Jack Falstaff

“ We believe, like the immortal Jack Falstaff, they were each born at four o’clock of the morning, with a bald head, and something of a round belly; certain it is, they are universally thin in the hair, and exhibit strong manifestation of obesity.
The further marks of identity consist in a ring very variously chased, and the infallible insignia of a tuning-fork: without this no professional singer does or can exist. ”

“ This was very kind of Maître Jean, for it made Lady Alice smile. And the poor mother stood in need of some such diversion, however passing.
“Now, lads,” said Mowbray. “Whip and spur with a vengeance. No rest this side of Canterbury. And for London, ho!”
“For London, ho!” shouted Jack Falstaff, with a beaming face, looking more like a jovial young prince riding to tournament, than a rescued purloiner of animal food flying the constable. ”

“ The fact seems to be that there is a real consequence about Sir John Falstaff which is not brought forward: We see him only in his familiar hours; [pg 234] we enter the tavern with Hal and Poins; we join in the laugh and take a pride to gird at him: But there may be a great deal of truth in what he himself writes to the Prince, that tho' he be “Jack Falstaff with his Familiars, he is Sir John with the rest of Europe.” It has been remarked, and very truly I believe, that no man is a hero in the eye of his valet-de-chambre ”

“ They had had his trash a dozen times already.
“Aha! what’s this?” said the gladiator poet. “One tired of life? A worm ‘neath Ajax’s foot. Writhe hence or be crushed.”
To make the scene brief, a cudgelling match ensued. The waterman was vanquished, and the poet resumed his swaggering antics with renewed extravagance.
Jack Falstaff walked home, musing as follows:—
“At the Court Gate to-morrow. The Court will all come out in procession to the tilt-yard. All the lads will be there. That fellow for all his swagger and bulk knows no more about cudgel-play than a pig. ”

“ How many a sober-looking face demure when morning dawns would blush to meet the accusing spirit of the night, dressed out in all the fantasies of whim and eccentricity with which the rosy god of midnight revelry clothes his laughter-loving bacchanals—
"While sleep attendant at her drowsy fane, Parent of ease, envelopes all your train!"
The lamentations of old Crony brought to mind the [347] complaints of honest Jack Falstaff against his associates. "There is no truth in villanous man!" ”

“ 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. ”

“ Her tribulation was shared by the entire household, by all of whom (with the exception of Master Lambert, the Reve, the favourite butt of young Jack’s practical jokes) the young scapegrace in trouble was greatly beloved. Rough kitchen-maids and lumbering ploughmen were out on the road, watching as eagerly as their mistress—many of them with cheeks as wet as her own.
That hour seemed a lifetime to Lady Alice Falstaff.
Horses’ hoofs were at length heard pattering over the hill.
“Here they be,” roared Jankin, who had stationed himself as look-out in a high tree. “Hooray! they’m got’un.” ”

“ At all events he stole a lute-case, and seems to have liked it so much that he carried it 36 miles before his worser nature prevailed on him to sell it for 11⁄2d.
The next quotation still concerns Jack Falstaff and his crew, all of whom (and strictly in accordance with history) seem to have been sound practical musicians. This time they are speaking, not of descant, but of Prick-song. ”

“ Eighteen years later, at the age of sixty-five, Betterton appeared as Falstaff 'which drew all the town more than any new play produced of late. . . . The critics allow that Betterton has hit the humour of Falstaff better than any that have aimed at it before, . . . though he lacks the waggery of Estcourt, the drollery of Harper, and the salaciousness of Jack Evans.' (Genest, II. 381; V. 696.) Six notable Falstaffs in one generation is a record of which the seventeenth century may be proud.
Betterton's acting version of the play was published in 1700. ”

“ Poins.—Come, let’s hear, Jack; What trick hast thou now?
Sir John Falstaff.—By the Lord, I knew ye, as well as he that made ye. Why, hear ye, my masters: Was it for me to kill the heir apparent? Should I turn upon the true prince? Why, thou knowest, I am as valiant as Hercules: but beware instinct; the lion will not touch the true prince. Instinct is a great matter; I was a coward on instinct. I shall think the better of myself and thee, during my life. I for a valiant lion, and thou for a true prince. But, by the Lord, lads, I am glad you have the money__Hostess, clap to the doors ”

“ A truce to jesting, old friend Jack. I will lend thee no more money, and that is the plain truth of the matter. It is of no more use to thee than pearls to a pig. Thou art no more going to the Holy Land with King Henry than I am going thither behind thee on thy crupper (which Heaven forefend, considering the costliness of that mode of travel) . Come thou hither to dine, sup, and sleep as often as may list thee, and thou art welcome to the best my roof can afford. But I am a trader, Sir Jack, and a keen one,—I give naught for naught. ”

“ Chief Justice.—Well, be honest, be honest; and God bless your expedition!
Sir John Falstaff.—Will your lordship lend me a thousand pound to furnish me forth?
Chief Justice.—Not a penny, not a penny: you are too impatient to bear crosses. Fare you well: commend me to my cousin Westmoreland.
I consider this utter defeat of my Lord Chief Justice Gascoigne one of the most brilliant triumphs of Sir John Falstaff’s victorious life.
“If I do, fillip me with a three-man beetle,” said Jack, looking after the retreating form of his defeated adversary with ineffable contempt. “Boy!” ”

