Here he is interrupted and breaks off, but a minute or two later he comes back again to his argument, and curiously enough uses exactly the same words:
“But, I pr'ythee, sweet wag, shall there be gallows
standing in England when thou art king? and resolution
thus fobbed as it is with the rusty curb of old father
Antick, the law?”
Now, this question and the hope it expresses that justice would be put to shame in England on Prince Henry's accession to the throne is taken from a speech of the Prince in the old play, “The Famous Victories of Henry the Fifth.” Shakespeare would have done better to leave it out, for Falstaff has far too good brains to imagine that all thieves could ever have his licence and far too much conceit ever to desire so unholy a consummation. And Shakespeare must have felt that the borrowed words were too shallow-common, for he immediately falls back on his own brains for the next phrase and gives us of his hoarded best. The second part of the question, “resolution thus fobbed,” and so forth, is only another statement of the famous couplet in “Richard III.”:
“Conscience is but a word that cowards use,
Devised at first to keep the strong in awe.”
These faults show that Shakespeare is at first unsure of his personage; he fumbles a little; yet the vivacity, the roaring life, is certainly a quality of the original Falstaff, for it attends him as constantly as his shadow; the pun, too, is his, and the phrase “sweet wag” is probably taken from his mouth, for he repeats it again, “sweet wag,” and again “mad wag.” The shamelessness, too, and the lechery are marks of him, and the love of witty word-warfare, and, above all, the pretended repentance:
“O, thou hast damnable iteration, and art, indeed,
able to corrupt a saint. Thou hast done much harm
upon me, Hal,—God forgive thee for it. Before I knew
thee, Hal, I knew nothing; and now am I, if a man
should speak truly, little better than one of the wicked.
I must give over this life, and I will give it over; by the
Lord, an I do not, I am a villain; I'll be damned for
never a king's son in Christendom.”
In this first scene between Falstaff and Prince Henry, Shakespeare is feeling his way, so to speak, blindfold to Falstaff, with gropings of memory and dashes of poetry that lead him past the mark. In this first scene, as we noticed, he puts fine lyric phrases in Falstaff's mouth; but he never repeats the experiment; Falstaff and high poetry are anti-podes—all of which merely proves that at first Shakespeare had not got into the skin of his personage. But the real Falstaff had probably tags of verse in memory and lilts of song, for Shakespeare repeats this trait. Here we reach the test: Whenever a feature is accentuated by repetition, we may guess that it belongs to the living model. There was assuredly a strong dash of Puritanism in the real Falstaff, for when Shakespeare comes to render this, he multiplies the brush-strokes with perfect confidence; Falstaff is perpetually repenting.
After the first scene Shakespeare seems to have made up his mind to keep closely to his model and only to permit himself heightening touches.
In order to come closer to the original, I will now take another passage later in the play, when Shakespeare is drawing Falstaff with a sure hand:
“Fal. A plague of all cowards, I say, and a vengeance
too! marry and amen!—Give me a cup of sack, boy.—
Ere I lead this life long, I'll sew netherstocks, and mend
them, and foot them, too. A plague of all cowards!—
give me a cup of sack, rogue.—Is there no virtue extant?
{Drinks.}”