The Merry Wives of Windsor, as we have it, was first printed in the
folio of 1623. The play, however, was registered at the Stationers',
January 18, 1602, as "an excellent and pleasant-conceited comedy of
Sir John Falstaff and the Merry Wives of Windsor." In pursuance of
this entry, an imperfect and probably fraudulent edition was published
in the course of the same year, and was reprinted in 1619. In this
quarto edition, the play is but about half as long as in the authentic
copy of 1623, and some of the prose parts are printed so as to look
like verse. It is in doubt whether the issue of 1602 was a fair
reproduction of the play as originally written, or whether it was
printed from a defective and mutilated transcript stealthily taken
down by unskilful reporters at the theatre. On the former supposal, of
course the play must have been rewritten and greatly improved,--a
thing known to have been repeatedly done by the Poet; so that it is
nowise unlikely in this case. But, as the question hardly has interest
enough to pay the time and labour of discussing it, I shall dismiss it
without further remark.
It is to be presumed that every reader of Shakespeare is familiar with
the tradition which makes this comedy to have been written at the
instance of Queen Elizabeth; who, upon witnessing the performance of
_King Henry the Fourth_, was so taken with Falstaff, that she
requested the Poet to continue the character through another play, and
to represent him in love. This tradition is first heard of in 1702,
eighty-six years after the Poet's death; but it was accepted by the
candid and careful Rowe; Pope, also, Theobald, and others, made no
scruple of receiving it,--men who would not be very apt to let such a
matter pass unsifted, or help to give it currency, unless they thought
there was good ground for it. Besides, the thing is not at all
incredible in itself, either from the alleged circumstances of the
case, or from the character of the Queen; and there are some points in
the play that speak not a little in its support. One item of the story
is, that the author, hastening to comply with her Majesty's request,
wrote the play in the brief space of fourteen days. This has been
taken by some as quite discrediting the whole story; but, taking the
play as it stands in the copy of 1602, it does not seem to me that
fourteen days is too brief a time for Shakespeare to have done the
work in, especially with such a motive to quicken him.
This matter has a direct bearing in reference to the date of the
writing. _King Henry the Fourth_, the First Part certainly, and
probably the Second Part also, was on the stage before 1598. And in
the title-page to the first quarto copy of _The Merry Wives_, we have
the words, "As it hath been divers times acted by the Right Honourable
my Lord Chamberlain's Servants, both before her Majesty and
elsewhere." This would naturally infer the play to have been on the
stage a considerable time before the date of that issue. And all the
_clear_ internal evidences of the play itself draw in support of the
belief, that the Falstaff of Windsor memory was a continuation from
the Falstaff of Eastcheap celebrity. And the whole course of
blundering and exposure which Sir John here goes through is such, that
I can hardly conceive how the Poet should have framed it, but that he
was prompted to do so by some motive external to his own mind. That
the free impulse of his genius, without suggestion or inducement from
any other source, could have led him to put Falstaff through such a
series of uncharacteristic delusions and collapses, is to me wellnigh
incredible. So that I can only account for the thing by supposing the
man as here exhibited to have been an after-thought sprung in some way
from the manner in which an earlier and fairer exhibition of the man
had been received.
All which brings the original composition of the play to a point of
time somewhere between 1598 and 1601. On the other hand, the play, as
we have it, contains at least one passage, inferring, apparently, that
the work of revisal must have been done some time after the accession
of King James, which was in March, 1603. That passage is the odd
reason Mrs. Page gives Mrs. Ford for declining to share the honour of
knighthood with Sir John: "These knights will _hack_; and so thou
shouldst not alter the article of thy gentry"; which can scarce bear
any other sense than as referring to the prodigality with which the
King dispensed those honours in the first year of his English reign;
knighthood being thereby in a way to grow so _hackneyed_, that it
would rather be an honour not to have been dubbed. As for the reasons
urged by Knight and Halliwell for dating the first writing as far back
as 1593, they seem to me quite too far-fetched and fanciful to be
worthy of notice; certainly not worth the cost of sifting, nor even of
statement.
