ould draw his rapier and clear Dame Quickly's parlour; a consummate liar, yet a great stickler for truth. A wild braggart, he could draw distinctions and deny the major of a syllogism with the accuracy of a logician. Old in years, and fat, yet he could always pose as a leader of youth. Constantly duped, he was ever outwitting others. His versatility and powers of subterfuge and excuse were simply inexhaustible. To the ChiefJustice's reproach for his scandalous life, seeing his grey hairs and that every part of him was blasted with antiquity, he replied that he was born at three o'clock in the afternoon, with white hair and a round belly, and had cracked his voice with singing anthems; that he was old only in judgment and understanding (1 Cor. xiv. 20), and could caper any man for a thousand marks. He excused his flight at Gad's Hill by saying that he was as valiant as a lion, a Hercules by nature, but a coward by instinct, and that it was instinct which forbade him touching a true Prince. Though he had led Henry into every kind of dissipation, he could personate Henry IV. at a moment's notice and draw tears from his hearers by the pathetic, dignified reproof he administered to the young scapegrace, while he admonishes him to keep one companion if he would persevere in virtue-" a good portly man. I remember his name is Falstaff." And he could act the part of a virtuous man perfectly. Mrs. Ford says of him, "He would not swear;

DISMISSED THE COURT

143

praised women's modesty, and gave such orderly and well-behaved reproof to all unseemliness, that I would have sworn his disposition would have gone to the truth of his words, but they do no more adhere and keep place together than the 100th Psalm to the tune of Green Sleeves."" Falstaff is impudently shameless only with those who know him well, and whom he knows have seen through him. With strangers he is modest, cajoling, adroit, even edifying and devout. "He is," as he says, "Jack with his familiars, John with his brothers, and Sir John with all the world."

Such was the man who exercised such a baneful spell over Prince Henry in his youth, but the hour of grace struck and Henry obeyed. It was a call to his duty as a king, and his manhood awoke to its true dignity. The change in him was to be no half measure but complete, and when Falstaff approached, befooling, he was met with that word from Henry.

"I know thee not, old man : fall to thy prayers;
How ill white hairs become a fool, and jester !
I have long dreamed of such a kind of man,
So surfeit, swell'd, so old, and so profane;
But being awake, I do despise my dream.
Make less thy body, hence, and more thy grace;
Leave gormandising; know the grave doth gape
For thee thrice wider than for other men.
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 turned away my former self;
So will I those that kept me company."

And he forbids him to approach within ten miles of his person, but makes him a suitable allowance, and promises him advancement if he tries to reform.

.

Falstaff never reappears, but we read of his death.1 The classic scene in Dame Quickly's house-his nose sharp as a pen, and a babbling of green fields, fumbling with the sheets and smiling at his fingers' ends; and he cried out, "God! God! God!" three or four times, and "I to comfort him bade him not think of God." "So a bade me lay more clothes on his feet. And I put my hand into his bed and felt them, and they were cold as any stone." And he said, "the devil would have him about women." And he talked about the "Whore of Babylon," the common Puritan term for Rome. The old vice, the old cant, and the grip of death silencing both. The Lollard martyr preaches indeed to the very end.

With Falstaff we will conclude our comparison of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. We have as we think sufficiently shown that the poet defends the doctrines and ministers of the Church, while his fellow dramatists reviled them, and that his satire of one at least of the Protestant heroes of

1 Falstaff's death is related in "Henry V.," scene 3. The Falstaff resuscitated in the subsequent play of the "Merry Wives of Windsor" is merely an amorous old fool, the butt and dupe of his intended victims. The character was created at Elizabeth's bidding, to show the fat knight in love, the one part she would have known, had she understood him, he could not possibly perform. Cf. Braun's "Shakespeare," i., 244.

POINT OF THE SATIRE

145

the day, in the person of the fat knight, was so keen and well directed that the supporters of the new creed felt themselves bound to undertake their champion's defence. Thus in attack as in defence Shakespeare stands alone to manifest his sympathies with the ancient faith.

K

CHAPTER IV.

ENGLISH HISTORICAL PLAYS.

THE English historical plays extend with broken intervals from the reign of King John to that of Henry VIII. They may be regarded, therefore, as embracing a period marked by the rise, establishment, and fall of the feudal system in England. Shakespeare's chief, if not sole, authority is "Hollinshed's Chronicles"; but the pre-existing matter is fused in the crucible of the poet's genius, and recast according to the requirements of the historic drama. In a composition of this kind the events themselves, their chronological sequence, their mutual relation and development, the historical reality of the characters as adapted to the personages named, are of comparative unimportance. The aim of the dramatist is not to narrate in order transient and contingent facts, but to portray what is permanent and necessary, the true principles of life and conduct, the spirit working within, which is manifested only partially in outward effects.

The historic plays are not then intended to represent an accurate chronicle of the past. Indeed, in some instances, the poet notably departs from the