XVI.
THE MERRY WIVES AND FALSTAFF.
Shakespeare wrote The Merry Wives of Windsor in 1601, and during the Christmas holidays of that year it was presented upon the stage, before Queen Elizabeth and her court, at Windsor Castle. In 1602 it was published in London in quarto form, and in 1619 a reprint of that quarto was published there. The version that appears in the two quartos is considered by Shakespeare scholars to be spurious. The authentic text, no doubt, is that of the comedy as it stands in the first folio (1623). Shakespeare had written Henry IV.—both parts of it—and also Henry V., when this comedy was acted, and therefore he had completed his portrait of Falstaff, whose life is displayed in the former piece and whose death is described in the latter. Henry IV. was first printed in 1598 (we know not when it was first acted), and it passed through five quarto editions prior to the publication of it in the folio of 1623. In the epilogue to the second part of that play a promise is made that the story shall be continued, "with Sir John in it," but it is gravely doubted whether that epilogue was written by Shakespeare. The continuation of the story occurs in Henry V., in which Falstaff does not figure, although he is mentioned in it. Various efforts have been made to show a continuity between the several plays in which Falstaff is implicated, but the attempt always fails. The histories contain the real Falstaff. The Falstaff of the comedy is another and less important man. If there really were a sequence of story and of time in the portraiture of this character plays would stand in the following order: 1, Henry IV., Part First; 2, The Merry Wives of Windsor; 3, Henry IV., Part Second; 4, Henry V. As no such sequence exists, or apparently was intended, the comedy should be viewed by itself. Its texture is radically different from that of the histories. One of the best Shakespeare editors, Charles Knight, ventures the conjecture that The Merry Wives of Windsor was written first. Shakespeare invented the chief part of the plot, taking, however, a few things from Tarlton's Newes out of Purgatorie, which in turn was founded on a story called The Lovers of Pisa. It is possible also that he may have derived suggestions from a German play by Duke Henry Julius of Brunswick—a contemporary, who died in 1611—to which The Merry Wives of Windsor bears some resemblance, and of which he may have received an account from English actors who had visited Germany, as the actors of his time occasionally did.
Tradition declares that he wrote this comedy at the command of Queen Elizabeth, who had expressed a wish to see Falstaff in love. This was first stated by John Dennis, in the preface to an alteration of The Merry Wives of Windsor which was made by him, under the name of The Comical Gallant, or the Amours of Sir John Falstaff, and was successfully acted at Drury Lane theatre. That piece, which is paltry and superfluous, appeared in 1702. No authority was given by Dennis for his statement about Queen Elizabeth and Shakespeare's play. The tradition rests exclusively on his word. Rowe, Pope, Theobald, and other Shakespeare editors, have transmitted it to the present day, but it rests on nothing but supposition and it is dubious. Those scholars who accept the story of Dennis, and believe that Shakespeare wrote the piece "to order" and within a few days, usually fortify their belief by the allegation that the comedy falls short of Shakespeare's poetical standard, being written mostly in prose; that it degrades his great creation of Falstaff; that it is, for him, a trivial production; and that it must have been written in haste and without spontaneous impulse. If judgment were to be given on the quarto version of The Merry Wives, that reasoning would commend itself as at least plausible; but it is foolish as applied to the version in the folio, where the piece is found to be remarkable for nimbleness of invention, strength and variety of natural character, affluent prodigality of animal spirits, delicious quaintness, exhilarating merriment, a lovely pastoral tone, and many touches of the transcendent poetry of Shakespeare. Dennis probably repeated a piece of idle gossip that he had heard, the same sort of chatter that in the present day constantly follows the doings of theatrical people,—and is not accurate more than once in a thousand times. The Merry Wives of Windsor is a brilliant and delightful comedy, quite worthy of its great author (though not in his most exalted mood), who probably wrote it because his mind was naturally impelled to write it, and no doubt laboured over it exactly as he did over his other writings: for we know, upon the testimony of Ben Jonson, who personally knew him and was acquainted with his custom as a writer, that he was not content with the first draught of anything, but wrote it a second time, and a third time, before he became satisfied with it. Dr. Johnson, who had studied Shakespeare as carefully as any man ever studied him, speaking of The Merry Wives of Windsor, says that "its general power—that power by which all works of genius should finally be tried—is such that perhaps it never yet had reader or spectator who did not think it too soon at an end." A comedy that deserves such praise as this—which assuredly is not misplaced—need not be dismissed as a pot-boiler.
