Falstaff

“ But an expedient offers, a mirthful one,—Take your choice Falstaff, a point of honour, or a point of drollery.—It could not be a question;—Falstaff falls, Douglas is cheated, and the world laughs. But does he fall like a Coward? No, like a buffoon only; the superior principle prevails, and Falstaff lives by a stratagem growing out of his character, to prove himself no counterfeit, to jest, to be employed, and to fight again. That Falstaff valued himself, and expected to be valued by others, upon this piece of saving wit, is plain. ”

“ Prince Henry stammered awkwardly, addressing himself to Sir John Falstaff,—“Percy I killed myself, and saw thee dead.”
Prince John of Lancaster whistled a popular melody in a low key.
Sir John Falstaff lifted up his hands, and exclaimed—
“Didst thou? Lord, Lord, how this world is given to lying! I grant you I was down, and out of breath; and so was he: but we rose both at an instant, and fought a long hour by Shrewsbury clock. If I may be believed, so; if not, let them that should reward valour take the sin upon their own heads. ”

“ Thus constituted, his social and intellectual qualities so blending with the dissolute propensities of his nature, that the epicure, and free-booter, the whore-monger and vain-glorious boaster, lose in the composition their native deformity, Falstaff becomes the most entertaining and seductive companion that the united powers of genius, levity, and laughter have ever, in the most felicitous hour of their mirth and fancy, created for the sons of men. ”

“ In Falstaff there isn’t this final incongruity and element of surprise. Falstaff is but a sublimated sample of ‘the funny man.’ We cannot, therefore, laugh so greatly with him as with Johnson. (Nor even at him; because we are not tickled so much by the weak points of a character whose points are all weak ones; also because we have no reverence trying to impose restraint upon us.) Still, Falstaff has indubitably the power to convulse us. I don’t mean we ever are convulsed in reading Henry the Fourth. No printed page, alas, can thrill us to extremities of laughter. ”

“ The humorist refuses to part with any atom of his own personality, he stamps it on whatever comes from him. "If reasons were as plenty as blackberries," says Falstaff, achieving individuality by the same kind of odd picturesque comparison as every witty Irish peasant uses in talk, to the delight of himself and his hearers. But the individuality lies deeper than phrases: Falstaff takes his private standard into battle with him. There is nothing more obviously funny than the short paunchy man, let us not say cowardly, but disinclined to action, who finds himself engaged in a fight. ”

“ Justice Shallow looked at Sir John Falstaff. Not composedly though, by any means.
“Master Shallow, I owe you a thousand pounds,” said Sir John Falstaff. It was a fact at all events, and, therefore, worthy of mention.
“Ay, marry Sir John,” the justice faltered, “which I beseech you to let me have home with me.”
“That can hardly be, Master Shallow,” was the reply. “Do not you grieve at this; I shall be sent for in private to him! Look you, he must seem thus to the world. Fear not your advancement; I will be the man yet that shall make you great.” ”

“ Many thoughtless commentators have pronounced the portrait of Sir John Falstaff, as drawn in the “Merry Wives of Windsor,” to be wanting in verisimilitude, and have therefore called its authenticity into question. No discerning mind can mistake the likeness. It is the same man whom we have so often seen drawn by the same master-hand under more favourable circumstances—but how changed, how fallen! ”

“ Having made this exclamation, we may suppose that Sir John Falstaff would repair his not very flattering mistake by a plausible apology, or turn it off with a timely jest——either being always at his command at a moment’s notice. Having pacified the by no means implacable Doit, he would muse upon old times—old forms and deeds growing into shape and colour through the fog of years on the dead level of an old man’s memory—like cows and windmills through the morning mist on a Flemish landscape. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Falstaff himself is so great a joke, rather from his being so huge a mass of enjoyment than of absurdity.”
While with equal perceptive judgment “Falstaff,” says Dr. Johnson, “unimitated, unimitable Falstaff, how shall I describe thee? Thou compound of sense and vice; of sense which may be admired but not esteemed; of vice which may be despised, but hardly detested! Falstaff ... 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 defenceless. ”

“ The score of Falstaff is something of an alpha and omega of a musical life—there is the young and the old, the youth and the philosopher present and apparent, in rare harmonious weaving. The symmetry of the whole is striking indeed; while the clever construction throughout shows not merely the educated, but also the painstaking composer. [Pg 201] All the music is not of such superlative grace as that delicious scene where the animated quartet of merry wives are reading Falstaff's love-letters ”

“ But the talent itself has descended; and Falstaff may be regarded as the mighty progenitor of the American knack at exaggerating, into which imagination must enter either to make it witty or simply ludicrous. We can match the felicities of Falstaff from every State of the Union. Indeed, we are of opinion that emigration, which has impaired the physical fulness of the Anglo-Saxon man, has not depleted the vein of his humor: our romancing talent is as vast as the country which nourishes it by all enterprises and ambitions. We have not fallen away vilely; we do not bate, do not dwindle. ”

“ But the outer Falstaff is English, and the lawless root of him is yet more English, for there is not a race in the world hates the law more than the English race. Thus the inner, adventurous Falstaff is the Englishman who conquered every sea and planted his flag among the savages; he is perhaps the Englishman who went out to those savages with the Bible in his hand; he is the unsteady boy who ran away to sea, the privateersman who fought the French and the Dutch; he is the cheerful, greedy, dull, and obstinate Englishman, who is so wonderfully stupid and so wonderfully full of common sense. ”

