Sir John Falstaff

“ I do not mean to say, that had I lived in the fifteenth century I should have been a Sir John Falstaff. Morally, in his position, I should have cut as sorry a figure as, physically, in his garments. Boswells need not be Johnsons. Sympathy and admiration, I repeat, are the necessary qualifications. I sympathise with, and admire the heroic character as developed in all ages; and I look upon Sir John Falstaff as the greatest hero of his own epoch.
Earthly greatness, like everything else to which the same adjective applies, is comparative—to be measured only by besetting difficulties. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 ”

“ Dear, beloved, and, whatever the world may of thee (for I have the conceit that I look deeper into men’s natures than the thoughtless commonalty) , honoured Sir John Falstaff, if money could win thee to be near me and mine—who love thee deservedly, and to whom thou hast never been aught but what is just and pure—thou shouldst have it from my well-stored coffers poured untold into thy pockets. ”

“ Who then so likely to be a popular man in Coventry as Sir John Falstaff—the master, par excellence, of the Princely Revels? What town in the kingdom so likely to be endeared to Sir John’s affections as Coventry? Why, the knight’s repugnance to run the gauntlet of the gibes of his familiars, admirers, and butts, when at the head of his ragged regiment, is at once explained! What a joke for the pages and courtiers hanging about the inn-doors! What giggling from the tavern wenches! ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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! ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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.” ”

“ Sir John Falstaff at once understood that he had little to hope from the royal bounty or good faith. With his usual philosophy he determined to make the best of his position. Having nothing to live on but the king’s promise he determined to live upon that—and appears to have succeeded in doing so pretty comfortably. For we find him in the autumn of 1414, with a goodly retinue of followers and a stud of horses, “sitting at ten pounds a week” at the Garter Inn, Windsor—a liberal scale of accommodation for which Sir John’s assumed “expectations” were doubtless accepted as permanent security. ”

“ Sir John selected such men as he considered desirable for the King’s service from the levies provided for him; accepted a brief repast, and departed, having promised Master Shallow to renew their acquaintance on the termination of the wars, in a second visit to that gentleman’s hospitable mansion, extracting in return a half-promise from its owner to accompany him to court. It is strange that Justice Shallow, gifted, as we have seen him, with a remarkably retentive memory, should have forgotten how costly a luxury he had found the honour of Sir John Falstaff’s patronage in early youth. ”

“ I can fancy Sir John Falstaff for a few days leading a life of marvellous peace, and even happiness, in the orderly household of sage Master Whittington, who loved our friend for the strong latent good that was in him, and to whom the doubly errant knight’s vices and irregularities were mere hateful excrescences, to be abhorred, as we abhor the consumption that kills our favourite sister, but which makes us love herself the more in our indignation at its rapacious cruelty. ”

“ Argument, like progress, according to a modern imperial authority, cannot march without its martyrs and its victims. If the vintner, in his lifetime, were really a good man, he would have forgiven me. So that upon the whole, we may consider the matter settled.
Sir John Falstaff, at the suggestion of Prince Henry, was entrusted with a charge of foot. It was all very fine to laugh at Sir John in time of security. When danger made its appearance, they were only too glad to rush to him for assistance. ”

“ Sir John Falstaff was indignant.
“Will you tell me, Master Shallow, how to choose a man? Care I for the limb, the thewes, the stature, bulk and big assemblance of a man? Give me the spirit, Master Shallow. Here’s Wart. You see what a ragged appearance it is. He shall charge you and discharge you with the motion of a pewterer’s hammer: come off and on swifter than he that gibbets on the brewer’s bucket. And this same half-faced fellow Shadow, give me this man—he presents no mark to the enemy; the foeman may with as great aim level at the edge of a penknife. ”

“ Is it then a great wonder that the Lord Chief Justice of England (an office which, after all, was then of little more importance than that of a police magistrate of the present day) should have felt envious of a man so vastly his superior in every way (except in the trifling matters of solvency and conventional honesty) , as Sir John Falstaff, and should have sought to annoy his brilliant rival by every means in his power; of which, considering the official position of the one man, and the habits of the other, there could have been no scarcity? ”

“ What were Sir John Falstaff’s guiding principles? the inconsiderate reader may ask,—yielding to the popularly received opinion that the knight never had any, than which a greater mistake can scarcely be imagined. Who shall accuse of irregularity a man who, for upwards of three-score years, based his every act upon the rigid observance of two rules of life? ”

“ 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. ”

“ Knowing he would be a king some day, when he would find it as advantageous to be thought an honest man as it would be easy to hang anybody who might say he wasn’t, he considered that his future would shine all the brighter from present companionship with rogues—such as a prejudiced society agreed to consider Falstaff and his followers. So Prince Henry studied the first crude principles of taxation by plundering his father’s subjects on the public roads in company with Sir John Falstaff. ”

“ 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. ”

“ It is needless to say that none such could be found amongst the lugubrious familiars of the late monarch. The princes of the blood themselves—the new king’s own brothers—were by no means free from the general apprehension. It seems rather odd that they should have believed in the possibility of gratitude existing in the bosom of one of their own blood; but it is nevertheless certain that they agreed to look on Sir John Falstaff in the light of “the coming man,” a prospect they regarded with considerable apprehension and alarm. For they were by no means jovial princes, these young fellows. ”

“ And they were taken away—Bardolph, Pistol, and poor little Robin included—aye, and even Master Robert Shallow, of Gloucestershire, in the commission of the peace, custos rotulorum, whose only offence was one against the laws of ordinary human judgment; to wit, that he had lent Sir John Falstaff the sum of one thousand pounds under the impression that he would one day get it back again. ”

“ 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. ”

“ And yet, incredible as it may seem, Sir John Falstaff actually contrived to reach the metropolis on the third day after his departure from Master Shallow’s residence. I am not prepared to say that no magic power was employed in effecting this apparently miraculous transit. On the contrary, the aid of a rather potent magician appears to have been successfully invoked for the occasion—one, at whose bidding, the roughest roads become level, the stoutest doors fly open, the veriest griffins, tigers, crocodiles, and Cerberi of gate-keepers become docile as lambs ”

“ 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. ”

“ That the lady was entitled to the highest respect is proved by the jealous care taken by Sir John Falstaff that she should be treated with ‘such by all comers, manifested in the fact, that when, on the night of the supper alluded to, Ancient Pistol, having entered the room in a state of intoxication, applied some injurious epithets to the lady, Sir John was so far roused from his habitual forbearance—and from the comfortable process of digestion—as to administer to the tipsy officer one of the soundest drubbings he ever received in the course of his well-pummelled existence. ”

“ Sir John Falstaff, emulating his royal chieftain, also “exposed his person in the thickest of the fight”—nay, may very reasonably be asserted to have been “the thickest of the fight himself.” We will not pause to dwell upon the magnitude of risk incurred by Sir John—much greater in proportion to his bulk than that of the slender and dyspeptic monarch—in exposing so vast a target to the arrows of the enemy. Our knight’s heroic achievements are too numerous to need any stress to be laid on one solitary instance. ”

“ For my part, if a lie may do thee grace, I’ll gild it with the happiest terms I have.”
At this juncture a retreat was sounded, proving that the fortune of war had decided in favour of the Royalist faction. The two princes hastened to their father’s tent, Sir John Falstaff following, with the body of Hotspur on his back, soliloquising as follows:
“I’ll follow, as they say, for reward. He that rewards me, Heaven reward him! If I do grow great, I’ll grow less; for I’ll purge, and leave sack, and live cleanly as a nobleman should do.” ”