them. 'Twice at the end of Scenes 1. and 3. of Act iii. (at the end of Scene 1. only in Q) do they hint at something they intend; and in Act iv. 5., after the Host has lost his horses, they are curiously officious in cautioning him against the thieves; their threatened vengeance and the Host's loss were doubtless connected.'1 (3) There remain, however, a number of striking discrepancies only to be explained by assuming either that the Quarto version had been edited and supplemented by a tolerably skilful hand, or that the original play underwent a Shakespearean revision before it was printed for the Folio. The theory of revision has little in its favour beyond a few dubious phrases, which gain in point if they are supposed to have originated after 1603. Thus these knights will hack' has been explained as an allusion to James's profuse creation of them; and Falstaff's 'now, master Shallow, you'll complain of me to the king' (Q, 'to the Council'), and Mrs. Quickly's 'the king's English' have been referred, quite needlessly, to Shakespeare's, instead of Falstaff's, king. The most interesting divergence on a larger scale is in the Herne's oak scene, where the Quarto version develops the fairy motif with a vivacity not to be expected of the mere botcher, and in a metre and manner faintly recalling the songs of Puck : : Quickly. Away begon, his mind fulfill, All do something, none amis. Sir Hugh. I smell a man of middle-earth. For his presumption in this place, 1 Introd. to Facsimile of Q, 1602, p. 9. Spare neither legge, arme, head, nor face. Sir H. See, I haue spied one by good luck, Fal. God send me good fortune now, and I care not. And take a Taper in your hand, And set it to his fingers endes, And if you see it him offends, Why then be sure he is full of sin. Apart from this indeterminate margin of possibly later work, the date of the Merry Wives can be fixed within fairly narrow limits. The tradition which ascribed it to the Queen's express command emerges almost a century after her death; Dennis, Rowe, and Gildon record it almost simultaneously, with slight differences of detail which prove its antiquity. Dennis, who adapted the play under the title of The Comical Gallant (1702), excused himself for having thus honoured Shakespeare, on the ground that 'I knew very well that it had pleas'd one of the greatest queens that ever was in the world. . . . This comedy was written at her command, and by her direction, and she was so eager to see it acted that she commanded it to be finished in fourteen days.' Rowe, in his Life of Shakespeare (1709), added a further valuable detail: 'She was so well-pleased with that admirable character of Falstaff in the two parts of Henry IV. that she commanded him to continue it for one play more, and to show him in love.' Late as this tradition emerges, it is intrinsically very credible, and is substantially accepted by most critics. The anomalous position of the Merry Wives among Shakespeare's works, its intellectual thinness, its lack, notwithstanding its masterly technique, of Shakespearean quality, are easily accounted for in a piece hastily written at the Queen's command. The Windsor scenery, touched with a minute realism elsewhere strange to Shakespeare, and the abundance of allusions, sure to be relished at Court, like the 'cousin garmombles,' indicate that it was especially addressed to Elizabeth. But it is more likely to have followed Henry V. than Henry IV., for in the Epilogue of Henry IV. Shakespeare had given a distinct promise to 'continue the story with Sir John in it, and make you merry with fair Katharine of France.' It is incredible that the Queen, with this prospect in store, should have diverted Shakespeare from executing it; but when Henry V. appeared nothing of Sir John was found in the story but the news of his death. Falstaff had made the fortune of Henry IV., which was commonly known by his name; he was already by far the most famous of Shakespeare's characters. The London public may well have resented his disappearance and made demands for his recall, to which the Queen gave effective expression. The Merry Wives would then have been written in the course of 1599. But if the Queen desired a continuation of the Falstaff story of Henry IV., she was destined to be disappointed. Shakespeare significantly avoids attaching the comedy to the history by definite links, and he attenuates those that he retains; he changes the scene, and leaves the time wholly vague; Shallow, though incensed with Falstaff, never refers to the thousand-pounds' debt which assuredly had not been paid; Silence is replaced by Slender; Fenton has 'kept company with the wild prince,' but has never met Falstaff. Falstaff's Windsor adventures are an independent story, which we are left to fit into his 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 We may, 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 |