* * * * *
Much question has been made as to the particular period of his life in
which Sir John prosecuted his adventures at Windsor, whether before or
after the incidents of _King Henry the Fourth_, or at some
intermediate time. And some perplexity appears to have arisen from
confounding the order in which the several plays were written with the
order of the events described in them. Now, at the close of the
History, Falstaff and his companions are banished the neighborhood of
the Court, and put under strong bonds of good behaviour. So that the
action of the Comedy cannot well be referred to any point of time
after that proceeding. Moreover we have Page speaking of Fenton as
having "kept company with the wild Prince and Pointz." Then too, after
Falstaff's experiences in the buck-basket and while disguised as "the
wise woman of Brentford," we have him speaking of the matter as
follows: "If it should come to the ear of the Court, how I have been
transformed, and how my transformation hath been washed and cudgelled,
they would melt me out of my fat drop by drop, and liquor fishermen's
boots with me: I warrant they would whip me with their fine wits till
I were as crestfallen as a dried pear." From which it would seem that
he still enjoys at Court the odour of his putative heroism in killing
Hotspur at the battle of Shrewsbury, with which the First Part of the
History closes. The Second Part of the History covers a period of
nearly ten years, from July, 1403, to March, 1413; in which time
Falstaff may be supposed to have found leisure for the exploits at
Windsor.
So that the action of the Comedy might well enough have taken place in
one of Sir John's intervals of rest from the toils of war during the
time occupied by the Second Part of the History. And this placing of
the action is further sustained by the presence of Pistol in the
Comedy; who is not heard of at all in the First Part of the History,
but spreads himself with characteristic splendour in the Second.
Falstaff's boy, Robin, also, is the same, apparently, who figures as
his Page in the Second Part of the History. As for the Mrs. Quickly of
Windsor, we can hardly identify her in any way with the Hostess of
Eastcheap. For, as Gervinus acutely remarks, "not only are her outward
circumstances different, but her character also is essentially
diverse; similar in natural simplicity indeed, but at the same time
docile and skilful, as the credulous wife and widow of Eastcheap never
appears." To go no further, the Windsor Quickly is described as a
_maid_; which should suffice of itself to mark her off as distinct
from the Quickly of Boar's-head Tavern.
In truth, however, I suspect the Poet was not very attentive to the
point of making the events of the several plays fadge together. The
task of representing Sir John in love was so very different from that
of representing him in wit and war, that he might well fall into some
discrepancies in the process. And if he had been asked whereabouts in
the order of Falstaff's varied exploits he meant those at Windsor to
be placed, most likely he would have been himself somewhat puzzled to
answer the question.
For the plot and matter of the Comedy, Shakespeare was apparently
little indebted to any thing but his own invention. _The Two Lovers of
Pisa_, a tale borrowed from the novels of Straparola, and published in
Tarlton's _News out of Purgatory_, 1590, is thought to have suggested
some of the incidents; and the notion seems probable. In that tale a
young gallant falls in love with a jealous old doctor's wife, who is
also young, and really encourages the illicit passion. The gallant,
not knowing the doctor, takes him for confidant and adviser in the
prosecution of his suit, and is thus thwarted in all his plans. The
naughty wife conceals her lover, first in a basket of feathers, then
between some partitions of the house, and again in a box of deeds and
valuable papers. If the Poet had any other obligations, they have not
been traced clearly enough to be worth noting.
* * * * *
As a specimen of pure comedy, _The Merry Wives of Windsor_ by general
concession stands unrivalled. I say _pure_ comedy, for it has no such
interminglings of high poetry and serious passion as mark the Poet's
best comedies, and give them a semi-tragic cast. This play is not only
full of ludicrous situations and predicaments, but is also rich and
varied in comic characterization. Even Falstaff apart, who is an
inexhaustible storehouse of laughter-moving preparations, there is
comic matter enough in the characters and doings of the other persons
to make the play a perpetual diversion. Though historically connected
with the reign of Henry the Fourth, the manners and humours of the
scene are those of the Poet's own time; and in this respect we need
but compare it with Ben Jonson's _Every Man in his Humour_, to see
"how much easier it was to vanquish the rest of Europe than to contend
with Shakespeare."
