Leave gormandizing ; know the grave doth gape For thee thrice wider than for other men. The Fat Knight Banished. 5 1 Reply not to me with a fool-born jest : Presume not that I am the thing I was ; For God doth know, so shall the world perceive, That I have turn'd away my former self ; So will I those that kept me company. When thou dost hear I am as I have been. Approach me, and thou shalt be as thou wast, The tutor and the feeder of my riots ; Till then, I banish thee, on pain of death, As I have done the rest of my misleaders, Not to come near our person by ten mile. For competence of life I will allow you. That lack of means enforce you not to evil ; And, as we hear you do reform yourselves. We will, according to your strengths and qualities. Give you advancement. Be it your charge, my Lord, [ To the Chief yustice^ To see perform'd the tenour of our word. Set on. [Exeunt JCing^ and his tmin,^ As the King and his train move on, plump Jack says to Justice Shallow, " I owe you a thousand pound." The lean creditor beseeches the fat debtor to pay in full, or, at least, to let him have five hundred of the thousand due. Of course there is not money enough in Sir John's purse — not even so much as the " seven groats and two pence " which his page not long before reported to be the sum total therein ; and Falstaff " can get no remedy against this consumption of the purse ; borrowing only lingers and lingers it out, but the disease is incurable." The knight asks Master Shallow not to grieve at this ; and comforts that worthy by saying that he will be sent for in private to the King, and that he will be the man yet that will I 5 2 Falstaff. make the justice great. But Shallow replies : " I cannot well perceive how, unless you should give me your doublet and stuff me out with straw." Sir John still insists that the young King's rough treatment of himself is only colorable, and that he will surely be sent for soon at night ; and he ends by inviting Shallow, Pistol, and Bardolph to go with him to dinner. Soon re-enter Prince John, the Chief Justice, and officers with them. Judge Gascoigne forthwith proceeds to "lay 'sweet Jack Falstaff' by the heels,' thus : ■ Ch. J. Go carry Sir John Falstaff to the Fleet. Take all his company along with him. Fal. My lord, my lord, — Ch. J. I cannot now speak ; I will hear you soon. Take them away. Truly an evil plight to be in for one who, burn- ing with high hopes, has Just "leered" upon his royal Hal ; a sad predicament for one who, but yesterday, declared himself to be Fortune's steward, rioted in visions of money and influence and pottle- pots of sack without limit, blessed his friends, cursed the Chief Justice, knew that the young king was sick for him — for him who has ridden day and night, and to-day stands " stained with travel, and sweating with desire to see him ['my royal Hal'] ; thinking of nothing else, putting all affairs else in oblivion, as if there were nothing else to be done but to see him ['my sweet boy']." Such a shock of disappointment would utterly crush most Carried to the Fleet. 53 men ; but plump Jack is not a man to be long de- pressed by any misfortune. The stormy waves of adversity may roll over the " greasy knight " ; but the oil that 's in him smooths and stills the troubledfl waters, and, cork-like, he soon comes up smiling,' and gaily floats on the surface. It appears that no specific charges were formu- lated against Falstaff ; that he did not have his day in court ; that the cross-grained and peremptory Chief Justice took him by surprise, would listen to no plea, shut his mouth, and at once hustled him off to the Fleet Prison. For this severe doom the Justice should be held responsible, and not the King, who has left the stage, and who had simply ordered that Falstaff should not come near him "by ten mile." He had also promised that the knight should have " competence of life," and had even held out the hope of " advancement " accord- ing to his strengths and qualities, in case he re- formed himself. The "sweet wag," now become King, intimated however that there shall be " gal- lows standing in England " during his reign. The Chief Justice, evidently considering that the fat old reprobate had been let off too easily, in default of definite charges, took the responsibility of sum- marily punishing him on general principles, and thus made a sort of " Star-Charaber matter" of the old sinner's case. That Judge Gascoigne was a firm and upright magistrate, and dared to do his duty, is shown by his drastic treatment of Prince Hal " for striking him about Bardolph." Referring to his humiliation by the Judge, the King asked : 54 Falstaff. How might a prince of my great hopes forget So great indignities you laid upon me ? What ! rate, rebuke, and roughly send to prison The immediate heir of England ! Was this easy ? May this be wash'd in Lethe, and forgotten ? There is no finer or better exposition of the sacredness of judicial authority than the memo- rable defence which the Judge interposed : I then did use the person of your father ; The image of his power lay then in me : And, in the administration of his law, Whiles I was busy for the commonwealth, Your highness pleased to forget my place. The majesty and power of law and justice, The image of the king whom I presented, And struck me in my very seat of judgment ; Whereon, as an offender to your father, I gave bold way to my authority And did commit you. If the deed were ill. Be you contented, wearing now the garland. To have a son set your decrees at nought, To pluck down justice from your awful bench. To trip the course of law, and blunt the sword That guards the peace and safety of your person : Nay, more, to spurn at your most royal image And mock your workings in a second body. Question your royal thoughts, make the case yours ; Be now the father and propose a son. Hear your own dignity so much profan'd. See your most dreadful laws so loosely slighted, Behold yourself so by a son disdain'd ; And then imagine me taking your part. And in your power soft silencing your son. After this cold considerance, sentence me ; And, as you are a king, speak in your state The Chief Justice — The King. 55 What I have done that misbecame my place, My person, or my liege's sovereignty. This defence prevailed, for the King replied : You are right, justice, and you weigh this well ; Therefore still bear the balance and the sword ; And I do wish your honours may increase, Till you do live to see a son of mine Offend you and obey you, as I did. So shall I live to speak my father's words : " Happy am I, that have a man so bold. That dares do justice on my proper son ; And not less happy, having such a son, That would deliver up his greatness so Into the hands of justice.'' You did commit me : For which, I do commit into your hand Th' unstained sword that you have us'd to bear ; With this remembrance, — that you use the same With the like bold, just, and impartial spirit As you have done 'gainst me. There is my hand. You shall be as a father to my youth ; My voice shall sound as you do prompt mine ear. And I will stoop and humble my intents To your well practis'd wise directions. — And, princes all, believe me, I beseech you ; My father is gone wild into his grave. For in his tomb lie my affections. And with this spirit sadly I survive. To mock the expectation of the world. To frustrate prophecies and to raze out Rotten opinion, who hath writ me down After my seeming. The tide of blood in me Hath proudly flow'd in vanity till now ; Now doth it turn and ebb back to the sea, Where it shall mingle with the state of floods And flow henceforth in formal majesty. 56 Falstaff. The Chief Justice, charged by the King " to see performed the tenour of our word," seems to have exceeded his authority, and pronounced against Falstaff a sentence too severe and without " cold considerance." Possibly his lordship's temper was warmed by the thought of his parting words to Sir John on a former occasion : " Now the Lord lighten thee ! thou art a great fool." The King doubtless reversed the hard sentence soon after- ward ; for we find Falstaff and his friends all at liberty in the opening scenes of King Henry V. The Merry Wives of Windsor. — The Oily Old Lewdster of Intolerable Entrails, not the Incomparable Jester of East- cheap.— Mrs. Quickly, Shallow, Slender, Evans. — Gentle Master Fenton. — "Sweet Anne Page." — Mated and Mar- ried. The Merry Wives of Windsor is an offshoot from the comedy of King Henry IV., while King Henry V. is the direct continuation of the history. Tradition reports that Queen Elizabeth was so well pleased with that admirable character of Falstaff in the two parts of Henry IV. that she commanded Shakespeare to continue it for one play more, and to show Falstaff in love. It is also said that this gross-minded old woman was so eager to see the play acted that she commanded it to be finished in fourteen days. Shakespeare did not make a grievance of his task. He threw him- self into it with spirit, and despatched his work within the time appointed. Of course he could n't make Falstaff really in love, or the man would have been redeemed by it. But the gross-bodied, self-indulgent old sinner, devoid of moral sense and of self-respect, was past redemption. On his appearance in the character of a lover, Johnson remarks : " No task is harder than that of writing to the ideas of another. Shakespeare knew what 57 58 Falsi aff. the queen seems not to have known, that by any real passion of tenderness, the selfish craft, the careless jollity, and the lazy luxury of Falstaff must have suffered so much abatement that little of his former cast could have remained. Falstaff could not love but by ceasing to be Falstaff. He could only counterfeit love. Thus the poet approached as near as he could to the work enjoined him ; yet having, perhaps, in the former plays completed his own ideas, seems not to have been able to give Falstaff all his former power of entertainment." Appleton Morgan, in his Shakespeare in Fact and in Criticism, writes : " Of course the fat knight, in amorous chase after a pair of petticoats, is no more ' in love ' than previously with Dame Quickly or Doll Tearsheet. The pen that created Imogen and Desdemona, Perdita and Juliet, if seriously or- dered to delineate a libertine controlled and en- nobled by the passion that drives out self, would scarcely have failed to recognize a field for its genius. However, if Falstaff was still to titillate the fine humors of Elizabeth, he must be concu- piscent always, but this time baffled, foiled and put to rout. And so, for the nonce, in a play for the eyes of a Virgin Queen and within the letter, even at the expense of the spirit of her royal orders, must wifely honor live outside of noble birth, and virtue walk in homespun." Mr. Morgan remarks further on this play : " The salaciousness Elizabeth wanted was all there, as well as the transformation scene, but at the end there is a rebuke to lechery and to lecherous minds not equivocal in its char- The Merry Wives of Windsor. 