The MERRY WIVES OF WINDSOR is no doubt a very amusing play, with a
great deal of humour, character, and nature in it: but we should
have liked it much better, if any one else had been the hero of it,
instead of Falstaff. We could have been contented if Shakespeare had
not been 'commanded to show the knight in love'. Wits and
philosophers, for the most part, do not shine in that character; and
Sir John himself by no means comes off with flying colours. Many
people complain of the degradation and insults to which Don Quixote
is so frequently exposed in his various adventures. But what are the
unconscious indignities which he suffers, compared with the sensible
mortifications which Falstaff is made to bring upon himself? What
are the blows and buffetings which the Don receives from the staves
of the Yanguesian carriers or from Sancho Panza's more hard-hearted
hands, compared with the contamination of the buck-basket, the
disguise of the fat woman of Brentford, and the horns of Herne the
hunter, which are discovered on Sir John's head? In reading the
play, we indeed wish him well through all these discomfitures, but
it would have been as well if he had not got into them. Falstaff in
the MERRY WIVES OF WINDSOR is not the man he was in the two parts of
HENRY IV. His wit and eloquence have left him. Instead of making a
butt of others, he is made a butt of by them. Neither is there a
single particle of love in him to excuse his follies: he is merely a
designing, bare-faced knave, and an unsuccessful one.
The scene with Ford as Master Brook, and that with Simple, Slender's
man, who comes to ask after the Wise Woman, are almost the only ones in
which his old intellectual ascendancy appears. He is like a person
recalled to the stage to perform an unaccustomed and ungracious part;
and in which we perceive only 'some faint sparks of those flashes of
merriment, that were wont to set the hearers in a roar'. But the single
scene with Doll Tearsheet, or Mrs. Quickly's account of his desiring 'to
eat some of housewife Keach's prawns', and telling her 'to be no more so
familiarity with such people', is worth the whole of the MERRY WIVES OF
WINDSOR put together. Ford's jealousy, which is the mainspring of the
comic incidents, is certainly very well managed. Page, on the contrary,
appears to be somewhat uxorious in his disposition; and we have pretty
plain indications of the effect of the characters of the husbands on the
different degrees of fidelity in their wives. Mrs. Quickly makes a very
lively go-between, both between Falstaff and his Dulcineas, and Anne
Page and her lovers, and seems in the latter case so intent on her own
interest as totally to overlook the intentions of her employers. Her
master, Doctor Caius, the Frenchman, and her fellow servant Jack Rugby,
are very completely described. This last-mentioned person 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, that he is given to
prayer; he is something peevish that way; but nobody but has his fault.'
The Welsh Parson, Sir Hugh Evans (a title which in those days was given
to the clergy) is an excellent character in all respects. He is as
respectable as he is laughable. He has 'very good discretions, and very
odd humours'. The duel-scene with Caius gives him an opportunity to show
his 'cholers and his tremblings of mind', his valour and his melancholy,
in an irresistible manner. In the dialogue, which at his mother's
request he holds with his pupil, William Page, to show his progress in
learning, it is hard to say whether the simplicity of the master or the
scholar is the greatest. Nym, Bardolph, and Pistol, are but the shadows
of what they were; and Justice Shallow himself has little of his
consequence left. But his cousin, Slender, makes up for the deficiency.
He is a very potent piece of imbecility. In him the pretensions of the
worthy Gloucestershire family are well kept up, and immortalized. He and
his friend Sackerson and his book of songs and his love of Anne Page and
his having nothing to say to her can never be forgotten. It is the only
first-rate character in the play, but it is in that class. Shakespeare
is the only writer who was as great in describing weakness as strength.