The action of the piece proceeds throughout by intrigue; that is, a
complication of cross-purposes wherein the several persons strive to
outwit and circumvent one another. And the stratagems all have the
appropriate merit of causing a pleasant surprise, and a perplexity
that is grateful, because it stops short of confusion; while the
awkward and grotesque predicaments, into which the persons are thrown
by their mutual crossing and tripping, hold attention on the alert,
and keep the spirits in a frolic. Yet the laughable proceedings of the
scene are all easy and free; that is, the comic situations are
ingenious without being at all forced; the ingenuity being hidden in
the naturalness with which every thing comes to pass. The play well
illustrates, too, though in its own peculiar sort, the general order
and method of Shakespeare's art; the surrounding parts falling in with
the central one, and the subordinate plots drawing, as by a secret
impulse, into harmony with the leading plot. For instance, while
Falstaff undergoes repeated collapses from a hero into a butt, that
others may laugh at his expense; the Welsh Parson and the French
Doctor are also baulked of their revenge, just as they are getting
over the preliminary pains and vexations; and, while pluming
themselves with anticipated honours, are suddenly deplumed into
"vlouting-stogs": Page, too, and his wife no sooner begin to exult in
their success than they are taken down by the thrift of a counter
stratagem, and left to the double shame of ignobly failing in an
ignoble undertaking: and Ford's jealousy, again, is made to scourge
himself with the very whip he has twisted for the scourging of its
object. Thus all the more prominent persons have to chew the ashes of
disappointment in turn; their plans being thwarted, and themselves
made ridiculous, just as they are on the point of grasping their
several fruitions. Falstaff, indeed, is the only one of them that
rises by falling, and extracts grace out of his disgraces. For in him
the grotesque and ludicrous is evermore laughing and chuckling over
itself: he makes comedies extempore out of his own shames and
infirmities; and is himself the most delighted spectator of the scenes
in which he figures as chief actor.
This observation and enjoyment of the comical as displayed in
himself, which forms one of Sir John's leading traits, and explains
much in him that were else inexplicable, is here seen however
labouring under something of an eclipse. The truth is, he is plainly
out of his sphere; and he shows a strange lapse from his wanted
sagacity in getting where he is: the good sense so conspicuous in his
behaviour on other occasions ought to have kept him from supposing for
a moment that he could inspire the passion of love in such a place;
nor, as before observed, does it seem likely that the Poet would have
shown him thus, but that he were moved thereto by something outside of
his own mind. For of love in any right or even decent sense Sir John
is essentially incapable. And Shakespeare evidently so regarded him:
he therefore had no alternative but either to commit a gross breach of
decorum or else to make the hero unsuccessful,--an alternative in
which the moral sanity of his genius left him no choice. So that in
undertaking the part of a lover the man must needs be a mark of
interest chiefly for what is practised upon him. For, if we may
believe Hazlitt, "wits and philosophers seldom shine in that
character"; and, whether this be true or not, it is certain that "Sir
John by no means comes off with flying colours." In fact, he is here
the dupe and victim of his own heroism, and provokes laughter much
more by what he suffers than by what he does.
But Falstaff, notwithstanding all these drawbacks, is still so far
himself, that "nought but himself can be his conqueror." If he be
overmatched, it is not so much by the strength or skill of his
antagonists as from his being persuaded, seemingly against his
judgment and for the pleasure of others, into a line of adventure
where he is not qualified to shine, and where genius, wit, and
understanding are commonly distanced by a full purse and a handsome
person. His incomparable art in turning adversities into commodities;
the good-humoured strategy whereby he manages to divert off all
unpleasant feeling of his vices and frailties; the marvellous agility
and aptness of wit which, with a vesture of odd and whimsical
constructions, at once hides the offensive and discovers the comical
features of his conduct; the same towering impudence and effrontery
which so lift him aloft in his more congenial exploits; and the
overpowering eloquence of exaggeration with which he delights to set
off and heighten whatever is most ludicrous in his own person or
situation;--all these qualities, though not in their full bloom and
vigour, are here seen in triumphant exercise.