59 acter. ' This is enough to be the decay of lust and late walking throughout the realm,' says Falstaff, and perhaps there is a reproof to the queen herself — who certainly deserved it — in the line, ' Our radiant queen hates sluts and sluttery,' that is scathing in its satire." Dowden thus comments : " Shakspere dressed up a fat rogue, brought forward for the occasion from the back premises of the poet's imagination, in Falstaff's clothes ; he allowed persons and places and times to jumble themselves up as they pleased ; he made it impossible for the most laborious nine- teenth-century critic to patch on the Merry Wives to Henry IV. But the Queen and her court laughed as the buck-basket was emptied into the ditch, no more suspecting that its gross lading was not the incomparable jester of Eastcheap than Ford suspected the woman with a great beard to be other than the veritable Dame Pratt." * Elsewhere Dowden says : " Nor is he conceived in quite the same manner as the Falstaff of Henry IV. Here the knight is fatuous, his genius deserts him ; the never-defeated hangs his head before two country dames ; the buck-basket, the drench of Thames water, the blows of Ford's cudgel, are reprisals too coarse upon the most inimitable of jesters. Yet the play is indeed a merry one, with well-contrived incidents and abundance of plain, broad mirth. A country air breathes over the whole — for which the Gloucestershire scenes of * Shakspere — His Mind and Art, Am. ed., pp. 329, 330. 6o Falstaff. second Henry IV., had prepared us. . . . Al- together, if we can accept Falstaff' s discomfitures, it is a sunny play to laugh at if not to love." In short, the sayings and doings of the fat knight in this comedy do not lead us to hold opinion with Pythagoras that the soul of " Jack Falstaff with his familiars, John with his brothers and sisters, and Sir John with all Europe," has wholly infused itself into the trunk of this lewdster, " old, cold, withered, and of intolerable entrails," who says of himself, " I think the devil will not have me damned, lest the oil that 's in me should set hell on fire " ; who declares to Mistress Ford that " the firm fixture of her foot would give an excellent motion to her gait in a semi-circled farthingale " ; who protests to her that he " cannot cog and say thou art this and that, like a many of these lisping hawthorn-buds, that come like women in men's apparel, and smell like Bucklersbury in simple time " ; and who, disguised as Heme the hunter, with a pair of huge horns on his head, at last con- fesses, " I do begin to perceive that I am made an ass." No, no, — this fat and foolish rogue, who has no wit and eloquence, and who, instead of making a butt of others, is made a butt of by them, is not the incomparable jester of Eastcheap. " Sweet, kind, true, valiant, and old " Jack Falstaff, charged with the many misdemeanors committed by the oily old rascal who is the hero of the Merry Wives, could easily exculpate himself by proving an alibi. Hudson writes : " That the free impulse of Shakespeare's genius, without suggestion or induce- The Merry Wives of Windsor. 6 1 ment from any other source, could have led him to put Falstaff through such a series of uncharacter- istic delusions and collapses is to me well-nigh incredible." (See also Hazlitt's criticism of the play.) Hartley Coleridge writes : " That Queen Bess should have desired to see Falstaff making love proves her to have been, as she was, a gross-minded old baggage. Shakespeare has evaded the dififi- culty with great skill. He knew that Falstaff could not be in love ; and has mixed but a little, a very little, pruritus with his fortune-hunting courtship. But the Falstaff of the Merry Wives is not the Falstaff of Henry IV. It is a big-bellied impos- tor, assuming his name and style, or, at best, it is Falstaff in dotage. . . . The merry wives are a delightful pair. Methinks I see them, with their comely, middle-aged visages, their dainty white ruffs and toys, their half-witch-like conic hats, their full farthingales, their neat though not over- slim waists, their housewifely keys, their girdles, their sly laughing looks, their apple-red cheeks, their brows the lines whereon look more like the work of mirth than years. And sweet Anne Page — she is a pretty little creature whom one would like to take on one's knee." Clarke comments : " There are the two ' Merry Wives ' themselves. What a picture we have of buxom, laughing, ripe beauty ! ready for any frolic ' that may not sully the chariness of their honesty.' The jealous-pate. Ford, ought to have been sure of his wife's integrity and goodness, from her being 62 Falstaff. so transparent-charactered and cheerful ; for your insincere and double-dealing people are sure to betray, some time or other, the drag that dishonesty claps upon the wheel of their conduct. The career of a deceitful person is never uniform. In the sequel, however, Ford does make a handsome atonement — that of a frank apology to the party whom he had abused by his suspicions ; and he winds up the play with the rest, not the least happy of the group from having an enfranchised heart. He says well : Pardon me, wife. Henceforth do what thou wilt. I rather will suspect the sun with cold Than thee with wantonness. Now doth thy honour stand. In him that was of late a heretic, As firm as faith. . Then, there is Page, the very personification of hearty English hospitality. You feel the tight grasp of his hand, and see the honest sparkle of his eye, as he leads in the wranglers with ' Come, gentlemen, I hope we shall drink down all unkind- ness.' If I were required to point to the portrait of a genuine indigenous Englishman, throughout the whole of the works of Shakespeare, Page would be the man. Every thought of his heart, every motion of his body, appears to be the result of pure instinct ; he has nothing exotic or artificial about him. He possesses strong yeoman sense, an unmistakable speech, a trusting nature, and a fear- less deportment ; and these are the characteristics of a true Englishman." The Merry Wives of Windsor. 63 Page has a sturdy English confidence in his wife's honesty, and says, upon hearing of Falstaff's pro- posed attempt upon her virtue, " If he should intend this voyage towards my wife, I would turn her loose to him ; and what he gets more of her than sharp words, let it lie on my head." Mrs. Page says of her good man, " He 's as far from jealousy as I am from giving him cause ; and that, I hope, is an unmeasurable distance." When she receives the fat knight's letter, she says ; "What, have I scaped love-letters in the holiday-time of my beauty, and am I now a subject for them? Let me see." Having read it, she exclaims : " What a Herod of Jewry is this ! — O wicked, wicked world ! One that is well-nigh worn to pieces with age to show himself a young gallant ! What an unweighed be- haviour hath this Flemish drunkard picked — with the devil's name ! — out of my conversation, that he dares in this manner assay me ? Why, he hath not been thrice in my company ! — What should I say to him ? — I was then frugal of my mirth. — Heaven forgive me ! — Why, I '11 exhibit a bill in the Parliament for the putting down of fat men. How shall I be revenged on him ? for revenged I will be." Presently in comes her friend Mrs. Ford, who has received the twin-brother of Fal- staff's letter to Mrs. Page. The two gossips consult together and plot against this " greasy knight " as Mrs. Page calls him, and Mrs. Ford says : " What tempest, I trow, threw this whale, with so many tuns of oil in his belly, ashore at Windsor? How shall I be revenged on him ? I think the best way 64 Falstaff. were to entertain him with hope, till the wicked fire of lust have melted him in his own grease." When Falstaff, dressed in woman's clothes, and persona- ting the fat old woman of Brentford, makes his exit, Mrs. Page says to Mrs. Ford : " Heaven guide him to thy husband's cudgel, and the devil guide his cudgel afterwards ! " Though her sense of humor prompts this lively remark, yet her sense of justice, and also her wise kindheartedness, will not see him beaten so unmercifully. At what period in Falstaff's career he pursued the Windsor wives cannot be certainly determined. But the majority of recent critics agree in placing the production of the play between that of second Henry IV. and Henry V. Knight and Verplanck think the knight experienced the witcheries of the merry wives before his introduction in the histori- cal plays, Halliwell between the two parts of Henry IV., and Johnson between second Henry IV. and Henry V. Hudson finds room for Sir John's Windsor adventures somewhere in the ten years covered by second Henry IV. Collier, Dowden, White, and other critics consider the comedy of the Merry Wives as having a cer- tain independence of the histories, and not to be brought into chronological' relations to them. As White remarks : " Shakespeare was not writing biography, even the biography of his own charac- ters. He was a poet, but he wrote as a playwright ; and the only consistency to which he held himself, or can be held by others, is the consistency of dramatic interest. And if when he deals with his- The Merry Wives of Windsor. 65 toric personages we find him boldly disregarding the chronological succession of events in favor of the general truthfulness of dramatic impression, with what reason can we expect to find him re- specting that succession with regard to the time when such mere creatures of his will as Shallow, or Bardolph, Nym, and Pistol, lent money to or entered the service of Sir John Falstaff, or Avhen Mrs. Quickly ceased to be maid, or wife, or widow ? — if she were ever either. We must discard all deductions from the failure of the four plays to make a connected memoir of Falstaff and his friends and followers, as not only inconclusive but of no consequence." Mistress Quickly, the housekeeper to Doctor Caius ; or, as Sir Hugh Evans designates her, " his nurse, or his dry-nurse, or his cook, or his laundry, his washer, or his wringer," who acts as the very lively go-between for Falstaff with the two merry wives, and who courts Anne Page for her master, undertakes the same office for Slender, and more- over favors the suit of Fenton — this Mrs. Quickly is not mine hostess of the Boar's Head tavern ; but she is a very pleasant, fussy, busybodying, good-natured, unprincipled old woman, whom it is impossible to be angry with. Her master, Doctor Caius, the Frenchman, and her fellow-servant. Jack Rugby, are very completely described. Rug- by is rather quaintly commended by Mrs. Quickly as " an honest, willing, kind fellow, as ever servant shall come in house withal, and, I warrant you, no tell-tale, nor no breed-bate. His worst fault is, 66 Falstaff. that he is given to prayer ; he is something peevish that way : but nobody but has his fault." We have a sidelong glance into this busybody's char- acter when Falstaff adopts her suggestion to send his page to Mistress Page : " Look you," says she, " he may come and go between you both ; and in any case have a nay-word, that you may know one another's mind, and the boy never need to under- stand any thing ; for 't is not good that children should know any wickedness : old folks, you know, have discretion, as they say, and know the world." Sir Hugh Evans, (" Sir," a title which in those days was given to the clergy,) the Welsh parson, with his " pribbles and prabbles," and who, in speech, "makes fritters of English,'' is an excel- lent character in all respects. He is as respectable as he is laughable. He has " very good discre- tions and very odd humours." Nym, Bardolph, and Pistol are but the shadows of what they were ; and Justice Shallow, who has lived " fourscore years and upward " and is in his dotage, should not have left his seat in Gloucestershire and his magisterial duties. In this play he has little of his former consequence left. But his cousin, Abraham Slender, makes up for the deficiency. " He is," as Hazlitt says, "a very potent piece of imbecility. In him the pretensions of the worthy Gloucester- shire family are well kept up, and immortalized." Little as he has to do. Slender is the character that most frequently floats before our fancy when we think of this comedy. We do not wish Anne Page to have been married to him, but in their Slender s Portrait. 