Knight's conjecture that The Merry Wives was written before the histories were written is a plausible conjecture, and perhaps worthy of some consideration. It is not easy to believe that Shakespeare, after he had created Falstaff and thoroughly drawn him, was capable of lessening the character and making it almost despicable with paltriness—as certainly it becomes in The Merry Wives. That is not the natural way of an artistic mind. But it is easier to credit the idea that the Falstaff of The Merry Wives was the first study of the character, although not first shown, which subsequently expanded into the magnificent humorous creation of the histories. Falstaff in the comedy is a fat man with absurd amorous propensities, who is befooled, victimised, and made a laughing-stock by a couple of frolicsome women, who are so much amused by his preposterous folly that they scarcely bestow the serious consideration of contempt and scorn upon his sensuality and insolence. No creature was ever set in a more ludicrous light or made more contemptible,—in a kindly, good-humoured way. The hysterical note of offended virtue is never sounded, nor is anywhere seen the averted face of shocked propriety. The two wives are bent on a frolic, and they will merrily punish this presumptuous sensualist—this silly, conceited, gross fellow, "old, cold, withered, and of intolerable entrails." If we knew no more of Falstaff than the comedy tells us of him we should by no means treasure him as we do now; but it is through the histories that we learn to know and appreciate him, and it is of the man portrayed there that we always unconsciously think when, in his humiliating discomfiture, we hear him declare that "wit may be made a Jack-a-lent when 'tis upon ill employment." For the Falstaff of the histories is a man of intellect, wisdom, and humour, thoroughly experienced in the ways of the world, fascinating in his drollery, human, companionable, infinitely amusing, and capable of turning all life to the favour of enjoyment and laughter—a man who is passionate in the sentiment of comradeship, and who, with all his faults (and perhaps because of some of them, for faultless persons are too good for this world), inspires affection. "Would I were with him," cries the wretched Bardolph, "wheresome'er he is, either in heaven or in hell." It is not Bardolph only whose heart has a warm corner for the memory of the poor old jovial sinner, wounded to death by the falling off of friendship—the implacable hardness of new-born virtue in the regenerated royal mind.
A comprehensive view of Falstaff—a view that includes the afflicting circumstances of his humiliation and of his forlorn and pathetic death not less than the roistering frolics and jocund mendacity of his life and character—is essential to a right appreciation of the meaning of him. Shakespeare is never a prosy moralist, but he constantly teaches you, if you have eyes to see and ears to hear, that the moral law of the universe, working continually for goodness and not for evil, operates in an inexorable manner. Yet it is not of any moral consideration that the spectator of Falstaff upon the stage ever pauses to think. It is the humour of the fat knight that is perceived, and that alone. The thoughtful friends of Falstaff, however, see more in him than this, and especially they like not to think of him in a deplorable predicament. The Falstaff of The Merry Wives is a man to laugh at; but he is not a man to inspire the comrade feeling, and still less is he a man to impress the intellect with the sense of a stalwart character and of illimitable jocund humour. Falstaff's friends—whose hearts are full of kindness for the old reprobate—have sat with him "in my Dolphin chamber, at the round table, by a sea-coal fire," and "have heard the chimes at midnight" in his society, and they know what a jovial companion he is—how abundant in knowledge of the world; how radiant with animal spirits; how completely inexhaustible in cheerfulness; how copious in comic invective; how incessantly nimble and ludicrous in wit and in waggery; how strange a compound of mind and sensuality, shrewdness and folly, fidelity and roguery, brazen mendacity, and comic selfishness! They do not like to think of him as merely a fat old fool, bamboozled by a pair of sprightly, not over-delicate women, far inferior to him in mental calibre, and made a laughing-stock for Fenton and sweet Anne Page, and the lads and lassies of Windsor, and the chattering Welsh parson. "Have I lived," cried Falstaff, in the moment of his discomfiture, "to stand at the taunt of one that makes fritters of English?" He is a hard case, an inveterate sinner, as worthless as any man well could be, in the eyes of decorum and respectability; but those who know him well grow to be fond of him, even if they feel that they ought to be ashamed of it, and they do not quite forgive the poet for making him contemptible.
You can find many other figures that will make you laugh, but you can find no other figure that makes you laugh with such good reason. It seems incredible that Shakespeare, with his all-embracing mind and his perfect instinct of art, should deliberately have chosen to lessen his own masterpiece of humour. For Shakespeare rejoiced in Falstaff, even while he respected and recorded the inexorable justice of the moral law that decrees and eventually accomplishes his destruction. There is no one of his characters whose history he has traced with such minute elaboration. The conception is singularly ample. You may see Falstaff, as Shallow saw him, when he was a boy and page to Thomas Mowbray, Duke of Norfolk; you may see him all along the current of his mature years; his highway robberies on Gadshill; his bragging narrative to Prince Henry; his frolicsome, paternal, self-defensive lecture to the prince; his serio-comic association with the ragamuffin recruits at Coventry; his adroit escape from the sword of Hotspur; his mendacious self-glorification over the body of Harry Percy; his mishaps as a suitor to Mrs. Ford and Mrs. Page; his wonderfully humorous interviews with the Chief-Justice and with Prince John of Lancaster; his junketings with Justice Shallow in Gloucestershire, and his rebuff and consternation at his first and last meeting with King Henry V.; and finally you may see him, as Mrs. Quickly saw him, on his death-bed, when "'a cried out God! God! God! three or four times," and when "his nose was as sharp as a pen, and 'a babbled o' green fields."
