career, and to square with his character, as best we may.1 Nay, he sets these Windsor adventures in pointed contrast with the pranks of Eastcheap. No close parallel has been found for these adventures as a whole. They are rather Italian than English in conception, and single incidents can be traced to wellknown Italian novels of Ser Giovanni and Strafarola, and an English adaptation, 'The Two Lovers of Pisa,' in Tarleton's Newes out of Purgatory. In all these the point of the plot lies in a successful intrigue, and the laugh goes against the deluded husband. Thus in Ser Giovanni's tale, Bucciuolo confides his love affairs at every step to his Maestro, the unsuspected and unsuspecting husband of the lady; on the husband's approach she hides him under a heap of linen, or thrusts him unseen out of the door. On these or similar devices Shakespeare models the adventures of Falstaff, but he gives them an altogether new complexion. Ford is the confidant of Falstaff, as the Maestro of Bucciuolo; but the humour of the Italian story lies solely in the baffling of the jealous husband, whereas in the English the lover is baffled also, and the husband, deluded by his jealousy as well as by his wife's craft, becomes a doubly comic figure. Bucciuolo, again, like Falstaff, is hidden under a heap of linen; but the linen is fresh from the wash,' and Bucciuolo is presently released by his mistress and regaled with a savoury supper of capon and wine. Falstaff's basket of foul linen bound for the Thames bank, on the other hand, while equally effective in hiding him from the jealous husband, serves at the same time to avenge the innocent and merry wife. 1 Wemay, no doubt, plausibly conjecture that the Windsor episode occurs in the early days of Henry V.'s reign, when Fal ་ staff and the rest of the Eastcheap crew, though 'banished,' have all been very well provided for' (2 Hen. IV., v. 4. 104). Thus the great jester, who made game of the chiefjustice and the prince, defied the laws and throve on the simplicity of the world, is turned into a commonplace roué, who only furnishes matter for jests to others by helplessly succumbing to the devices of two honest country wives. He is not more disreputable than when he robbed on the King's highway and enlisted a troop of scarecrows at the King's expense; but the comic genius which triumphed over the most desperate situations has vanished. His fair round belly remains, but it has become an awkward encumbrance in his escapades, instead of serving as a perpetual theme and rallying-point of allusion and repartee. In Eastcheap he had accepted the favours of devoted women, and 'forgiven' his hostess his own debts to her. At Windsor the spell of his fascination is broken; he has to make advances instead of receiving them, and the wary townsfolk, however deferential to the famous knight, are proof against his craft. Mine host of the Garter is no Dame Quickly, and to be out at heels' in his house is to be reduced to 'shifting' and 'cony-catching.' But the Windsor Falstaff is the dullest as well as the grossest of 'conycatchers.' The disguise is of the thinnest in which he masquerades as a lover before the wives of the wealthy burghers, whose purses are their only attraction. Two purses will serve his purpose better than one, therefore the wives must be wooed both at once and in identical letters. Not a touch of romance or of personal charm is allowed to colour Falstaff's relations to them, or theirs to him. Finance is the raison d'être of the whole intrigue. 'I will be cheaters to them both,' he announces at the outset, 'and they shall be exchequers to me,'—a pretty plain intimation on Shakespeare's part that he, in fact, declined to show Falstaff' in love.' For that marvellously individualised and inexhaustibly various character he has substituted an elementary generic figure. The characters at large are sketched with the same simple breadth. The second plot, so ingeniously interwoven with the Falstaff intrigue, is set going by a pleasant variation of the same motive. Slender and Caius flutter round Anne Page's dowry, as Falstaff about her mother's purse; and their claims are gravely considered instead of being merrily repelled. Hence the pleasant irony of the situation in which these excellent burghers are finally entangled. Mistress Page, who never dreams of selling her husband's honour, and Master Page, who never dreams of suspecting that she may, both plot independently to sell their daughter's happiness. And Anne Page outwits her parents, as her mother outwits Falstaff, in the name of true love, and adds her name by a two-fold title to the number of the Merry Wives. But these two stories by no means exhaust the comic material of the play. The comedy is, as the title-page of the Quarto puts it, 'entermixed with sundrie variable and pleasing humors,' and the phrase describes, with an aptness not usual in pirated titlepages, the crowd of amusing personages who mingle with, rather than carry on, the plot. Shallow and Simple, Bardolph and Pistol and Nym are 'variable. and pleasing humors,' types of particular eccentricities, which it is their rôle to exhibit. The enterprising publisher of the Quarto probably felt, what has often since been noticed, that the Merry Wives has a close affinity to the Jonsonian Comedy of Humours, and in particular to the epoch-making masterpiece of the previous year, Every Man in His Humour, in which Shakespeare himself had played, and which he is said to have specially recommended to his company. Every Man in His Humour is without doubt a greater comedy than the Merry Wives, richer and more various, more penetrated with the intimate mind-stuff of its writer, less brilliant and facile, but at bottom more spontaneous. Shakespeare's wonderfully mobile genius dallied a moment with a manner which was not his own. He has painted Windsor and its burghers with the sympathetic touch of one who well remembered another antique country-town, with another wide sylvan river lapping its meads and parks; but also with the obtrusive realism of detail, the artifice and symmetry of plan, and the simple incisive characterisation which distinguish Jonson's picture of humorous' London. The Garter Inn, Frogmore, Datchet Mead (and doubtless also the Pittie of iii. 1. 6) were real localities; the names of Ford, Page, Evans, Brook, Miller are found in the Windsor registers of Shakespeare's time; tradition still points out the houses of Page and Ford.1 But the realism is qualified, as in Jonson, by alien elements most skilfully assimilated. Falstaff's intrigue is Italian in conception, the fairy finale under Herne's oak is a masque, the fantastic quality of which eludes us to the last. And the 'regularity,'-or observance of the unities which Jonson so powerfully promoted in English comedy, is so strikingly exemplified in the Merry Wives that Dryden, a sharp critic of the romantic plays of Shakespeare, singled it out for exceptional praise, and even suggested that Jonson, 'who first reformed those errors,' had been prompted to his reform by this the first regular comedy.'2 Several individual figures, without being borrowed from Jonson, are imagined in his vein. The jealous 1 The topography and personnel of the play have been worked out in great detail by VOL. II 241 Tighe and Davies, Annals of 2 The Grounds of Criticism in Tragedy, 1679. R Ford has often been compared to Kitely. Slender even seems to owe here and there a trait to Master Stephen, the country gull; as in his cautious retreat before the threatening ferocities of Bardolph and Pistol in i. 1. :— Slen. Marry, sir, I have matter in my head against you; and against your cony-catching rascals, Bardolph, Nym, and Pistol. Bard. You Banbury cheese! Slen. Ay, it is no matter. Pist. How now, Mephostophilus ! Slen. Ay, it is no matter. Master Stephen executes a similar volte-face still more effectively (i. 2.): Steph. I thought you had laughed at me, cousin. Steph. Did you indeed? Know. Yes indeed. Steph. Why then Know. What then? Steph. I am satisfied; it is sufficient. Slender does his wooing 'by the book'; and when, on the verge of the critical interview with Anne Page, he longs for his forgotten 'book of songs and sonnets,' one cannot but recall how Master Stephen bought him 'a hawk and a hood and bells and all,' and lacked nothing but a book to keep it by' (i. 1.). |