67 poetical alliance they are inseparable. Some of the touches, which only Shakespeare's hand could give, are to be found in the character of Slender, as, " I '11 ne'er be drunk whilst I live again, but in honest, civil, godly company, for this trick ! If I be drunk, I '11 be drunk with those that have the fear of God, and not with drunken knaves " — which resolve, as Evans says, shows his " virtuous mind." We have a speaking portrait of Slender in the conversation between Mrs. Quickly and his man, Peter Simple : " He hath but a little wee face, with a little yellow beard, a Cain-coloured beard." He is " as tall a man of his hands as any is between this and his head ; he hath fought with a warrener. . . . He holds up his head, as it were, and struts in his gait." Master Abraham Slender's own estimate of himself is that he is " not altogether an ass " ; but Mrs. Page, who de- clares that the doctor hath her good will, and none but he, to marry with Nan Page, says : " That Slen- der, though well-landed, is an idiot." Master Abraham does not hide his station in society, es- pecially from the women, and takes care that Anne Page shall know that he " keeps three men and a boy yet, till his mother be dead " ; and that he "lives like a poor gentleman born." He says this before Anne, not to her. Bashful even to sheep- ishness, he is yet closely observant of her, and re- marks to Evans : " She has brown hair, and speaks small like a woman." Often he sighs and says gently to himself, " O, sweet Anne Page ! " But she says sadly to herself : 68 Falstaff. This is my father's choice. O, what a world of vile ill-favour'd faults Looks handsome in three hundred pounds a-year ! Slender is such a faint-hearted and shilly-shally suitor that he is compelled to borrow all the sug- gestions of his passion from his uncle : Shal. She 's coming ; to her, coz. O boy, thou hadst a father ! Slen. I had a father. Mistress Anne ; my uncle can tell you good jests of him. — Pray you, uncle, tell Mistress Anne the jest, how my father stole two geese out of a pen, good uncle. Shal. Mistress Anne, my cousin loves you. Slen. Ay, that I do ; as well as I love any woman in Gloucestershire. Shal. He will maintain you like a gentlewoman. Slen. Ay, that I will, come cut and long-tail, under the de- gree of a squire. Shal. He will make you a hundred and fifty pounds jointure. Anne. Good Master Shallow, let him woo for himself. Thereupon Justice Shallow departs ; and when Slender, solus cum sold, is put in the embarrassing position of being allowed to woo for himself, the dialogue proceeds : Anne. Now, Master Slender, — Slen. Now, good Mistress Anne,— Anne. What is your will? Slen. My will ! 'od's heartlings, that 's a pretty jest indeed ! I ne'er made my will yet, I thank heaven ; I am not such a sickly creature, I give heaven praise. Anne. I mean. Master Slender, what would you with me ? Slen. Truly, for mine own part, I would little or nothing vcith you. Your father and my uncle hath made motions : if Master 'Fenton. 69 it be my luck, so ; if not, happy man be his dole ! They can tell you how things go better than I can : you may ask your father. But Mistress Anne loves neither her father's nor her mother's choice for her husband ; and rather than marry the latter, she says : Alas, I had rather be set quick i' the earth And bowl'd to death with turnips ! Master Fenton, a gay, wild young fellow, like Bassanio of The Merchant of Venice, loves sweet Nan. He meant to marry for money, but is won from it by love. In answer to his report of her father's objection to him, that " 't is impossible he should love her but as a property, " Anne candidly says, " May be he tells you true, " and he as can- didly replies : No, heaven so speed me in ray time to come ! Albeit I will confess thy father's wealth Was the first motive that I woo'd thee, Anne, Yet, wooing thee, I found thee of more value Than stamps in gold or sums in sealed bags ; And 't is the very riches of thyself That now I aim at. He 's frank, resolute, and lovable, and a friend of the host of the Garter Inn, and a friend, too, of the hostess, who describes him thus : " He capers, he dances, he has eyes of youth, he writes verses, he speaks holiday, he smells April and May." His beloved is thus sketched by Furnivall in his 70 Falstaff. introduction to this play : " The sweetness of ' sweet Anne Page ' is all through it. A choice bud in the rose-bud garden of girls of Shakespeare's time, she is, this young heiress, not seventeen, pretty vir- ginity, brown-haired, small-voiced, whose words are so few, yet whose presence is felt all through the play. True to her love she is, ready-witted almost as Portia ; dutiful to her parents, so far as she should be, and then disobeying them for the higher law of love. Her real value is shown by the efforts of three lovers to get her." At the party, held at night at Heme's Oak in the park for the special benefit of Falstaff in the character of the "Stag at Bay," where all the actors were " niask'd and vizarded, " we are not sorry that sweet Nan, dressed as the Fairy Queen, did not, as her father had commanded, slip away with Slender to Eton, there immediately to be married ; that Doctor Caius did not " shuffle her away, " as her mother had appointed, and that his outcry was : " By gar, I am cozened ; I ha' married un gar^on, a boy." Alas for poor Slender, who says: "I went to her in white, and cried 'mum,' and she cried 'budget,' as Anne and I had ap- pointed ; and yet it was not Anne, but a post- master's boy." But we are doubly glad that the young lover, gentle Master Fenton, with his eyes of youth and writing verses and smelling April and May, got the right Anne, and 'twixt twelve and one, slipped away with her to church where was a vicar, who straight did make the twain one. The happy pair returns and the play ends, thus : Mated and Married. 7 1 Page. How now, Master Fenton ! Anne. Pardon, good father ! — good my mother, pardon ! Page. Now, mistress, how chance you went not with Master Slender ? Mrs. Page. Why went you not with master doctor, maid? Fenton. You do amaze her ; hear the truth of it. You would have married her most shamefully, Where there was no proportion held in love. The truth is, she and I, long since contracted, Are now so sure that nothing can dissolve us. The oiTence is holy that she hath committed ; And this deceit loses the name of craft. Of disobedience, or unduteous title, Since therein she doth evitate and shun A thousand irreligious cursed hours, . Which forced marriage would have brought upon her. Ford. Stand not amaz'd ; here is no remedy. In love the heavens themselves do guide the state ; Money buys lands, and wives are sold by fate. Fal. I am glad, though you have ta'en a special stand to strike at me, that your arrow hath glanced. Page. Well, what remedy ? — Fenton, heaven give thee joy ! What cannot be eschew'd must be embrac'd. Fal. When night-dogs run, all sorts of deer are chas'd. Mrs. Page. Well, I will muse no further. — Master Fenton, Heaven give you many, many merry days ! — Good husband, let us every one go home. And laugh this sport o'er by a country fire, — Sir John and all. VI. Falstaff, Too-Too Old.— Not Free from " The Rusty Curb of Old Father Antic, the Law." — Examination before Shallow and Silence, JJ. — Sketch of the Shallow Family. — Robert Shallow, a Prodigal Son, Reforms and Emigrates to Virginia. — Buys Land, Marries, and Founds a Family, One of the " F. F. V.'s." — Becomes a Justice of the Peace in a Unique Way. — His Prosperity and Death. — Rise and Fall of the Shallow Family in Virginia. — 'Squire " Shall- Owe " in Kansas. — The Genius of Drouth. — Translated by a Cyclone. — Manuscript Notes of Falstaff's Trial, How Discovered and Deciphered. — Summary of Charges Formu- lated against the Fat Knight. After Royal Hal had given Sir John Falstaff a nunc dimittis from the Fleet Prison, reassured him that he should have " competence of life " lest lack of means would enforce him to evil, and that " advancement " would be given him according to his strengths and qualities in case he reformed — in such a pleasant predicament, it may reasonably be supposed that Sir John intended to settle down and pass his last years in careless jollity and lazy luxury at the Boar's Head tavern in Eastcheap. At this turning-point in his chequered and sack- soaked career, he could no longer claim to be " in the vaward of his youth." His friends had, years before and in spite of his oft-repeated protests, set 72 Sir yohn Too-Too Old. "j^ down his name in the scroll of old men ; and his enemies regarded him as too-too old, and nearing the end of his graveward path. But what his age was in fact, no chronicler can find out. He told the Chief Justice that he was born about three of the clock in the afternoon. Now, it is noteworthy that he who was so precise as to the hour of his birth, did not also mention the month, the day of the month, and the year in which that important event occurred. We shall not be far wrong, proba- bly, if we set down 1340 as the year of Falstaff's birth. " Why do you fix upon that year ? " asks the agnostic critic, who is, of course, a stern stickler for facts, and slams the door in the face of every- thing which he thinks has not been shown to be certain. Listen. A year or two before the battle of Shrewsbury, which was fought 21st July, 1403, Sir John admitted to Prince Hal that his age was " some fifty, or, by 'r Lady, inclining to three score." Although Falstaff was not habitually truthful — -was indeed unrivalled as a truth-crusher — yet it may reasonably be presumed that he did not then overstate his age. Afterward, the Chief Justice reproved him for calling himself young and hot- livered, and asked him a dozen direct questions in a string, all touching his age — the last being whether every part about him was not blasted with an- tiquity. As the whole series of questions elicited from Sir John no negative answer to any one of them, it seems that, on this issue, judgment ought to go against him. As Prince Hal was crowned as King Henry V., 9th April, 1413, and on that day 74 Falstaff. the Chief Justice sent Sir John to the Fleet, he must, on this King's coronation-day, have been declining from three score and ten at least. It is also permissible to suppose that when Fal- staff was set at liberty, he thought himself, as defendant, finally free from " the rusty curb of old Father Antic, the Law " ; but it now seems that he was not. Although it is nowhere recorded that Judge Gascoigne ever again laid him by the heels, or even brought him in question for any felony or misdemeanor, yet it appears from a certain old, outlandish, and musty manuscript, which has luck- ily escaped " the tooth of time and razure of oblivion," and which has lately been discovered and deciphered, that, soon after he was let out of prison, he was apprehended and brought before Justices Shallow and Silence, and Abraham Slender as amicus curice, to be examined touching many and grievous public offences charged and formulated against him. It also appears from the manuscript aforesaid, and certain old letters and papers of the Shallow family, that the learned Welsh parson, Sir Hugh Evans, served as clerk of this court. Fang as sheriff, and Snare, Grabbe, and Ketchum as under- bailiffs ; that among the witnesses, both for the Crown and for the alleged culprit, were Peto, Cor- poral Nym, Lieutenant Bardolph, Ancient Pistol, Mistress Quickly, Doll Tearsheet, Master George Page and wife and son, William, Master Ford, alias Brook, and wife. Doctor Caius, and the host of the Garter Inn ; also, Justice Shallow's man, Davy, Slender's man, Peter Simple, and Sir John's Soliloquy. 