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THE PLAYS OF

SHAKESPEARE

FIRST PART OF

KING HENRY IV

WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY

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The publisher desires to acknowledge the courtesy of Messrs. Macmillan and Co. in granting permission to use the text of the Cambridge Shakespeare.

INTRODUCTION.

I.

SHAKESPEARE finds the matter for this play in Holinshed's Chronicle, and in an old, quite puerile play, The Famous Victories of Henry the fifth, conteining the Honorable Battell of Agin-court, in which the young Prince is represented as frequenting the company of roisterers and highway robbers. It was this, no doubt, that suggested to him the novel and daring idea of transferring direct to the stage, in historical guise, a series of scenes from the everyday life of the streets and taverns around him, and blending them with the dramatised chronicle of the Prince whom he regarded as the national hero of England. To this blending we owe the matchless freshness of the whole picture.

For the rest, Shakespeare found scarcely anything in the foolish old play, acted between 1580 and 1588, which could in any way serve his purpose. He took from it only the anecdote of the box on the ear given by the Prince of Wales to the Lord Chief-Justice, and a few names—the tavern in Eastcheap, Gadshill, Ned, and the name, not the character, of Sir John Oldcastle, as Falstaff was originally called.

In his close-woven and unflagging mirthfulness, in the inexhaustible wealth of drollery concentrated in his person, Falstaff surpasses all that antiquity and the Middle Ages have produced in the way of comic character, and all that the stage of later times can show.

There is in him something of the old Greek Silenus, swag-bellied and infinitely jovial, and something of the Vidushaska of the old Indian drama, half court-fool,

half friend and comrade to the hero. He unites in himself the two comic types of the old Roman comedy, Artotrogus and Pyrgopolinices, the parasite and the boastful soldier. Like the Roman scurra, he leaves his patron to pay the reckoning, and in return entertains him with his jests, and, like the Miles Gloriosus, he is a braggart above all braggarts, a liar above all liars. Yet he is in his single person richer and more entertaining than all the ancient Silenuses and courtfools and braggarts and parasites put together.

There is among Shakespeare's predecessors a great writer, one of the greatest, with whom we cannot but compare him; to wit, Rabelais, the master spirit of the early Renaissance in France. He is, moreover, one of the few great writers with whom Shakespeare is known to have been acquainted. He alludes to him in As You Like It (iii. 2), where Celia says, when Rosalind asks her a dozen questions and bids her answer in one word: 'You must borrow me Gargantua's mouth first: 'tis a word too great for any mouth of this age's size.'

If we compare Falstaff with Panurge, we see that Rabelais stands to Shakespeare in the relation of a Titan to an Olympian god. Rabelais is gigantic, disproportioned, potent, but formless. Shakespeare is smaller and less excessive, poorer in ideas, though richer in fancies, and moulded with the utmost firmness of outline.

Rabelais died at the age of seventy, ten years before Shakespeare was born; there is between them all the difference between the morning and the noon of the Renaissance. Rabelais is a poet, philosopher, polemist, reformer, 'even to the very fire exclusively,' but always threatened with the stake. Shakespeare's coarseness compared with Rabelais' is as a manure-bed compared with the Cloaca Maxima. Burlesque uncleanness pours in floods from the Frenchman's pen.

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