On the whole, this bringing-forth of Sir John rather for exposure than
for exhibition is not altogether grateful to those whom he has so
often made to "laugh and grow fat." Though he still gives us wholesome
shakings, we feel that it costs him too much: the rare exhilaration he
affords us elsewhere, and even here, invests him with a sort of
humorous reverence; insomuch that we can scarce help pitying even
while we approve his merited, yet hardly merited, shames and failures.
Especially it touches us something hard that one so wit-proud as Sir
John should be thus dejected, and put to the mortification of owning
that "ignorance itself is a plummet o'er me"; of having to "stand at
the taunt of one that makes fritters of English"; and of asking, "Have
I laid my brain in the sun, and dried it, that it wants matter to
prevent so gross o'er-reaching as this?" and we would fain make out
some excuse for him on the score of these slips having occurred at a
time in his life when experience had not yet disciplined away the
natural vanity which may sometimes lead a man of genius to fancy
himself an object of the tender passion. And we are the more disposed
to judge leniently of Falstaff, inasmuch as his merry persecutors are
but a sort of decorous, respectable, commonplace people, who borrow
their chief importance from the victim of their mischievous sport; and
if they are not so bad as to make us wish him success, neither are
they so good that we like to see them thrive at his expense. On this
point Mr. Verplanck, it seems to me, has spoken just about the right
thing: "Our choler would rise, despite of us, against Cleopatra
herself, should she presume to make a dupe and tool of regal old Jack,
the natural lord and master of all about him; and, though not so
atrociously immoral as to wish he had succeeded with the Windsor
gypsies, we plead guilty to the minor turpitude of sympathy, when he
tells his persecutors, with brightening visage and exultant twinkle of
eye, 'I am glad, though you have ta'en a special stand to strike at
me, that your arrow hath glanced.'"
There is, however, another and perhaps a more instructive view to be
taken of Sir John as here represented. I shall have occasion hereafter
to note how, all through the period of _King Henry the Fourth_, he
keeps growing worse and worse, while the Prince is daily growing
better. Out of their sport-seeking intercourse he picks whatever is
bad, whereas the other gathers nothing but the good. As represented in
the Comedy he seems to be in the swiftest part of this worsening
process. At the close of the First Part of the History, the Prince
freely yields up to him the honour of Hotspur's fall; thus carrying
home to him such an example of self-renouncing generosity as it would
seem impossible for the most hardened sinner to resist. And the Prince
appears to have done this partly in the hope that it might prove a
seed of truth and grace in Falstaff, and start him in a better course
of life. But the effect upon him is quite the reverse. Honour is
nothing to him but as it may help him in the matter of sensual and
heart-steeling self-indulgence. And the surreptitious fame thus
acquired, instead of working in him for good, merely serves to procure
him larger means and larger license for pampering his gross animal
selfishness. His thoughts dwell not at all on the Prince's act of
magnanimity, which would shame his egotism and soften his heart, but
only on his own ingenuity and success in the stratagem that led to
that act. So that the effect is just to puff him up more than ever
with vanity and conceit of wit, and thus to give a looser rein and a
sharper stimulus to his greed and lust; for there is probably nothing
that will send a man faster to the Devil than that sort of conceit.
The result is, that Falstaff soon proceeds to throw off whatever of
restraint may have hitherto held his vices in check, and to wanton in
the arrogance of utter impunity. As he then unscrupulously
appropriated the credit of another's heroism; so he now makes no
scruple of sacrificing the virtue, the honour, the happiness of others
to his own mean and selfish pleasure.