75 the recruits enlisted by Sir John, to wit, Ralph Mouldy, Simon Shadow, Thomas Wart, Francis Feeble, and Peter BuUcalf ; and that the court was held at the Boar's Head tavern in Eastcheap, London. In addition to what has already been written of the members Oi this court, it may be said that Falstaff, on his return from York, made a second visit to Master Robert Shallow in Gloucestershire. During this visit, and after a singularly character- istic and very amusing dialogue between the justice and his man, Davy, Sir John is left alone, and thus soliloquizes ; " If I were sawed into quantities, I should make four dozen of such bearded hermits' staves as Master Shallow. It is a wonderful thing to see the semblable coherence of his men's spirits and his : they, by observing of him, do bear them- selves like foolish justices ; he, by conversing with them, is turned into a justice-like serving-man. Their spirits are so married in conjunction with the participation of society that they flock together in consent, like so many wild-geese. If I had a suit to Master Shallow, I would humour his men with the imputation of being near their master ; if to his men, I would curry with Master Shallow that no man could better command his servants. It is certain that either wise bearing or ignorant carriage is caught, as men take diseases, one of another ; therefore let men take heed of their company. I will devise matter enough out of this Shallow to keep Prince Harry in continual laughter the wearing out of six fashions, which is four terms, 76 Falstaff. or two actions, and a' shall laugh without inter- vallums." * Moreover, Justice Shallow was distinguished for loquacity, opiniatrety, and, as Macaulay says of Dr. Sam Johnson, " the anfractuosities of his intel- lect and temper." Justice Silence — doubtless a descendant of the Roman historian, Tacitus — was noted for taciturnity ; and Master Slender was famed for his extreme simplicity. It ought, how- ever, to be here recorded in favor of 'Squire Shallow and his cousin Silence, that it is not known that either of these ancient worthies, with all his oddities and weaknesses, ever, by his magisterial misconduct, justified " the common resemblance of the courts of justice to the bush, whereunto while the sheep flies for defence against weather [storm], he is sure to lose part of his fleece " (Bacon's essay. Of j^udicature) ; or answered the description given by a member of the House of Commons in 1601, who defined a "justice of the peace" as a creature that " for half a dozen chickens will dispense with half a dozen penal statutes." By way of preface to the report of the examina- tion of Sir John Falstaff before the worshipful Jus- * On this soliloquy Clarke comments : ' ' The relish with which Falstaff each time stays by himself to witticize upon Shallow's peculiarities, the gusto with which he makes the justice's leanness furnish him with as ample store of humour as his own fatness, the shrewdness with which he penetrates the truth of the relative qualities and positions of the country magistrate and his serving-man, all show how thoroughly the author himself enjoyed the composition of this thrice-admirable comedy-portrait character." justices by Heredity. yy tices Shallow and Silence upon the many charges preferred against him, it is meet that the strange story of the discovery of the manuscript notes of the trial, which, supplemented by certain curious letters and papers, constitute the only known record thereof, be now briefly told : Also, that an account be given of the translation of the manu- script, and a summary of the counts contained in the information filed against Falstaff. It is duly recorded that Robert Shallow, esquire, was " a gentleman born, who wrote himself armigero, in any bill, warrant, quittance, or obligation," and that his ancestors in Gloucestershire had so written themselves " any time these three hundred years.'' It may, therefore, be very reasonably inferred that, among his kith and kin and after the lapse of so many years, the office of justice of the peace had become so firmly fibred into and through the Shal- low family as to cause many of the sons therein to become justices by heredity, and that, at least in its main branches, it has so continued, even unto this day. As Swedenborg says of some religious dogmas held by certain bigots, they are glued to their brains. So it was, and so it has continued to be, with the Shallow stock — the office of justice of the peace is glued to their brains, and hence it runs in the family. The oldest sons thereof, generation after generation, are born so. This famous family seems not to have had its habitat only in the county of Gloucester, but to be prevalent through- out Great Britain, and elsewhere in the English- speaking world. It has, in fact, forked, bifurcated 78 Falstaff. and branched in all directions. Hence Shake- speare's description of the fifth age of the seven ages of man, is generic : . . . . And then the justice, In fair round belly with good capon lined, With eyes severe and beard of formal cut, Full of wise saws and modern instances ; And so he plays his part. It is noteworthy that, in the case of Justice Shal- low, this description does n't fit. He is not built that way. He is characterized neither by tough muscularity of mind nor of body. There is no rotundity in any part of his anatomy ; and the notion that his eyes could be severe, or that his beard — probably in his youth " a little yellow beard," like that of Abraham Slender — could be formally cut so as to give anything like judicial solemnity to his " little wee face " — such an idea is inherently ab- surd ; and besides, the make-up of the man's mind confutes the supposition that he could be " full of wise saws and modern instances." Shallow, being an octogenarian justice at the time of Falstaff 's trial, probably died soon after it took place ; but it may be presumed that he left a son to fill the official vacancy caused by his death. And doubtless this son begat a son who reigned in his stead after he slept with his fathers. And so, ac- cording to the book of the genealogy of the Shallow family, the heads thereof went on from the reign of King Henry V., generation after generation, beget- ting justices of the peace to a period within " the yustices by Heredity. 79 spacious times of great Elizabeth." Before this queen's reign the Shallow stock had been much im- proved by marriages outside of the Silence and the Slender families. Thomas Shallow, esquire, had married a wealthy woman of good sense and great beauty, Anne Page Fenton, a lineal descendant of gentle Master Fenton and his wife, " sweet Anne Page." Their eldest son was William, who married Rosalind Fenton, a descendant of a branch of the Fenton family long settled near Windsor. William Shallow and his wife Rosalind had three sons, Robert, Henry, and Hugh ; and two daughters, Anne and Elizabeth. When James I. began to reign, the Shallows had greatly gentled their condition in mind, body, and estate. The bodies of some of them were heightened and rounded, broadened and beautified ; their in- tellects were enlarged and strengthened, their tem- pers sweetened, and their eyes brightened beneath foreheads not " villanous low." They also thought more and talked less — were not, as some of their ancestors had been, afflicted with an offensive flux of words without ideas. They no longer spoke in jerky, strident tones, which give the impression of inferior brain power. Many of the daughters were brightsome, brown-haired, and small-voiced like that sweet Anne Page for whom Master Abraham Slender had long before vainly sighed, and sighed. During the last years of the reign of James I., the principal justice of the peace in the county of Ciloucester was Thomas Shallow, who lived on an estate which had for ages been owned by his an- 8o Falstaff. cestors, and abode in " a goodly dwelling and a rich," wherein had dwelt the famous justice of Fal- staff's time. This Thomas was knighted by the King — it does not appear why. Sir Thomas had two sons — the younger, Robert, a gifted and spirited scapegrace, was a student at Oxford, left the uni- versity without a degree, and became a law student at Clement's Inn. Emulous of the name and fame of his great precursor and prototype, the " mad Shallow " who long before had been one of the foremost swinge-bucklers in all the inns o' court, this young Robert Shallow turned his back upon his books, led a roistering life, and became the pro- tagonist of the young swash-bucklers of his time at Clement's Inn. Still he contrived to pick up some " nice sharp quillets of the law," and also learned to smoke tobacco, in spite of the Counterblast to Tobacco written by his Majesty (" his Sowship," as the King's greatest favorite used to call him), to discourage its use. He so doted on " divine, rare, superexcellent tobacco, a virtuous herb, if it be well qualified, opportunely taken, and medicinally used," * that he lived in a cloud of smoke, often. * ' ' Tobacco, divine, rare, superexcellent tobacco, which goes far beyond all the panaceas, potable gold, and philosopher's stones, a sovereign remedy to all diseases. A good vomit, I confess, a virtuous herb, if it be well qualified, opportunely taken, and medicinally used ; but as it is commonly abused by mojt men, which take it as tinkers do ale, 't is a plague, a mis- chief, a violent purger of goods, lands, health, hellish, devilish, and damned tobacco, the ruin and overthrow of body and soul." — Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy. Robert Shallow, the Prodigal Son. 8 1 thought of Virginia where the plant grew, and longed to join a company of " useless gentlemen " who were about to go there. After this prodigal son had wasted his substance with riotous living, he began to be in want. And he left London and walked into Berkshire, where, at the close of a long day's journey, being weary, foot-sore, and hungry, he sought and found food and shelter at the Sow- and- Acorn Inn. At this hostelry he fed and rested several days, but having no money to pay for his entertainment, either as man or beast, the thrifty inn-keeper bristled up himself, waxed wroth, and swore the impecunious young man into the office of hogrubber, and forthwith sent him into his fields to feed swine, and eat with them, and thereby pay for his board and lodging. There he found husks as food very filling, but by no means satisfying. When he came to himself and seriously considered his low estate, he pronounced upon his companions a malediction, to the effect that the whole lot of Berkshires, their owner included, might be be- deviled, and, like the herd of devil-possessed Gadarene swine, run violently down a steep place into the sea, and be choked therein. And then he arose, shucked himself out of his environment, and straightway went to his father's house in Gloucester- shire. Sir Thomas had compassion on his wayward son, fell on his neck and kissed him, caused him to be well clothed, bounteously fed, and delighted with music. But the young man soon grew weary of humdrum life in the country, and eager to go in search of adventures and riches beneath alien 82 Falstaff. stars. He daily besought his father to furnish him forth, and let him voyage to Virginia. At this time the colonists had given up seeking a communication with the South Sea by ascending the Chickahominy, or some other stream which flows from the northwest ; nor did they any longer expect to find the Pacific Ocean just beyond the falls in James River. And the class of whom Cap- tain John Smith wrote, " there was now no talk, no hope, no work, but dig gold, wash gold, refine gold, load gold," — this sect of gold-finders had become extinct. The news reached Sir Thomas what great gains were to be got by cultivating tobacco in that colony, and that the settlers, in their eagerness for gain, had planted not only the fields, but the gardens, the public squares, and even the streets of Jamestown, and that Virginia was to be enriched by the culture of this valuable staple. While the father was considering his son's peti- tion, Robert went to London, where by great good fortune, he met his friend and fellow-student at Clement's Inn, Philip Wriothesly, a nephew of Shakespeare's early friend and patron, the popular Earl of Southampton, who was a leader in the London Company, and exulted in the anticipated glories of the rising state in Virginia, and who was about to send young Philip thither to seek his for- tune. The nephew introduced Robert to his uncle. His lordship was well pleased with Master Shallow, and anxious that he should embark with young Wriothesly, Accordingly the earl wrote to Sir 6 Robert Goes to Virginia. 