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FALSTAFF. "Bardolph, follow him: a tapster is a good trade."-Act I., Scene III.

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WITH ILLUSTRATIONS BY E. A. ABBEY, AND COMMENTS BY ANDREW LANG.

"NEV

I.

MERRY WIVES OF WINDSOR.

if the Baconian theory of the authorship were correct, to fancy Shakespeare rushing to Bacon with the news that the Queen wanted a comedy in a fortnight, and that comedy on Falstaff in love! Verulam must have been hardly put to it in that active fortnight, between his legal duties, his writing, and the rehearsals.

TEVER was theatrical enterprise to think of Shakespeare's quandary, so hurried as this, and it is a new thing, perhaps, to invent, write, learn, and play a comedy in a fortnight." So says Molière in the preface to Les Fâcheux, which was acted at Vaux, in Fouquet's great and final fête, the cause and scene of his fall, on August 17, 1661. In bragging of his speed, or rather in excusing the faults of his play by reason of its too prompt execution, Poquelin reckoned without his Shakespeare. The Merry Wives of Windsor, if tradition speak truth, was invented, written, committed to memory, rehearsed, and acted in a fortnight. Shakespeare is not easy to beat in any department of his art, and he who "never blotted a line" could work as quickly as Molière, with all the tags and chevilles which M. Scherer used to deplore. Both men both Molière and Shakespeare― were managers and actors first, authors afterwards. They were obliged to supply the wants of their companies, and to meet the demands of the people, the monarch, or the great nobles, without dreaming much about immortal fame. It is amusing a more than womanly courage, and,

Guess and tradition fill most of the vacant spaces in our knowledge of Shakespeare. As to the traditions about the Merry Wives, we may admit that the nature of the play justifies them, and therefore, perhaps, it originally suggested them. About Les Facheur, M. Jules Lemaitre observes that, whether it were written in a fortnight or not, it reads as if it had been. The same criticism holds true about the Merry Wives. It is a hasty work, and looks hasty. Again, if Elizabeth did not command the play, and give the hint about Falstaff in love, she well might have done so. That her victorious and virginal Majesty admired Sir John is very much to her credit. It shows that as she had

Copyright, 1889, by Harper and Brothers. All rights reserved.

VOL. LXXX.-No. 475.-1

like her father King Harry, "loved to look on a man," so she had a more than womanly humor. The fat knight is one of the characters who make women like Mrs. Pendennis regard Shakespeare with that lady's unfriendly eyes, Shakespeare, "whom she pretended to like, but didn't." Falstaff is the character that Rabelais would have drawn if he could: compare him with Father John of the Funnels and with Panurge; how much more godlike jovial is the knight! All his days Rabelais was unconsciously striving to invent Falstaff, feeling after him, and never finding him! M. Darmesteter says that Falstaff is a type of the lower form of British gayety, ever coarse when not bitter. In coarseness Rabelais can give many points to Sir. John, who, as for bitterness, had no gall.

Beloved knight! Compare his frank robberies with Panurge's many evil and disgusting ways of getting money. Observe the poetry of Sir John's maraudings: "Let not us that are squires of the night's body be called thieves of the night's beauty; let us be Diana's foresters, gentlemen of the shade, minions of the moon." It is a merry harvest-moon that looks down upon Sir John with her golden eye-a gay Selene that loves this portly Endymion, "little better than one of the wicked." Of the knight surely that gentle German professor was thinking, who, when his country-folk said that the English "had no philosophy," replied, "Yes, they have their humor." The rascal has given us medicines to make us love him; we have drunk medicines; he is the most comparative, rascallest, sweet

old knave. But sweet Jack Falstaff, kind Jack Falstaff, true Jack Falstaff, valiant Jack Falstaff, old Jack Falstaff! we do not look for ladies' love for thee, and all the more honor to Elizabeth, if, indeed, she loved thee well! Nor do we expect the fat knight, who was "as virtuously given as a gentleman need to be," to sigh much after ladies. "Falstaff in love" is a paradox; he pretends an affection for Mistress Ursula," whom I have weekly sworn to marry since I perceived the first white hair of my chin." Who was Mistress Ursuladoes Dr. Furnivall know?-the lady of penetration that sighed for Sir John? She cannot be the hostess to whom he swore upon Wednesday in Whitsun week, she to whom, if he were an honest man, he "owed himself and the money too," she who admitted that "an honester and truerhearted man!"-with an amorous aposiopesis. No, Sir John was not the knight for ladies' love, and when Shakespeare, "our humble author," promised to "continue the story with Sir John in it," we cannot think that Sir John was to be an amorist. Queen Elizabeth may have suggested the idea, as tradition declares, and Shakespeare may have worked it out in a fortnight, and so we have the Merry Wives of Windsor.

These traditions are not very early, nay, in a literary form, in printed books, they appear very late. In 1702. John Dennis, he of the Phrenzy, put forth his Comical Gallant, an improved version of the Merry Wives. In his "epistle dedicatory" he says that Queen Elizabeth commanded the piece, and had it done in a fortnight.

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ENTER MISTRESS ANNE PAGE WITH WINE.-Act I., Scene I.

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