But this total subjection of the mental to the animal nature cannot
long proceed without betraying the succours of reason. When the bands
of morality are thus spurned, a man rapidly sins his understanding
into lameness; as its better forces must needs be quickly rotted in
such a vapour-bath of sensuality. In this way an overweening pride of
wit often results in causing a man to be deserted by his wits; this
too in matters where he feels surest of them and has most need of
them. In refusing to see what is right, he loses the power of seeing
what is prudent and safe. He who persists in such a course will
inevitably be drawn into signal lapses of judgment, however richly
nature may have endowed him with that faculty: he will stumble over
his own self-love; his very assurance will be tripping him when he
least expects it. And so Falstaff's conceit and egotism, working
together, as they do, with his greed and lust, have the effect of
stuffing him with the most childish gullibility, at once laying him
open to the arts of bamboozling, and inviting others to practise them
upon him. He has grown to look with contempt upon honesty as a cheap
and vulgar thing, and is well punished in that honest simplicity
easily outwits him: nay, more; his fancied skill in sensual intrigue
brings him to a pass where ignorance itself is a clean overmatch for
him, and fairly earns the privilege of flouting at him.
Falstaff is fair-spoken when he chooses to be, can talk with judgment
and good sense, and has at command the arts of a gentlemanly and
dignified bearing. The two Windsor wives, meeting him at a social
dinner, and seeing him in his best suit of language and manners, think
him honourable as well as pleasant, and are won to some notes of
respect and affability towards him: "he would not swear; praised
women's modesty; and gave such orderly and well-behaved reproof of all
uncomeliness," that they would have sworn his disposition was at one
with the truth of his words. And because they meet his fair deportment
with some gentle returns of politeness, therefore he, in his conceit
of wit, of rank, and of fame, thinks they are smitten with a passion
for him. Fancying that they are hotly in love with him, he resolves on
making love to them; not that he is at all touched with the passion,
but with the cool intent of feigning a responsive flame for other and
more selfish ends. Their husbands are known to be rich, and they are
said to have the free use of their husbands' wealth. So his conclusion
is, that they are "a region in Guiana, all gold and bounty: they shall
be my East and West Indies, and I will trade to them both." In his
spendthrift self-indulgence, notwithstanding all the supplies which
his purse-taking habits and his late imputed service bring in, he has
come to be hard-up for cash, insomuch that his rascal followers are
for deserting him and turning to other resources. By driving a
love-intrigue with the women, he expects to work the keys to the full
coffers which they have at such command, and thus to replenish his
low-ebbing means.
Thus we here have Sir John in the process of complacently feeding his
glutton fancies with matter raked from the foulest gutters of
baseness. The women, burning with anger and shame, knock their wits
together for revenge; and the answer which they, in their
shrewdly-concerted plan, return to his advances is to him a pledge of
entire success: he is so transported, that he leaps clean out of his
senses forthwith, and the giddiness of his newly-fired conceit fairly
puts out the eyes of his understanding. His vanity is now quite
omnivorous: once possessed with the monstrous idea of having become
an object of love in such a place, nothing is too gross for him to
swallow. The raw and unspiced stuffings of Master Brook convey to him
no hint of mistrust: he drinks them in with unfaltering confidence;
and opens his breast to this total stranger as freely as if he were
his sworn and long-tried counsellor; the offered bribe of the man's
money so falling in with the other baits of greed as to swamp his
discretion utterly. After being cheated through the adventures of the
buck-basket, where he was "stopped in with stinking clothes that
fretted in their own grease," he appears indeed to have some smell of
the gross trickery played upon him; and vows to himself that, if he be
served such another trick, he will have his brains taken out, and
buttered, and given to a dog for a new-year's gift. But still his
vanity and thirst of money are too much for his startled prudence:
upon the offer of a second device, that too of a very flimsy texture,
and very thinly disguised, his paralysis of wit returns, and his
suspicions sink afresh into their dreamless nap. In the hard blows and
buffets there experienced, he has stronger arguments than before of
the game practised on him; still the deep spell on his judgment
continues unbroken: and now the very shame and grief of his past
failures and punishments seem to co-operate with his palsy of reason
in preparing him for a third hoax even more gross and palpable than
the former two.