83 Thomas on behalf of Robert, and also gave him a letter of commendation which proved to be of great service to him in the colony. Robert returned joy- fully home. The father consented on his son's twenty-first birthday, gave him ^^500, plenty of good advice and his blessing, together with a cer- tain huge iron-bound chest which had been for centuries an heirloom in the Shallow family, and into which it had been customary, from time to time, to toss and tumble all sorts of papers, docu- ments, memoranda, and MSS., pertaining to that famous family. Robert, in his heedless and head- long haste to return to London, and set sail with his friend Philip, pitched and tumbled into this chest or trunk, and upon the 0)nniuin. gatherum therein, his clothes, books, papers, keepsakes, and other articles of personal property, securely locked it, lost the key, bade farewell to his father and mother, brothers and sisters, took his trunk and travelled posthaste to London. He reached the city just in time to engage his passage with his friend on the Queen Bess, a ship belonging to the Virginia Com- pany, and about to sail with new recruits and supplies for Jamestown. As emigrants the com- pany had, here and there, in the skirts of England, Scotland, and Wales, Shark'd up a list of landless resolutes, For food and diet to some enterprise That hath a stomach in 't — about one hundred and ten in all, consisting chiefly of vagabond and useless gentlemen, dis- 84 Falstaff. solute gallants, packed off to escape worse destinies at home, broken tradesmen, rakes and libertines, men more fitted to corrupt than to found a commonwealth, several goldsmiths, who still had lingering hopes of finding gold, and many " ap- prenticed servants " from England, who were to be sold for a certain number of years to the planters ; but among these emigrants were too few carpenters, husbandmen, gardeners, fishermen, masons, black- smiths, " accomplished wood-cutters and diggers-up of trees' roots," and " honest laborers, burdened with wives and children." Knox, in his Fragment of Races, states the fol- lowing rash and unsatisfactory, but pungent and unforgetable, truths : " Nature respects race, and not hybrids." " Every race has its own habitat." " Detach a colony from the race, and it deteriorates to the crab." On the foregoing, Emerson thus comments : " See the shades of the picture. The German and Irish millions, like the Negro, have a great deal of guano in their destiny. They are ferried over the Atlantic, and carted over America, to ditch and to drudge, to make corn cheap, and then to lie down prematurely to make a spot of green grass on the prairie." Surely there must have been " a great deal of guano " and little else in the destiny of such a cargo of emigrants ; but Robert and Philip were fated to embark with them, and, after a long and tempestuous voyage, to land in Virginia, and there to begin their struggle for life in the new hemisphere. The colonists had found the soil so productive, Robert Settles in Virginia. 85 and the cultivation of tobacco so profitable, that when Master Shallow arrived in Virginia, they " so much doted on their tobacco " that they paid little attention to commerce or the fisheries. Tobacco had given animation to Virginian industry, and was fast becoming not only the staple, but the currency of the colony. Both Robert and his friend were anxious to own land, settle upon and improve it, become tobacco planters, and grow up with the country. Philip went up the James River to a plantation, which, in honor of Prince Henry, a general favorite with the English people, had been named Henrico ; and there he remained two or three years without succeeding to his satisfaction. Soon afterward he removed to a region which is now Southampton County, and there settled upon a large body of land that he purchased with money generously furnished by his uncle, the Earl of Southampton. Robert was at first inclined to take, near the mouth of the Appomattox River, the one hundred acres of land to which he was entitled as a colo- nist who had come at his own expense, and to add largely thereto by the purchase of other lands ; but he changed his plans. His father, having heard of his good behavior, and being highly pleased with his tendency to thrift, wrote him words of cheer, and also sent him_;^i,ooo, with advice to buy good and cheap lands, and lay the ground plan for a large fortune for himself and the prosperous growth of a transplanted branch of the illustrious Shallow family. Robert followed his father's advice, and 86 Falstaff. bought of the London Company — paying at the rate of twelve pounds and ten shillings for every hundred acres — ten thousand acres of very fertile land in what is now Gloucester County, so named by its first settlers, who were mostly from the shire so named in Old England. By the way, they soon discovered the York River oyster, detected its fine flavor, and swallowed it without a thought of what Prof. Huxley says of this bivalve : " I suppose that when this slippery morsel glides along the palate few people imagine that they are swallowing a piece of machinery far more complicated than a watch." It appears, however, that their ignorance in this respect harmed them not. Master Shallow's land was situated on the left bank of York River, and near the mouth thereof, and in the region, now so celebrated, where the youthful Lafayette hovered upon the skirts of Cornwallis, and the arms of France and the Con- federacy were united to achieve the crowning victory of American independence. He soon bought several apprenticed white servants and two or three negroes, hired a number of men skilled in felling trees and digging up their roots, a carpenter, a mason, a blacksmith, and an honest laborer, bur- dened with a wife and children. Thus reinforced he settled upon his land, and began to improve it. In the rude husbandry of the time and place, he raised corn, horses, horned beasts, swine, and to- bacco. He built his house upon the spot where, according to tradition, Powhatan and his breech- clouted council of grim warriors doomed Captain Pocahontas. 8 7 John Smith to die, and Pocahontas clung firmly to his neck as his head was bowed to receive the strokes of the tomahawk, aiid by her fearlessness and en- treaties persuaded the council to spare the agree- able stranger, who might make hatchets for her father and rattles and strings of beads for herself, the favorite child.* Perhaps Robert's house was like the mansion in which Washington was born, in Westmoreland County, Virginia : A rude farm- house, steep-roofed, with low eaves, one story high, having four rooms on the ground floor, and others in the attic. There was a huge chimney at each end, which was built up outside the house. Young Robert Shallow, having his own house, wanted a wife in it, He did not fall in love with * Irving Browne, Esq., in his Iconoclasm attd Whitewash, (pp. 15, 16,) says: "One of the most ruthless results of modern historical iconoclasm has been the demolition of Pocahontas. About the prosaic and somewhat common name of John Smith, until recently, has entwined one of the sweetest of legends. But alas for faith in history and in human nature ! and alas for some of the first families of Virginia ! the fair fame of the lovely copper-colored maiden has received a deadly smirch from a prying investigator. We are now assured that the Indian princess was a mere camp follower of the whites, and of the most light and naughty behavior. Captain Smith was notoriously a very gallant man among the ladies, and it is not incredible that she had the strongest motive for rescuing the adventurer from the club of her father. Others say that .Smith, who was a notorious liar, invented the story of his rescue. A writer in Scribners Magazine points out the anach- ronistic, if not apochryphal, character of the painting of the baptism of Pocahontas, in the National Capitol at Washing- ton. We are fain to dismiss Pocahontas with a sigh." 88 Falstaff. and propose to Lady Clara Vere de Vere, because she was not then in the colony. He bought for a wife Miss Angelica Penelope Dusenbury, and paid for her the highest market price, one hundred and fifty pounds of tobacco. She was the choicest of the ninety " maids of virtuous education, young, handsome, and well-recommended," sent out by the London Company from England for planters' wives. Robert and his Angelica loved each other, were wedded, went to housekeeping, lived together for half a century and upward — happily, 't is to be presumed — and to them were born sons and daughters. Thus was founded in " The Old Do- minion," one of the genuine " F. F. V.'s " — a family which was destined in due time to be in some sort royalized by intermarriage with a family having a strain of Pocahontas blood in its veins. By and by, the judicial instinct was aroused in Robert, and he longed to be a justice of the peace in Gloucester County, Virginia. One lucky day he chanced to fish out from among the papers and documents in the chest which he had brought from his old home, the commission of Solomon Shallow as a justice of the peace in Gloucestershire, Eng- land. Instantly the idea occurred to him that he might easily make himself a magistrate. This he at once proceeded to do by a unique and ingenious application of the statutes of amendment and jeofails. It consisted of certain amendments of the old and outlawed commission aforesaid, which were effected by a careful erasure of the name " Solomon " and the insertion of " Robert " in ynstice of the Peace, How Made. 89 place of it ; by removing the word " England " and writing " Virginia" in its stead ; and by mak- ing some other changes in the document which the necessities of the case at bar demanded. And so he became one of the king's magistrates de facto in the colony, and acted acceptably as such for many years, notwithstanding the bar sinister thus secretly emblazoned on his title to that office. Robert Shallow, justice of the peace, year after year, grew richer and richer, prouder and prouder, and before a score of years had passed since he settled in the colony he moved into a stately man- sion built of imported brick, and having carved mahogany stairways, curiously panelled rooms, with richly decorated ceilings, and so forth. He was a staunch royalist ; was for many years a mem- ber of the House of Burgesses ; dreaded the general diffusion of intelligence ; and concurred with the Virginia governor, who, in 167 1, wrote, " I thank God, there are no free schools, nor printing ; and I hope we shall not have, these hundred years ; for learning has brought disobedience, and heresy, and sects into the world, and printing has divulged them, and libels against the best government. God keep us from both." Moreover, like many other colonial gentlemen, he was fond of a manly out-of-door life, owned many negroes, kept open house, and was noted for his rough and generous hospitality. As to his religious views, they seem to have been well stated by that dogmatic divine, and tremendous theologaster, Mr. Thwackum, who, in Fielding's Tom 'fones, thus speaks : " When I go Falstaff. mention religion, I mean the Christian religion ; and not only the Christian religion, but the Prot- estant religion ; and not only the Protestant religion, but the Church of England." 