“ It is hopeless to try to abash him; force even, as embodied in the Chief Justice, does not awe him overmuch, so well does he know that threats will not avail to impair his pleasure. Falstaff in jail would make merry with the jailers, divert them with quips, throw dice and drink endlessly the sack they would offer him for love. He cannot be daunted, feeling too deeply that he holds the ball of the world between his short arms ”

“ Falstaff is one of the most celebrated personages of English comedy, and perhaps no drama can present a gayer one. The description of the follies of a youth so disorderly as that of Henry V., at a time when manners were so coarse and rude, would be a very melancholy picture, if, in the midst of its uncouth debauchery, habits and pretensions of a higher order did not effect a contrast, and perform a part all the more amusing because it is so out of place. ”

“ Sir John is old as well as fat, which gives a melancholy retrospective tinge to the 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 absolute self-possession, 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. ”

“ There's place and means for every man alive.
The familiarity of the public with the character of Falstaff, under the name of Sir John Oldcastle, is evidenced by the frequency with which both this play and character are referred to by the latter name even after the publication of the First Part of Henry IV. in 1598, with the name changed to Falstaff. ”

“ The circumstances may change but not the man. He only adapts the outward show to them. The incomparably more honest nature of Falstaff is as consistent as the king’s. He is a Bohemian who is not vicious nor cruel, but who simply follows the lusts of the flesh spontaneously, and is lovable for his geniality, his wit, and his perfect sincerity. ”

“ It was fortunate that with this sally Sir John Falstaff desisted for the present, or he would in all probability have been the death of Master Robert Shallow. That gentleman repeated the words, “And I will take such order that thy friends shall ring for thee,” to himself, many times over, that he might be able to retail the jest to his admiring friends. He circulated it at first as one of the many brilliant things Sir John Falstaff had said on the occasion of his first visit to Shallow Hall. ”

“ I begin to doubt seriously that Sir John Falstaff was one bit of a courtier after all. Had he been a person of that description, he would certainly have toadied King Henry the Fourth much better than he did, by aping (as is the fashion with people of a courtly turn) the most salient points of that lugubrious, and especially infamous, monarch’s character and conduct. This is a new light on the mystery of our knight’s repeated failures in the attempt to rise in court favour. He was not half a rogue—that is the long and short of the matter. ”

“ As for Hamlet and Cleopatra, they often seem to destroy the world and recreate it again in a single casual sentence; only the most towering images are allowed to wait upon their gigantic moods. And Falstaff—what of him? There are persons who disapprove of Falstaff; probably they are the very same people who will not tolerate any sort of exaggeration, who sniff at hyperboles, who dislike a thousand other fine things. We who love the hyperbolical both in literature and talk will take our stand on Falstaff, a sufficient bulwark against legions of such sticklers and quibblers. ”

“ In the folio edition of Shakespeare's works Fastolf's name is spelt Falstaff when introduced into the ‘First Part of Henry VI.’ This may seem to give additional weight to the theory that the Sir John Falstaff of Shakespeare's ‘Henry IV’ and ‘Merry Wives of Windsor’ is a satiric portrait of Sir John Fastolf. Shakespeare represents Falstaff to have been brought up in the household of the Duke of Norfolk, as Fastolf is reported to have been. Fastolf had a house in Southwark, and his servant, Henry Windsor, wrote to John Paston, 27 Aug. ”

“ These are ours only if the mirthmaker be a living man whose jests we hear as they come fresh from his own lips. All I claim for Falstaff is that he would be able to convulse us if he were alive and accessible. ”

“ A little reflection may perhaps bring us round again to the point of our departure, and unite our Understandings to our instinct.—Let us then for a moment suspend at least our decisions, and candidly and coolly inquire if Sir John Falstaff be, indeed, what he has so often been called by critic and commentator, male and female,—a Constitutional Coward. ”

“ To many, the play is remarkable because it introduces Sir John Falstaff, the most notable figure in English comedy. Falstaff is that deeply interesting thing, a man who is base because he is wise. Our justest, wisest brain dwelt upon Falstaff longer than [114] upon any other character because he is the world and the flesh, able to endure while Hotspur flames to his death, and the enemies of the devil are betrayed that the devil may have power to betray others.
The Second Part of King Henry IV. ”

“ When our play opens Dame Quickly is demurely stirring the fire while Bardolph is sorting garments which he takes from the press. We hear a quivery voice singing: “Then Came Bold Sir Caradoc” ... and Sir John Falstaff fumbles at the door and enters. It is a Falstaff much broken since his loss of the King’s favor and now equally decayed in wit, health and reputation. His paunch alone remains prosperous and monstrous and contrasts greatly with the shrunken remainder of the man. ”

“ A late visitor—especially one making such formidable announcement of his arrival as that which disturbed Sir John Falstaff from his comfortable after-supper nap, and sent Master Shallow’s little dried walnut of a heart leaping into his mouth, like a parched pea from a shovel up the chimney—was not only a source of astonishment but of alarm. It might be a robber at the head of a forest-band come to levy what we should term an execution on the goods and chattels ”

“ There was assuredly a strong dash of Puritanism in the real Falstaff, for when Shakespeare comes to render this, he multiplies the brush-strokes with perfect confidence; Falstaff is perpetually repenting. ”

“ Born to move in good society, Falstaff has not yet renounced all his pretensions of this kind; he has not adopted the coarseness of the positions to which he is degraded by his vices; he has given up every thing except his self-love; he does not make a merit of his intemperance, nor does he base his vanity upon the exploits of a bandit. ”