A good and faithful study of King Henry IV., and especially of the second part of that play, is essential for a right appreciation of Falstaff. Those scenes with the Chief-Justice are unmatched in literature. The knight stands royally forth in them, clothed with his entire panoply of agile intellect, robust humour, and boundless comic effrontery. But the arrogant and expeditious Falstaff of The Merry Wives—so richly freighted with rubicund sensuality, so abundant in comic loquacity, and so ludicrous in his sorry plights—is a much less complex person, and therefore he stands more level than the real Falstaff does with the average comprehension of mankind. The American stage, accordingly, by which more than by the printed book he has become known to our people, has usually given its preference to the Falstaff of the comedy. The Merry Wives was first acted in New York on October 5, 1788 at the John Street theatre, with Harper as Falstaff. On April 1, 1807 it was produced at the old Park, and the Falstaff then was John E. Harwood. The same stage offered it again on January 16, 1829, with Hilson as Falstaff. A little later, about 1832, James H. Hackett took up the character of Falstaff, and from that time onward performances of The Merry Wives occurred more frequently in different cities of America. Nor was the historical play neglected. On August 7, 1848 a remarkably fine production of the comedy was accomplished at the Astor Place Operahouse, New York, with Hackett as Falstaff, who never in his time was equalled in that character, and has not been equalled since. Another Falstaff, however, and a remarkably good one, appeared at Burton's theatre on August 24, 1850, in the person of Charles Bass. On March 14, 1853 The Merry Wives was again given at Burton's theatre, and Burton himself played Falstaff, with characteristic humour; but Burton never acted the part as it stands in Henry IV. Hackett, who used both the history (Part I.) and the comedy, continued to act Falstaff almost to the end of his life and Hackett did not die till 1871. A distinguished representative of Falstaff in the early days of the American theatre—the days of the renowned Chestnut in Philadelphia—was William Warren (1767-1832), who came from England in 1796. In recent years the part has been acted by Benedict De Bar and by John Jack. The latest Falstaff in America was that embodied by Charles Fisher, who first assumed the character on November 19, 1872, at Daly's theatre, and whose performance was picturesque and humorous.
On the English stage the historical play of Henry IV. was exceedingly popular in Shakespeare's time. The first Falstaff, according to Malone, whom everybody has followed as to this point, was John Heminge (1555-1630). After him came John Lowin (1572-1654), who is thought to have acted the part in the presence of Charles I. His successor seems to have been Lacy, who died in 1681. Next came Cartwright, and in 1699 or 1700 the great Betterton (1635-1710) assumed the fat knight, acting him in both parts of the history and in the comedy. Genest records twenty-two revivals of the first part of Henry IV. upon the London stage, at five different theatres, between 1667 and 1826; fifteen revivals of the second part between 1720 and 1821; and sixteen revivals of The Merry Wives of Windsor between 1667 and 1811. Many English actors have played Falstaff since Betterton's time, an incomplete though sufficiently ample list of them comprising Estcourt, 1704; F. Bullock, 1713; J. Evans and J. Hall, 1715; Mills, 1716; Quin, "dignity and declamation," 1738; Berry, 1747; Love (whose true name was James Dance), 1762; Shuter, 1774; John Henderson, one of the greatest actors that ever lived, 1774; Mrs. Webb (once only), 1776; Ryder, 1786; Palmer, 1788; King, 1792; Fawcett, 1795; Stephen Kemble, who was so fat that he could play it without stuffing or bladder, 1802; Blissett, 1803; George Frederick Cooke, 1804; Bartley, 1812; Charles Kemble, 1824; Dowton, 1824; Elliston, 1826; and Samuel Phelps, 1846. The latest representative of Falstaff in England was H. Beerbohm-Tree, who, although a man of slender figure, contrived to simulate corpulence, and who manifested in his acting a fine instinct as to the meaning of the character and considerable resources of art in its expression, although the predominant individuality and the copious luxuriance of Falstaff's rosy and juicy humour were not within his reach. Upon the American stage the part is practically disused; and this is a pity, seeing that a source of great enjoyment and one of the most suggestive and fruitful topics that exist in association with the study of human nature are thus in a great degree sequestered from the public mind. Still it is better to have no Falstaff on the stage than to have it encumbered with a bad one; and certainly for the peculiar and exacting play of Henry IV. there are now no actors left: at least they are not visible in America.