'Squire Shallow died on his eightieth birthday, and was buried in the family cemetery on the Shallow plantation, and beside his wife who had died some years before. A steep hillock a mile east of that on which the mansion-house stood, and separated from it by a bosky ravine, was then crowned with tall and stately forest trees, among which were four gigantic, unwedgeable, and gnarled oaks, marking the corners of a small rectangular quadrangle. Under the shadows of those trees, and exactly in the centre of that quadrangle. Justice Shallow's grave was, and on his marble monument his effigy in high relief, and the following inscription : Hic Jacet ROBERTUS SHALLOW, Akmiger : Obiit, XXVI. Septembris, MDCLXXXV, ^t. LXXX. Non opibus urna, nee mens virtutibus absit. On the eve of the American revolution the original Shallow family in Virginia had reached its zenith in mind, body, and estate. Soon there- after its descent began, becoming more rapid as the years went by. At the time of the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska bill, it was nearing its nadir, and seemed about to peter out, so to speak. The patrimonial estate had so dwindled away, genera- William Shakespeare Shallow. 9 1 tion after generation, that hardly a hundred of the ancestral acres remained in the family ; and these were so plastered over and covered up by divers deeds and mortgages, drawn up with such infernal artifice and diabolical skill, that all the lawyers in Gloucester County were not able to decide, by a legal construction of their various conflicting clauses and conditions, to whom the land belonged, or whether it belonged to anybody at all. Near the ruins of the mansion built by him whose epi- taph has just been quoted, stood a low, rambling, wooden, weather-beaten house, which was very old, in a tumble-down condition, deeply embowered in grapevines, and surrounded by jimson weeds of rampant and outrageous growth. The doors were off the hinges, old hats, trousers, and petticoats were stuffed into the broken windows, the roof of one wing had fallen in, and a huge chimney at one end of the house had toppled down headlong. The only negroes left on the plantation were Jupiter and his wife, Juno, both warmly attached to their master and mistress, and too aged and tottery to run away. Their master, William Shake- speare Shallow, was, in physical and psychical struct- ure, the outcome of some queer law of reversional heredity which hinted at a remote period when his ancestors were perhaps in a polliwog state, and had " souls so dull and stupid as to serve for little else but to keep their bodies from putrefaction." * He was a little, wearish, old man, who had a bald pate, * Dr. Robert South 's sermon, "On the Education of Youth." 92 Falstaff. a frog-like forehead, large, green, glassy eyes with a squint in one thereof, sail-like ears, a nimble tongue, a croaking voice which was subject to sud- den and ludicrous changes in its fundamental bass, a weak and receding chin, and a bottle nose of abnormal rubicundity. Moreover, he was splay- mouthed, as well as splayfooted. Easy-going and good-natured, slipshod and shiftless, he had an in- superable aversion to all kinds of profitable labor. To live seemed to him to mean nothing more than to be, and to play pitch-and-toss with the realities of life. Besides being in body the very genius of famine, he was also the very genius of drouth, and absorbed liquids as readily as a sponge — seldom, however, sucking in a good sherris-sack, or a mint- julep, because of his impecunious condition, but imbibing whiskey and other vulgar drinks, com- monly at the expense of somebody else. It was ob- served that intoxicating liquor never brought him on all-fours, or lessened his good-nature ; and curiously enough, it seemed to have no more effect on him than it has on the bottle which contains it, save that it doubled the nimbleness of his tongue and aggravated the redness of his Bardolphian nose. After he had taken a drink or two his chief delight was to sit on a dry-goods box along with other idlers, chew tobacco, let his tongue run at random, and argufy on almost any subject, but particularly on politics. In his profound political discussions, he often quoted from the Richmond Enquirer as his authority, and now and then referred to those bewildering mysteries, the Kentucky and Virginia 'Squire Shall- Owe. 93 Resolutions of 1798-9, which he had probably never read, and which he could not comprehend if he had. He was not usually fastidious in regard to facts which border on the marvellous ; and akin to this trait, a credulity, a readiness to believe the marvellous, tinged his whole character and made him a believer in ghosts, witches, and hobgoblins. He did not pay his debts, and it was impossible to collect them by law. Hence his creditors hyphen- ated his surname, removed the initial e of the word " esquire," suffixed it to his family name, and accented the second, instead of the first, syllable thereof ; and so he came to be called and known throughout Gloucester County as 'Squire Shall-Owe. Such a husband was a great grief — a mere incubus, as 't were — to his wife, who was a robustious woman of termagant temper and fearsome voice, and a lineal descendant from Dame Rip Van Winkle. Of course, he stood greatly in awe of his wife, as well he might, for she " ruled the roast," such as it was, and suffered him to domineer in his weak way outside of the house — the only side which, in fact, belongs to a thoroughly henpecked husband. At last 'Squire Shall-Owe and his wife took the scant proceeds of the dregs of their estate in Vir- ginia, and along with their old colored servants, Jupiter and Juno, who went willingly, emigrated to Kansas early in its Territorial days ; there, if possible, to grow green again and flourish anew beneath another and more hopeful sky. He pur- chased and settled upon a quarter-section of land in a sequestered situation, lying mostly between 94 Falstaff. the forks of Owl Creek, in Avon township, Coffey County, and about seven miles north of Zenith City, then a puny place of much noise and notoriety, but destined to become — in the estima- tion of its inhabitants — the county-seat and metrop- olis of all the region round about it. He built a small house in a group of goodly trees growing on a bluffy tongue of land in the forks of the above- named stream ; and some years later, and after he had been several times terrified by fierce winds which swept up and down Owl Creek — doubtless seduced there by the long draw or ravine made by its high banks — he dug, close to his cabin, a deep cave as a refuge from wind and weather. A few acres of his land were arable ; the residue was best adapted to raising hogs, sheep, and cattle. But a change of sky and environment did not change his nature ; his inborn shiftlessness re- mained. His views of life were mostly retrospec- tive, and, moreover, he was such a tireless talker about the Old Dominion that he was given the nickname of " Ole Virginny." In the year of the great drouth in Kansas, Jupiter and Juno died ; in the great grasshopper year the 'squire's wife died ; and 't is likely that he too would have died during that chill and starving time, had he not received aid in the form of cast-off clothes, bread, bacon, and beans. When the Kansas prohibitory liquor law was at last rigidly enforced, 'Squire Shall-Owe began to ' dwindle, peak, and pine," and to become, if pos- sible, more moody, dry, dusty, shrunken, and Translated by a Cyclone. 95 shadowy than ever before. Like certain variable quantities in mathematics, he lessened more and more until he neared the vanishing-point. About noontide on a certain hot summer-day, he was seen in Zenith City, lingering long alone in the vicinity of Tom Todhunter's late " Cornucopia," where he was snuffing and sniffing the empty kegs and casks thereabouts, as if to refresh his memory, and brace himself up with thoughts of the thousands of drinks which he had taken at that dried-up fountain — the most of them not costing him a cent, as they had been treats, or, if counted against him, marked on the slate. Later in the day he was observed lurking near Jerry Jones's deceased distillery, or brewery, and inhaling the intoxicating reminiscences thereat. An hour before sunset he was seen astride of a sorry little mule belonging to Conrad Copenhaver, leaving town and hurrying homeward to his lonely castle, to escape an impending storm of wind and rain. Before midnight a cyclone swept with resistless and destroying fury through the Owl Creek country, and thereafter 'Squire Shall-Owe was seen alive no more. The next day two or three of the neighbors visited the wind-swept premises of the late owner, and found the trees uprooted and prostrate, the cabin and its contents utterly wrecked, and the frag- ments scattered afar to the four winds ; and, in a deep gulch distant about a furlong northeast from the site of the dwelling, Copenhaver's ass lay life- less. The dead donkey was securely tied by a rope halter to an apple-tree which had long stood near the door of the lowly mansion, not only comforting 96 Fahtaff. its owner with its fruit, but also serving as a hitch- ing-post and a Kansas stable. Evidently the 'squire had reached home in time to tie the poor beast to this tree, which the cyclone tore up and transported, along with its four-footed appendage, to the spot where both were discovered. But the 'squire him- self was not found, although the search for him was continued for several days. The next week Wil- helm Grohbengreaser went up the east fork of Owl Creek two or three miles, to look for some of his sheep which had been scattered by the recent storm. As he was about to return home from his fruitless search his attention was attracted to a convention of crows in session among the leafy and wide- spreading branches of an elm overhanging the stream ; but as his thoughts were chiefly of his lost sheep, he gave, at the time, only slight heed to this circumstance. He mentioned the fact, however, to two or three inquisitive and sympathetic neighbors ; and, on the following day, all went to discover why the crows were in council as reported. When they reached the spot, the crow convention, at sight of a shotgun shouldered by Grohbengreaser, at once adjourned sine die, and the members thereof, with caws, flew and alighted beyond its range. The nimblest man of the company climbed the tree in question, and found in a crotch formed by its trunk and a stout branch, and firmly fixed therein, what was left of the mortal remains of old 'Squire Shall- Owe. He whose pedigree reached back to the Robert Shallow who had settled in the Virginia colony almost three centuries before, reached back The Funeral of ^Squire Shall- Owe. 97 to the illustrious Justice Shallow of Falstaff's time, ran back even to the days of William the Conqueror — this man had been seized by the cyclone, whirled far aloft and lodged " up a tree " in the spacious mediterranean State of Kansas. Thither had he been translated by the tempest, like a dry and withered leaf, the very last leaf on his genealogical tree. In the absence of the coroner, the facts were sub- mitted to a high-prairie justice of the peace in Avon