When at length the untrussed hero is made to see how matters have been
carried with him, and to feel the chagrin of being so egregiously
fooled, he is indeed cast down to the lowest notes of self-contempt;
and though he so far rallies at last as to cover his retreat with
marked skill, yet he leaves the path behind him strewn thick with the
sweat-drops of his mortification. In his pride of wit and cleverness,
he had looked with scorn upon plain common people as no better than
blockheads; and had only thought to use them, and even his own powers
of mind, for compassing the means of animal gratification. But he now
stands thoroughly degraded in his own sight, and this too in the very
points where he had built his conceit of superiority. He finds that
all his wit and craft were not enough to prevent even Sir Hugh, the
simple-minded Welsh parson, from making him a laughing-stock. We too,
whose moral judgment may have been seduced from the right by the
fascinations of his intellectual playing, are brought to estimate more
justly the natural honours and safeguards of downright integrity and
innocence; and to see that the deepest shrewdness stands in not
thinking to be shrewd at all. Thus our judgment of the man is set
right in the very point where it was most liable to be drawn astray.
Gervinus regards this idea as being the soul of the piece. He thinks
the Poet's leading purpose here was to teach that plain-thoughted,
guileless honesty is a natural overmatch for studied cunning; and to
show how self-seeking craft and intricacy are apt to be caught in the
snares they have laid for others, while unselfish truth and simplicity
are protected against them by those instinctive moral warnings of
nature which crafty men despise. And he rightly observes that the play
illustrates the point in repeated instances. Thus the policy and sharp
practice of the Host to catch gain, of Ford to detect and expose the
imagined sins of his wife, and of Mr. and Mrs. Page to mismatch their
daughter, only bring to confusion the parties themselves; their crafty
devices, like Falstaff's, being outwitted and cheated by the "_honest_
knaveries" of their intended victims. Thus the several cases concur to
enforce the moral, that "an egotist like Falstaff can suffer no
severer defeat than from the honesty which he believes not, and from
the simplicity which he esteems not."
I refrain from attempting a full analysis of Sir John's character,
till I encounter him at the noontide of his glory, stealing, drinking,
lying, recruiting, warring, and discoursing of wine, wit, valour, and
honour, with Prince Hal at hand to wrestle forth the prodigies of his
big-teeming brain.
Sir John's followers are here under a cloud along with him, being
little more than the shadows of what they appear when their master is
fully himself and in his proper element. Bardolph and Pistol are
indeed the same men, or rather things, as in the History; but the
redundant fatness of their several peculiarities is here not a little
curtailed: the fire in Bardolph's nose waxes dim for lack of fuel; the
strut is much dried out of Pistol's tongue from want of drink to
generate loftiness: the low state of their master's purse, and the
discords thence growing between him and them, have rather soured their
tempers, and that sourness rusts and clogs the wheels of their inner
man. Corporal Nym is not visibly met with in _King Henry the Fourth_,
though the atmosphere smells at times as if he had been there; but we
have him again in _King Henry the Fifth_, where he carries to a
somewhat higher pitch the character of "a fellow that frights humour
out of its wits."
* * * * *
I have before observed that the Mrs. Quickly of this play is plainly
another individual than the Hostess of Eastcheap: the latter has known
Sir John "these twenty-nine years, come peascod time," whereas to the
former his person is quite unknown till she goes to him with a message
from the Windsor wives. But she seems no very remote kin of the
Hostess aforesaid: though clearly discriminated in character, yet they
have a strong family likeness. Her chief action is in the capacity of
a matchmaker and go-between; and her perfect impartiality towards all
of Anne Page's suitors, both in the service she renders and the return
she accepts, well exemplifies the indefatigable benevolence of that
class of worthies towards themselves, and is so true to the life of a
certain perpetual sort of people as almost to make one believe in the
transmigration of souls.
