Here is surely the true Falstaff; he will not lead this life long; this is the soul of him; but the exquisite heightening phrase, “Is there no virtue extant?” is pure Shakespeare, Shakespeare generalizing as we saw him generalizing in just the same way in the scene where Cade is talked of in the Second Part of “King Henry VI.” The form too is Shakespeare's. Who does not remember the magic line in “The Two Noble Kinsmen “?
“She is all the beauty extant.”
And the next speech of Falstaff is just as illuminating:
“Fal. You rogue, here's lime in this sack, too; there is
nothing but roguery to be found in villainous man: yet a coward
is worse than a cup of sack with lime in it—a villainous
coward.—Go thy ways, old Jack; die when thou wilt, if manhood,
good manhood, be not forgot upon the face of the earth, then am I
a shotten herring. There live not three good men unhanged in
England, and one of them is fat and grows old: God help the
while! A bad world I say——”
At the beginning the concrete fact, then generalization, and then merely a repetition of the traits marked in the first scene, with the addition of bragging. Evidently Shakespeare has the model in memory as he writes. I say “evidently,” for Falstaff is the only character in Shakespeare that repeats the same words with damnable iteration, and in whom the same traits are shown again and again and again. When Shakespeare is painting himself in Richard II. he depicts irresolution again and again as he depicts it also in Hamlet; but neither Hamlet nor Richard repeats the same words, nor is any trait in either of them accentuated so grossly as are the principal traits of Falstaff's character. The features in Falstaff which are so harped upon, are to me the features of the original model. Shakespeare did not know Falstaff quite as well as he knew himself; so he has to confine himself to certain qualities which he had observed, and stick, besides, to certain tags of speech, which were probably favourites with the living man.
In another important particular, too, Falstaff is unlike any other comic character in Shakespeare: he tells the truth about himself in a magical way. The passage I allude to is the first speech made by Falstaff in the Second Part of “Henry IV.”; it shows us Shakespeare getting into the character again—after a certain lapse of time:
“Fal. Men of all sorts take a pride to gird at me; the
brain of this foolish-compounded clay, man, is not able
to invent anything that tends to laughter, more than I
invent or is invented on me: I am not only witty in myself,
but the cause that wit is in other men—”
Just as in the first act Shakespeare introducing Falstaff makes him talk poetically, so here there is a certain exaltation and lyrical swing which betrays the poet-creator. “Foolish-compounded,” too, shows Shakespeare's hand, but the boast, I feel sure, was a boast often made by the original, and thus brings Shakespeare into intimate union with the character; for after this introduction Falstaff goes on to talk pure Falstaff, unmixed with any slightest dash of poetry.
Who was the original of Falstaff? Is a guess possible? It seems to me it must have been some lover of poetry—perhaps Chettle, the Chettle who years before had published Greene's attack upon Shakespeare and who afterwards made amends for it. In Dekker's tract, “A Knight's Conjuring,” Chettle figures among the poets in Elysium: “In comes Chettle sweating and blowing by reason of his fatnes; to welcome whom, because hee was of olde acquaintance, all rose up, and fell presentlie on their knees, to drinck a health to all the louers of Hellicon.” Here we have a fat man greeted with laughter and mock reverence by the poets—just such a model as Shakespeare needed, but the guess is mere conjecture: we don't know enough about Chettle to be at all sure. Yet Chettle was by way of being a poet, and Falstaff uses tags of verse—still, as I say, it is all pure guesswork. The only reason I put his name forward is that some have talked of Ben Jonson as Falstaff's original merely because he was fat. I cannot believe that gentle Shakespeare would ever have treated Jonson with such contempt; but Chettle seems to have been a butt by nature.
That Falstaff was taken from one model is to me certain. Shakespeare very seldom tells us what his characters look like; whenever he gives us a photograph, so to speak, of a person, it is always taken from life and extraordinarily significant. We have several portraits of Falstaff: the Prince gives a picture of the “old fat man,...” that trunk of humours “... that old white-bearded Satan”; the Chief Justice gives us another of his “moist eye, white beard, increasing belly and double chin.” Falstaff himself has another: “a goodly portly man, i' faith and a corpulent; of a cheerful look, a pleasing eye, and a most noble carriage.” Such physical portraiture alone would convince me that there was a living model for Falstaff. But there are more obvious arguments: the other humorous characters of Shakespeare are infinitely inferior to Falstaff, and the best of them are merely sides of Falstaff or poor reflections of him. Autolycus and Parolles have many of his traits, but they are not old, and taken together, they are only a faint replica of the immortal footpad.