township, and learned in " crowner's quest law," who decided that no inquest was necessary in the case, for the reason that if the body found was not the body of old Bill Shakespeare Shall-Owe, whose body could it be ? And so this sapient magistrate cudgelled his brains no more about it. The funeral was held at the Hardshell Baptist church on Duck Creek — the Rev. Jedediah Goshorn preaching upon the two texts, to wit : " All flesh is grass." — Isaiah, xiv., 12 ; " He shall be buried with the burial of an ass." — Jeremiah, xxii., 19. His double-barrelled sermon was a very powerful one, and it hit and brought down the congregation, so to speak. During its delivery, even that octogenarian sinner, Andy Shanklin, was heard snuffling a little, and seen brushing a tear-drop or two from his eyes, giving the sharp end of his fiery red nose a wring with his fingers, to free it of the superabundant moisture, and then wiping it on his rusty and greasy coat- sleeve. The body of the deceased was buried beside that of his wife, in the graveyard near at hand — the graves of Jupiter and Juno being hard by. gS Falstaff. Conrad Copenhaver — hoping, probably, to realize out of the decedent's estate enough to satisfy his own claim for the loss of his mule — without due authority, intermeddled somewhat with the few goods and chattels which the deceased left behind him. Certain creditors, aggrieved by the acts of this officious intruder, submitted their claims to a veteran pettifogger in Zenith City, Alexander Black- stone, who took the whole matter under considera- tion, and, at the end of a fortnight, handed down his opinion, written over an entire quire of fools- cap ; which foolscap opinion was to the effect that Copenhaver had, by his unauthorized and officious acts, made himself executor de son tort, and liable to pay out of his own pocket whatever deficiency of assets there might be for the satisfaction of claims against the estate. Nothing, however, for the benefit of complaining creditors, resulted from this opinion, as was to be expected. In the cyclone cave in which poor Shallow had failed to find refuge from death, were discovered some of his worldly effects, as follows : A shirt and a half ; a ragged coat ; a threadbare and torn pair of trousers ; a pair of old boots ; a rusty razor; a coarse comb ; a patent medicine almanac ; a box of Brandreth's pills ; several old numbers of the Richmond Enquirer ; a bottle of Perry Davis's pain-killer ; corks and corkscrew ; empty bottles ; and a jug or two. Under a lot of trumpery was found a small box wherein were papers and pam- phlets, and several books — among them Hogg's Poems, Ram on Facts (befittingly bound in sheep). 'Squire Shall-Owes Chest. 99 Edgeworth's Essay on Irish Bulls, and Ruskin's theological treatise, On the Construction of Sheep- folds. The 'squire had picked up these books with the expectation, perhaps, of reading some- thing therein to his advantage and profit in the business of raising hogs, sheep, and cattle. In the box were also Wirt's Life of Patrick Henry, Swan's Treatise for y^ustices, and a well-printed copy of Shakespeare's Plays, with uncut leaves. In a well-walled and carefully cemented niche in a corner of the cave, was found, securely locked, the iron-bound chest or trunk, which had been for ages in the Shallow family, and which Robert, the son of Sir Thomas Shallow, had brought with him when he emigrated to the Virginia colony. This chest, along with its ancient and mysterious con- tents, 'Squire Shall-Owe had doubtless brought to Kansas in its early days. According to report among his friends and neighbors, he took vigilant care of it, and stood greatly in dread of its insides. It appears that he was reluctant to touch this ancestral ark, or to rummage therein with his un- consecrated hands ; and it seems that he was as much in awe of it as certain African tribes are of a stone or a stick which they worship as a fetich. But Copenhaver feared it not. He, assisted by an ex-constable, who, like his employer, could n't read English, took the chest out of its niche, and, having no key to unlock it, broke it open, and held an inquest upon its contents. Finding nothing of value in his estimation, he turned over the trunk and everything therein to the school- loo Falstaff. master of the district, who. had a smattering' of Latin and Greek, and was reputed to be a semi- Shakespearian scholar withal. He fumbled for a fortnight, at intervals, with the papers, documents and memoranda given over to him, but even he could make nothing of them. Becoming curious at last as to the mechanism of the chest, he made a careful inspection thereof, found that it had a false bottom, and therein discovered a long and narrow parchment roll, closely and quaintly written all over in black letter, and having a surface about equal to that of a roll or two of wall-paper, or to the superficies of half a dozen sheepskins, or there- abouts. After pottering a long while over the manuscript, and finding it to be all Greek to him, he at first thought of presenting it to the Kansas Historical Society ; but he finally followed the advice of a brother pedagogue and of the justice of the peace who had held the inquest on the remains of " Ole Virginny," and submitted it, along with all the papers turned over to him by Copenhaver and the ex-constable, to a select com- mittee of seven wise men, each being a specialist, and all resident in and around Zenith City— said committee to have power, through its chairman, to send for persons and papers, and to employ, at its own expense, a stenographer, a chemist, a micros- copist, an acidist, a photographist, a hermeneuticist, a volapiikist, and so forth. The committee chosen to Anglicize the manuscript and to determine the question of its genuineness, was constituted as follows, to wit : Committee of Seven Wise Men. \ o i Edward Coke Fogg, legist ; Richard Bentley Smyth, Egyptologist ; Ahasuerus Jones, Assyriologist ; Richard Porson Diagamma, Hellenist ; Martinus Scriblerus, Latinist ; Ignatius De Mudd, cryptologist ; Joel Levi, a learned " Ebrew Jew," who was also a studious cabalist and Talmudist. On St. Swithin's day in the afternoon, all the members of the committee, along with other literati of Zenith City, met in and around Tom Todhunter's grocery or juicery, nee Cornucopia, which for divers good and sufficient reasons had lately been adjusted on wheels and moved from the main street into a grove across the Neosho River, and outside of the city limits. After an hour of con- viviality, they retired to the rear of this wheeled academy, where they found seats on benches and empty beer-kegs in the shade of a gigantic syca- more tree. Then and there these seven wise men forthwith laid their heads together and proceeded to tackle the important document which had been intrusted to them. They read it — or rather, tried to read it — backwards, and forwards, and sideways, and some parts thereof they read, or tried to read, again and again ; and thus they continued, between drinks, to puzzle and pother over it, and to become more and more bewildered in their wits, until near supper-time, when they adjourned for that day. And in this way they continued to dawdle over the manuscript, day after day — Sundays and rainy days excepted — until about the middle of the dog I02 Falstaff. days ; and still they could make neither head nor tail of the text. Each of these wiseacres had a theory and views of his own in regard to the docu- ment ; and they all resembled certain German critics of Shakespeare, as described by Richard Grant White : " Like the western diver, they go down deeper and stay down longer than other critics, but, like him, too, they come up muddier." Of the seven scholars, Prof. De Mudd was the most opinionated and obstreperous. His theory was that the most important parts of the document are cryptographic, and, of course, indecipherable without the cipher. As a consequence, he was all the while on the lookout for cipher-words, which he believed to be lurking somewhere in the text ; but, after searching for a month, he failed to find even one of them. The key which could unlock the mysteries of the manuscript seemed to be lost beyond recovery. However, one sultry afternoon, and just as the disgusted chairman of the commit- tee was about to roll up the manuscript, weight it with a heavy stone, and fling it into the turbid waters of the Neosho River, a lucky suggestion came from an unexpected quarter, and rescued the precious document from oblivion. 'T is said that once on a time, the cackling of a goose saved Rome. However that may be, the volapiikist of the com- mittee, George Psalmanazar Wopsle, who was lying on a grassy knoll in the shade of a tree, fighting flies and fanning himself, opened his mouth and spake in a maudlin way, and on this wise : " Hold on, old Fogg, don't toss that scrub document to the The Mysterious Document. 103 catfish in the Noshow just yet, though it does have a very ancient and fish-like smell. You seven wise men, don't give up the job of finding out what it all means, if it means anything, but fight it out on this line or t' other, if it takes all summer. I say, De Mudd, it 'pears to me that you 're the knowingest of this lot of litery fellers, but that 's not saying a great deal. You 've been all the time a-hunting for the key, or the ' cipher,' as you call it. Now, you old zeroist, why don't you look for it in the marginal notes as you call 'em, or in them monstrous long-tailed words you 've been talking so much about ? What do you suppose them words was put into this 'ere manuscript for, unless 't was to hide something or other ? I say, De Mudd, you just bring that tough old dokkyment straight here to me, and I '11 show you some words as long as the shadows of your long legs late in the afternoon of a midsummer day, and written alongside of the text ; I can't pronounce any of 'em, but I '11 point 'em out to you ; there 's one monstrous word — the longest in the lot, and made up of such queer letters — which the writer has coiled up in a sort of cipher or round-robin style, in a ring that, to my critical eyes, seems to have been made by the damp bottom of a beer-glass set on the parchment. Between you and me, De Mudd, I 've gazed at that spiral word with my naked eyes, and peered at it through a microscope, as well as through a beer-glass of im- mense magnifying power, and puzzled over it, and followed it round and round, until it has made my head swim ; and I 've felt just like that man who I04 Falstaff. thought himself so wondrous wise that he jumped into a brier-bush and scratched out both of his eyes out, and then he saw his eyes was out. And so I can't see which is the head, and which is the tail, of that word ; but it may be, it has neither ; still, a cipher may be lurking in it somewhere. Think about it, De Mudd ; and do you study them long words strung along the sides of the manu- script ; study 'em with all yer might and main for a month, and I 'II bet my head agin yours for a football that you '11 be able to spell out something or other outen this thing. You think I 'm not much of a litery feller ; maybe I 'm not, in your way ; but I 've been a printer's devil, and I 've set type for and even edited a country newspaper, and I say that a man that can spell well, even if he can't do anything else, he 's a well-educated man. De Mudd, you just put out Am-bi-gu-i-ty t' me, and see if I can't spell it. Besides, I 've read into Shakespeare considerable myself, and I 've seen some of his best Plays played. Lay on Macduff, and be damned to you, sir." Wopsle continued his remarks in a broken, rambling, and peremptory way, to the amazed committee now gathered around him ; but, becom- ing queasy, he soon grew inarticulate with retching. When the volapukist had sufficiently recovered, he took the manuscript from De Mudd's hand, and soon found, perpendicularly written in the margin thereof, the following longitudinous word : " Hono- rificabilitudinitatibus " — which word. Doctor Scrib- lerus at once said, occurs in Shakespeare's Love's Sesquipedalia Verba. 