* * * * *
"Mine Host of the Garter" is indeed a model of a host; up to any
thing, and brimful of fun, so that it runs out at the ends of his
fingers; and nothing delights him more than to uncork the wit-holders
of his guests, unless, peradventure, it be to uncork his wine-holders
for them. His exhilarating conceit of practical shrewdness, serving as
oil to make the wheels of his mind run smooth and glib, is choicely
characteristic both of himself individually and of the class he
represents.--Sir Hugh Evans is an odd marriage of the ludicrous and
the honourable. In his officious simplicity he moralizes the play much
better, no doubt, than a wiser man would. The scene where, in
expectation of the fight with Doctor Caius, he is full of "cholers,"
and "trempling of mind," and "melancholies," and has "a great
dispositions to cry," and strikes up a lullaby to the palpitations of
his heart without seeming to know it, while those palpitations in turn
scatter his memory, and discompose his singing, is replete with a
quiet delicacy of humour hardly to be surpassed. It is thought by some
that both he and Caius may be delineations, slightly caricatured, of
what the Poet had seen and conversed with; there being a certain
portrait-like reality and effect about them, with just enough of the
ideal to lift them into the region of art.
* * * * *
Hazlitt boldly pronounces Shakespeare "the only writer who was as
great in describing weakness as strength." However this may be, I am
pretty sure that, after Falstaff, there is not a greater piece of work
in the play than Master Abraham Slender, cousin to Robert Shallow,
Esquire,--a dainty sprout, or rather sapling, of provincial gentry,
who, once seen, is never to be forgotten. In his consequential
verdancy, his aristocratic boobyism, and his lack-brain originality,
this pithless hereditary squireling is quite inimitable and
irresistible;--a tall though slender specimen of most effective
imbecility, whose manners and character must needs all be from within,
because he lacks force of nature to shape or dress himself by any
model. Mr. Hallam, whose judgment in such things is not often at
fault, thinks Slender was intended as "a satire on the brilliant
youth of the provinces," such as they were "before the introduction
of newspapers and turnpike roads; awkward and boobyish among civil
people, but at home in rude sports, and proud of exploits at which the
town would laugh, yet perhaps with more courage and good-nature than
the laughers."
* * * * *
Ford's jealousy is managed with great skill so as to help on the plot,
bringing on a series of the richest incidents, and drawing the most
savoury issues from the mellow, juicy old sinner upon whom he is
practising. The means whereby he labours to justify his passion,
spreading temptations and then concerting surprises, are quite as
wicked as any thing Falstaff does, and have, besides, the further
crime of exceeding meanness; but both their meanness and their
wickedness are of the kind that rarely fail to be their own
punishment. The way in which his passion is made to sting and lash him
into reason, and the happy mischievousness of his wife in glutting his
disease, and thereby making an opportunity to show him what sort of
stuff it lives on, are admirable instances of the wisdom with which
the Poet underpins his most fantastic creations.
The counter-plottings, also, of Page and his wife, to sell their
daughter against her better sense, are about as far from virtue as the
worst purposes of Sir John; though, to be sure, their sins are of a
more respectable kind than to expose them to ridicule. But we are the
more willing to forget their unhandsome practices therein, because of
their good-natured efforts at last to make Falstaff forget his sad
miscarriages, and to compose, in a well-crowned cup of social
merriment, whatever vexations and disquietudes still remain.--Anne
Page is but an average specimen of discreet, placid, innocent
mediocrity, yet with a mind of her own, in whom we can feel no such
interest as a rich father causes to be felt by those about her. In her
and Fenton a slight dash of romance is given to the play; their love
forming a barely audible undertone of poetry in the chorus of
comicalities, as if on purpose that while the sides are shaken the
heart may not be left altogether untouched.