“ When there is a letter or message to be delivered he performs this conscientiously in person, such like commissions giving him an opportunity of studying the town and forming his opinions on men and manners. He is by no means a winged-footed Mercury; but can usually coin a good excuse for delay, or, if detected, a jest to ward off punishment. He has plenty of money; for his master is liberal, and Jack is a great pet with the visitors to the mansion—saying pretty things to the ladies and smart ones to the gentlemen, in return for which he is loaded with presents. ”

“ At Blackheath our travellers came up with the body of the insurgent camp, commanded by Jack’s old master of fence, Wat Smith, who had assumed the name of Tyler. Here it was Jack’s good fortune to rescue the Princess of Wales, the young king’s mother, from the fury of the malcontents, whom their honest but mistaken leader was unable to control. Jack asserted himself as a man of Kent, and claimed immunity for the princess as a Kentish woman—for had she not been known in the heyday of her beauty as the Fair Maid of Kent? ”

“ His Royal Highness.—“Where shall we take a purse to-night, Jack?”
Sir John Falstaff.—“Where thou wilt, lad; I’ll make one: an I do not, call me villain and baffle me.”
Carried nem. con.
At this juncture, a new member entered the council chamber in the person of Master Edward Poins. This was a young gentleman of good family, but bad morals; that is to say, for the present. He was one of those loyal natures who, in all ages, are to be found attaching themselves instinctively to some great man, taking their tone and colour in all things from the illustrious model. Mr. ”

“ He openly assumes all these characters to shew the humourous part of them. The unrestrained indulgence of his own ease, appetites, and convenience, has neither malice nor hypocrisy in it. In a word, he is an actor in himself almost as much as upon the stage, and we no more object to the character of Falstaff in a moral point of view than we should think of bringing an excellent comedian, who should represent him to the life, before one of the police offices. ”

“ Finally, immediately before the rejection, the world where he is king is exposed in all its sordid criminality when we find Mrs. Quickly and Doll arrested for being concerned in the death of one man, if not more, beaten to death by their bullies; and the dangerousness of Falstaff is emphasised in his last words as he hurries from Shallow’s house to London, words at first touched with humour but at bottom only too seriously meant: ‘Let us take any man’s horses ”

“ Falstaff's wit is an emanation of a fine constitution; an exuberance of good-humour and good-nature; an overflowing of his love of laughter, and good-fellowship; a giving vent to his heart's ease and over-contentment with himself and others. He would not be in character, if he were not so fat as he is; for there is the greatest keeping in the boundless luxury of his imagination and the pampered self-indulgence of his physical appetites. He manures and nourishes his mind with jests, as he does his body with sack and sugar. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Henry of Monmouth—Sir John’s pet pupil, his “tender lambkin”—was king; and surely, if such feelings as gratitude and goodfellow-ship existed in the hearts of princes, no man had greater right to look forward to emoluments and dignities under the new regime than Sir John Falstaff. He himself was incapable of forgetting old friends in his prosperity, and he could not suspect such baseness in others. We have heard him declare that he would double charge Pistol with dignities, that Master Shallow might choose what office he would in the land—it should be his! ”

“ And what man who has travelled to distinction on foot cares—when he has changed his boots—to talk or be reminded of the mud he has walked through?
These reflections are peculiarly applicable to the case of Sir John Falstaff,—the individual hero whose career it will be the business of these pages to trace. That great man, at the date of those sayings and achievements which have gained him a world-wide celebrity, was—in spite of his pardonable reluctance to admit the fact—already advanced in years. ”

“ That Sir Edward Poins—always a faithful imitator, to the best of his ability, of King Henry the Fifth—should have thus behaved towards his early friend and patron will surprise no student of human nature. This coolness and ingratitude, however, of a supposed friend had no other effect than to induce Sir John Falstaff during his residence in the neighbourhood to choose his associates exclusively from the middle classes—the lesser landowners, clergy, and even small traders of extra-palatial Windsor. ”

“ 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. ”

“ There is in truth no such thing as totally demolishing Falstaff; he has so much of the invulnerable in his frame that no ridicule can destroy him; he is safe even in defeat, and seems to rise, like another Antæus, with recruited vigour from every fall; in this, as in every other respect, unlike Parolles or Bobadil: They fall by the first shaft of ridicule, but Falstaff is a butt on which we may empty the whole quiver, whilst the substance of his character remains unimpaired. His ill habits, and the accidents of age and corpulence, are no part of his essential constitution ”

“ 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. ”

“ It may have been a question of stopping out late, or of introducing an unbecoming companion (let us say Ancient Pistol, whom Sir John, in a moment of vinous aberration, may have been so inconsiderate as to present to Dame Alice Whittington as a model member of mass-going society) . At any rate, it is very certain that, in the month of March, 1413, Sir John Falstaff was no longer, if he had recently been, a guest of Master Richard Whittington, or even a resident in the British metropolis. ”

“ But when he reflected what indulgent, beneficent masters—if, indeed, parents were not the fitter word—his ancestors had always been to their tenants:—no! for the sake of human nature, he could not believe in such black ingratitude as to suppose Falstaff had come to any harm. It would still be in his power to give his friends a cordial welcome. He led the way almost cheerfully, deploring only that the journey must be performed on foot.
At the first opportunity he whispered Bardolph, “Slip on before us, borrow a horse, steal an ass, or run like mad. ”