105 Labour 's Lost, Act V., Sc. i. He also remarked that this is outdone by Rabelais with the following word : " Antipericatametaanaparheugedamphicribrationes." And thereupon Wopsle pointed out several other long words similarly written, here and there, along the edges of the text. These the committee peered at silently for a long while. At last, Wopsle took the manuscript, and, looking as wise as a scholiast, poked his finger at the word which had perplexed and bewildered him so utterly. And then Profes- sor Digamma put on his spectacles, looked thereon, and said, " 't is a Greek word " ; and, after study- ing it for a few minutes and scratching his head during the while, he declared that 't is a word of fourteen syllables, which was coined by Aris- tophanes and by him used in his comedy entitled The Wasps. Moreover, he said that the learned Voss has framed a German equivalent * for this sesquipedalian word, and that the German word, like the Greek, is an example of agglutination rather than technical etymological composition. He also remarked that Aristophanes concocted and used in his Ecdesiazusa, a word which, in the Greek, consists of seventy-seven syllables, as the name of a dish composed of a great number of ingredients ; and that Richter quotes Forster as au- thority for a Sanskrit compound of one hundred and fifty-two syllables. And furthermore, Desunt ccRtera. * MoTgiTtddimnerungsh^ndelmacherrechtsverderbmiilnuanderung. io6 Falstaff. As 't was as natural for Digamma to speak Greek as 't is for a pig to squeak, there 's no telling how long he would have talked, had not a vivid flash of lightning, a deafening thunder-clap, and some drops of rain brought his remarks to an abrupt con- clusion. Owing to the impending storm, the busi- ness of the day was brought to a close on the jump, as 't were, thus : The task of translating the manu- script, of supplying, so far as it was possible, the many gaps therein, and giving an opinion as to its worth or worthlessness, was given over to a sub- committee consisting of De Mudd, Digamma, Scri- blerus, Fogg, and Wopsle — a sort of kangaroo com- mittee, as it proved to be, for its chief strength and efficiency lay, not in its frontispiece, but rather in its tailpiece ; and, as a consequence, the tail wagged not only itself, but also the head and the body as well. Wopsle, however, seems to have been made a member of the sub-committee at the special in- stance and request of the chairman thereof. It was ordered that a report be made, if possible, on or before the last of the dog days. Acting upon certain hints given by the word Abracadabra, written in its peculiar mystical manner and in an obscure corner of the document, De Mudd and Wopsle soon discovered, cunningly concealed in certain of the long words aforesaid, the all-impor- tant cipher-words — five in number, quincuncially arranged and running throughout the text — which words worked like a charm in revealing the mys- teries of the manuscript, and with the certainty of the multiplication-table, the sublimity of the bi- Discovery of the Cipher-Words. 107 nomial theorem, and the luminosity of the famous " Problem of the Lights," which used to be in M. Bourdon's treatise on algebra. The joy of the Pickwickians after the Chairman of their Club had, by the payment of ten shillings, rescued from a rustic an uneven and broken stone whereon he had detected a strange and curious inscription of un- questionable antiquity, to wit, X BILST UM PSHI S.M. ARK, did not surpass the joy of De Mudd and Wopsle when their sedulous search for the cipher-words was crowned with success. Doubtless their delight equalled that of Champollion when he had at last interpreted the famous Rosetta stone which had so long puzzled Egyptologists. George Psalmanazar Wopsle himself exhibited such extraordinary in- genuity in mending many of the holes in the text of the manuscript, and so much facility in turning obsolete words and archaic phrases into newspaper English, that De Mudd came to have as high an opinion of his genius in these respects as Dr. John- son had of the character, talents, and piety of George Psalmanazar of Formosa with whom he used to discuss theological and literary matters in an alehouse in London, and of whom he asserted that he would " as soon think of contradicting a bishop." Although Digamma and Scriblerus io8 Falstaff. worked in the background, so to speak, of the sub- committee, yet they did their duty faithfully and well by digging and delving in the graves of the dead(and " damned," ut dicebat iste navovpyoi Gulielmus Cobbett,*) languages, resurrecting the scraps thereof embraced in the text of the docu- ment, clothing them in the English language of to-day, and compelling them to tell the secrets of their prison-house. Fogg did little, but to object, except, and demur to almost everything that was done, and to wrangle daily with Wopsle. The task of the sub-committee was finished, and its report made in due time. Among the many special findings of fact contained in said report, are the following : The manuscript submitted to the committee is, in many places, a palimpsest ; fortunately, however, the erasures have been so slightly made that the subsequent writing — much of which is criss-cross — has not wholly obscured the first writing ; but, unfortunately, there are many lacuna therein. The text is a polyglot, mostly made up of law Latin, law Norman, and old English, all sprinkled and seasoned with bits of Greek and Hebrew ; and the scholarly writer thereof seems to have been " at a great feast of languages, and stolen the scraps." The manu- script abounds in obsolete words, and archaic ex- pressions ; its style is quaint and pleonastic, and has the " damnable iteration " peculiar to legal * James Russell Lowell, in " Notices of an Independent Press," prefixed to liis Biglow Papers. Charges Against Sir yokn. 109 documents. In intervals of employment the clerkly hand has indented and illuminated the text with ornamental letters and grotesque figures and pic- tures, and listlessly scribbled marginal notes there- to. The clerk has, in school-boy fashion — merely to try his goosequill pen, perhaps — scrawled here and there in the margins several long Greek and dog-Latin words, " best fitted for Gargantua's mouth, but too great for any mouth of this age's size." The document purports to be the notes taken of the examination of Sir John Falstaff before Justices Shallow and Silence, with Master Abraham Slender as a friend of the court, in regard to a long list of public offences charged against him. These notes appear to have been mostly written by the learned Welsh parson, Sir Hugh Evans, as the clerk of this half-way court. It also appears that Fang served as the sheriff of said court, and Snare, Grabbe, and Ketchum as under-bailiffs ; and that the examination was held at the Boar's Head tavern, in Eastcheap, London. Though there are many hiatuses in the manu- script, yet Wopsle has, with amazing critical acu- men, often divined what is wanting and supplied it in the translation ; but the rest of the gaps therein have been left vacant because no member of the sub-committee has been able to guess what is lack- ing. Sir Hugh's notes end so suddenly that 't is surmised that the greater part thereof has been lost, or that the trial, for some unknown cause, came to an abrupt conclusion. The document ap- I lo Falsi off. pears never to have been duly filed in any public office. The information or complaint filed against Sir John, seems to have been prepared on behalf of the King, by a pleader who clearly anticipated' the three kinds of certainty which Lord Coke distin- guishes. (Co. Litt. 303a.) The substance, es- sence, or rather, the quintessence, of the charges formulated therein — these charges being freed from verbiage, archaisms, and vermiculate rhetoric, and translated into plain, every-day English — is that Sir John Falstaff is a Tavern-haunter ; drunkard ; Bacchanalian ; bootlegger ; saloonist ; wine-bibber ; sack-butt ; huge bombard of sack ; [Hiatus in MS.] Incomparable liar ; omnipotent villain ; fat old rogue ; oily old rascal ; greasy knight ; whoreson round man ; gorbellied knave ; swinge-buckler ; braggadocio ; coward ; thief ; robber ; purse-taker ; murderer (of " men in buckram ") ; [Alter hiatus in MS!\ Idler ; vagabond ; dead beat ; swindler ; spendthrift ; cheat ; parasite ; peculator ; perennial debtor ; roisterer ; gormandizer ; lewdster ; flatterer ; slanderer ; tattler ; Translation of MS. 1 1 1 scandal-monger ; blackguard ; blatherskite ; conversationalist ; \Ingens hiatus hie in MS^ Profane swearer ; low Churchman ; latitudinarian ; Epicurean ; Ephesian ; Corinthian ; abominable misleader of youth ; old white-bearded Satan ; * \Hialus valde deflendus in MSJ\ Bringing Sir John Falstaff before such a court was very like arraigning Gulliver on articles of impeachment for high treason and other capital crimes alleged to have been by him committed in the empire of Lilliput. It appears that he did not care to employ counsel to defend him, but that he attorneyed his own case. All of the members of the sub-committee, save one, agreed that the manuscript is genuine, prob- ably authentic, and possibly of some literary value. After mature consideration by the entire com- mittee, all of the members thereof, except two, concurred in the foregoing opinion : And it was ordered that the original manuscript and all the other documents and papers of the late 'Squire Shall-Owe which had been submitted to the com- mittee, together with the translation of the manu- * The new words in the foregoing translation of the informa- tion filed against Falstaff, as well as certain low and slangy, but expressive, Americanisms appearing here and there, in the report of Sir John's trial, were doubtless inserted therein by Wopsle, who seems to have been the ringleader of the transla- tors of the manuscript notes of the trial aforesaid. 1 1 2 Falstaff. script, and the report thereon, be deposited among the archives of Zenith City — Edward Coke Fogg and Joel Levi, dissenting. They gave it as their opinion that the manuscript itself is a forgery and of no literary worth whatever ; hinted that George Psalmanazar Wopsle, aided and abetted by Ignatius De Mudd, had fabricated the greater part of the purported translation thereof ; sneered at the other members of the committee for their gullibility ; protested against filing the papers as aforesaid ; and insisted that such documentary trash should be tossed into a waste-paper basket, or, rather, re- duced to ashes. But at this juncture, Wopsle, who was then half-seas-over — he 'd been a sailor-boy — good-naturedly interposed, and said : " Come, come, gentlemen of the committee, I hope we shall drink down all unkindness ; let 's all drink on my score, and to the memory of the old boy built like a Dutch lugger and having a round forecastle,* to wit, old Jack Falstaff." And all responded, " Ay, ay, sir," and drank accordingly, iterum iterumque, until one or two — perhaps three — of the seven sages aforesaid were seen to lurch considerably, and to be in great danger of shifting their cargo * A sailor who had just come into port with a full pocket paid Stephen Kemble thirty pounds to have a performance of Henry IV. all to himself, with Kemble as "the old boy with the round forecastle, built like