nor is it impossible that the preface to Les Fâcheux itself suggested to English minds this legend of expeditious work. Between 1661 and 1702 a French fact had time to develop into an English myth. It is Rowe who, in his Life of Shakespeare (1709), says that the Queen" was so well pleased with that admirable character of Falstaff in the two parts of Henry IV., that she commanded Shakespeare to continue it for one play more, and to show him in love." In 1710, Gildon "is very well assured" that the Queen "had obliged Shakespeare to write a play of Sir John Falstaff in love," a play achieved in a fortnight, "a prodigious thing when all is so well contrived, and carried on without confusion." As the first quar to edition of the play dates from 1601-2, the tradition was a century old before winning its way into print. The title-page of the quarto of 1602 says that it has been acted "Both before her Majestie and elsewhere," and there proof and traditions end, and guessing begins. We do not know for certain the place of the play in chronological series. Though Falstaff dies in Henry V., there is no reason why he should not be revived in a piece of which the action is in the reign of Henry IV. But is Henry IV. on the throne still, the Merry Wives? A passage in Act III., Scene II., reads as if he were not; as if Henry V. were King. It is said of Fenton that he kept "company with the wild Prince and Poins," and in this reads as if that wild fellowship were now a thing of the past. On the other hand, in the quarto, an early piratical edition, Falstaff supposes the Fairies to be "the wild Prince stealing his father's deer," which proves that contemporaries thought Henry IV. was King, even if the words are not Shakespeare's. It is not an important matter, as Shakespeare had an undoubted right, after killing Sir John in one play, to give us a chance adventure of his earlier days in another and later piece. There is a great deal of learning about Shallow, and the supposed caricature of Sir Thomas Lucy, and the "luces" in his coat of arms. When we say that there is "a great deal of learning" about any matter, we generally mean that nothing concerning it is known and much is guessed. In examining some boys once on Shakespeare, I received one answer to this effect: "We have been told till we are tired to death of hearing it, that Greene called Shakespeare a Shakescene." I confess that I am tired to death of being told about Sir Thomas Lucy and the deer and the rabbits. As Dr. Johnson said concerning the Second Punic War, I never wish to hear of it again as long as I live. The tale about Lucy and the bucks is in Rowe, 1709, and was written down earlier by the Rev. R. Davies, who died in 1707, and who might have been better employed than in collecting and perpetuating such tattle. Davies was such an ass that he calls Sir Thomas Lucy "Sir Lucy," and makes him out to be "Justice Clodpate," as if Shakespeare ever introduced a Justice Clodpate. If Shakespeare poach ed, he only did what most of us have done when we were young, and had the chance. The Lucys carry three luces, or pikes, in their shields, not a dozen, like Shallow. The whole question, even if it could be answered with certainty, is not worth the gallons of ink that have been spilt over it, and might well be left, with the authorship of Junius's Letters, and the identity of the Man in the Iron Mask, as a happy hunting-ground for bores. The Merry Wives of Windsor is not one of the best of Shakespeare's plays; it is one of the least good, as is natural. We can hardly suppose that he wrote it out of his natural vein he knew better than to introduce Falstaff in love: he was lowering the delightful character to the level of a royal or of a popular demand. Falstaff" cannot cog," he is no "lisping hawthorn bud"-very far from it "that smells like Bucklersbury in simple-time." It is with a visible struggle that he quotes Sidney," Have I caught my lovely jewel?" It Moreover, the piece has reached us in poor and more or less apocryphal condition. The quarto clearly does not exactly represent the original. is a piratical publication, like Neufvillenaine's piracy of Molière's Sganarelle, ou le Cocu Imaginaire.* The quarto is a bad text; the folio is not a good text; "each in turn convicts the other as imperfect." We do not know whether their imperfections are departures from one common original, or whether each is untrue to a different original-one a sketch, the other *See Grigg's fac-simile, with Mr. Daniel's Introductions, to which much is owed here. MISTRESS FORD. "Why, this is the very same: the very hand, the very words. What doth he think of us?"-Act II., Scene I. a completed work. There is a conspicuous muddle in Act III., Scene V., where a whole day and night appear to pass in the course of a single scene, Mr. Daniel says, though I confess that I do not read the passage in the same way. The action seems to me to occur on the morning after Falstaff's ducking, and very early in the morning. Mr. Daniel says it is the afternoon of the day of that misadventure. But "this is affectations." The text The fat woman of Brentford is another local and transitory "Humor." is corrupt; the piece was hurried and and nimbler rapier. It cannot surely palpably forced: the low comedy of be that in William Page we have the Sir Hugh Evans and Dr. Caius is-first sketch of an Eton boy? He is a not an example of Shakespeare's best very early British school - boy, at all low comedy. Yet how much would. events, and Windsor is not far from be lost, how many familiar phrases, Eton. He learns such Latin gramhow charming a picture of an English mar as Shakespeare, with Mr. Dongirl is Anne Page, how delightful a set nelly's leave, may have acquired at of fools in Shallow and Slender, if the the school of Stratford-on-Avon. Merry Wives had perished! Here, for William comes to trouble over his once, we have Shakespeare's humor accusativo, but he is a good sprag playing among domestic scenes, under memory on the whole, and one of the Windsor towers, in Datchet mead, few school-boys whom Shakespeare among his own people, without much thought fit to bring on the stage. intermixture of higher poetry, or of He is not prone to design the absurd, historical events. To be sure, many unconscious humors of boyhood. He of his characters, in whatever cos- needed his boys for girls' parts. tumes they appear, and in whatever country or age they exist, are pure English. But in the Merry Wives they are all at home, among the fields they knew, in the houses of massive oaken wood-work, under the red-tiled roofs, full of their local humors, their ordinary affairs, their usual sports. We could hardly expect to hear of Banbury cheese" in Venice or Verona, or of Banbury cakes, so familiar by name to the modern traveller on the Great Western Railway. The mill-sixpence and the two Edward shovel-boards that Slender lost are of a native currency, and the baiting of Sackerson was no doubt a manly though now extinct British form of bear-fight. The very color of Elizabeth's time is over the scene, as when Shallow, like Mercutio, disdains "your passes, stocadoes, and I know not what" of the Italian fencing-masters, then famous and formidable, and swears by his "long sword," one of those immeasurable tucks which were beginning to go out before a lighter We cannot tell how loudly our forefathers roared when Sir John appeared in the costume of this familiar and diverting matron. The fun was almost entirely "topical" and temporary, but no doubt it was excellent fooling while Gillian of Brentford was a popular example of corpulence in womankind. Falstaff "in the stocks for a witch" would have been a sight so mirth-moving that we almost wonder at Shakespeare's moderation in not exposing the knight to that unexpected discredit. The number of quotable and much quoted things in the Merry Wives is considerable. Shakespeare had an extraordinary knack of saying what would bear repetition, and prove a future bon-mot, in all manner of altered circumstances. How often have we not occasion to remark with Nym, "His mind is not heroic, and there's the humor of it." But how seldom, alas! in the changes and chances of |