Behind the counter, mute and anxious, sat Long had he sat in expectation vain ; "He sigh'd and look'd, and sigh'd and look'd again," Yet no one came to buy! The day was spent, he rose to shut his shop: "A customer at last!" the porkman thought; Now, though the fog was dark enough without, He could not make the question out; no more She, with a grin facetious, said, "Well, then, The porkman hurried quickly to the door, EPIGRAM. You ask me, Roger, what I gain T. G. G. SHAKSPEARE PAPERS.-No. I. SIR JOHN FALSTAFF. "For those who read aright are well aware Than Falstaff, revelling his rough mates between." MS. penes me. "JACK FALSTAFF to my familiars!"-By that name, therefore, must he be known by all persons, for all are now the familiars of Falstaff. The title of "Sir John Falstaff to all Europe" is but secondary and parochial. He has long since far exceeded the limit by which he bounded the knowledge of his knighthood; and in wide-spreading territories, which in the day of his creation were untrodden by human foot, and in teeming realms where the very name of England was then unheard of, Jack Falstaff is known as familiarly as he was to the wonderful court of princes, beggars, judges, swindlers, heroes, bullies, gentlemen, scoundrels, justices, thieves, knights, tapsters, and the rest whom he drew about him. It is indeed his court. He is lord paramount, the suzerain to whom all pay homage. Prince Hal may delude himself into the notion that he, the heir of England, with all the swelling emotions of soul that rendered him afterwards the conqueror of France, makes a butt of the ton of man that is his companion. The parts are exactly reversed. In the peculiar circle in which they live, the prince is the butt of the knight. He knows it not, he would repel it with scorn if it were asserted; but it is nevertheless the fact that he is subdued. He calls the course of life which he leads, the unyoked humour of his idleness; but he mistakes. In all the paths where his journey lies with Falstaff, it is the hard-yoked servitude of his obedience. In the soliloquies put into his mouth he continually pleads that his present conduct is but that of the moment, that he is ashamed of his daily career, and that the time is ere long to come which will show him different from what he seems. As the dramatic character of Henry V. was conceived and executed by a man who knew how genius in any department of human intellect would work,—to say nothing of the fact that Shakspeare wrote with the whole of the prince's career before him,-we may consider this subjugation to Falstaff as intended to represent the transition state from spoiled youth to energetic manhood. It is useless to look for minute traces of the historical Henry in these dramas. Tradition and the chronicles had handed him down to Shakspeare's time as a prince dissipated in youth, and freely sharing in the rough debaucheries of the metropolis. The same vigour "that did affright the air at Agincourt" must have marked his conduct and bearing in any tumult in which he happened to be engaged. I do not know on what credible authority the story of his having given Gascoigne a box on the ear for committing one of his friends to prison may rest, and shall not at present take the trouble of inquiring. It is highly probable that the chief justice amply deserved the cuffing, and I shall always assume the liberty of doubt ing that he committed the prince. That, like a "sensible lord," he should have hastened to accept any apology which should have relieved him from a collision with the ruling powers at court, I have no doubt at all, from a long consideration of the conduct and history of chief justices in general. More diligent searchers into the facts of that obscure time have seen reason to disbelieve the stories of any serious dissipations of Henry. Engaged as he was from his earliest youth in affairs of great importance, and with a mind trained to the prospect of powerfully acting in the most serious questions that could agitate his time,-a disputed succession, a rising hostility to the church, divided nobility, turbulent commons, an internecine war with France impossible of avoidance, a web of European diplomacy just then beginning to develope itself, in consequence of the spreading use of the pen and inkhorn so pathetically deplored by Jack Cade, and forerunning the felonious invention, "contrary to the king's crown and dignity," of the printing-press, denounced with no regard to chronology by that illustrious agitator;-in these circumstances, the heir of the house of Lancaster, the antagonist of the Lollards, -a -a matter of accident in his case, though contrary to the general principles of his family, -and at the same time suspected by the churchmen of dangerous designs against their property, the pretender on dubious title, but not at the period appearing so decidedly defective as it seems in ours, to the throne of France, the aspirant to be arbiter or master of all that he knew of Europe,-could not have wasted all his youth in riotous living. In fact, his historical character is stern and severe; but with that we have here nothing to do. It is not the Henry of battles, and treaties, and charters, and commissions, and parliaments, we are now dealing with ;—we look to the Henry of Shakspeare. That Henry, I repeat, is subject and vassal of Falstaff. He is bound by the necromancy of genius to the "white-bearded Satan," who he feels is leading him to perdition. It is in vain that he thinks it utterly unfitting that he should engage in such an enterprise as the robbery at Gadshill; for, in spite of all protestations to the contrary, he joins the expedition merely to see how his master will get through his difficulty. He struggles hard, but to no purpose. Go he must, and he goes accordingly. A sense of decorum keeps him from participating in the actual robbery; but he stands close by, that his resistless sword may aid the dubious valour of his master's associates. Joining with Poins in the jest of scattering them and seizing their booty, not only is no harm done to Falstaff, but a sense of remorse seizes on the prince for the almost treasonable deed "Falstaff sweats to death, And lards the lean earth as he walks along; At their next meeting, after detecting and exposing the stories related by the knight, how different is the result from what had been predicted by Poins when laying the plot! "The virtue of this jest. will be, the incomprehensible lies that this same fat rogue will tell us when we meet at supper: how thirty, at least, he fought with; what wards, what blows, what extremities he endured; and in the reproof of this lies the jest." Reproof indeed! All is detected and confessed. Does Poins reprove him, interpret the word as we will? Poins in deed! That were lèze majesté. Does the prince? Why, he tries a jest, but it breaks down; and Falstaff victoriously orders sack and merriment with an accent of command not to be disputed. In a moment after he is selected to meet Sir John Bracy, sent special with the villainous news of the insurrection of the Percies; and in another moment he is seated on his joint-stool, the mimic King of England, lecturing with a mixture of jest and earnest the real Prince of Wales. Equally inevitable is the necessity of screening the master from the consequence of his delinquencies, even at the expense of a very close approximation to saying the thing that is not; and impossible does Hal find it not to stand rebuked when the conclusion of his joke of taking the tavern-bills from the sleeper behind the arras is the enforced confession of being a pickpocket. Before the austere king his father, John his sober-blooded brother, and other persons of gravity or consideration, if Falstaff be in presence, the prince is constrained by his star to act in defence and protection of the knight. Conscious of the carelessness and corruption which mark all the acts of his guide, philosopher, and friend, it is yet impossible that he should not recommend him to a command in a civil war which jeopardied the very existence of his dynasty. In the heat of the battle and the exultation of victory he is obliged to yield to the fraud that represents Falstaff as the actual slayer of Hotspur. Prince John quietly remarks, that the tale of Falstaff is the strangest that he ever heard: his brother, who has won the victory, is content with saying that he who has told it is the strangest of fellows. Does he betray the cheat? Certainly not, it would have been an act of disobedience; but in privy council he suggests to his prince in a whisper, "Come, bring your luggage [the body of Hotspur] nobly-" nobly-as becomes your rank in our court, so as to do the whole of your followers, myself included, honour by the appearance of their master "Come, bring your luggage nobly on your back: Deeper tribute, how Tribute, this, from the future Henry V. ever, is paid in the scene in which state necessity induces the renunciation of the fellow with the great belly who had misled him. Poins had prepared us for the issue. The prince had been grossly abused in the reputable hostelrie of the Boar's Head while he was thought to be out of hearing. When he comes forward with the intention of rebuking the impertinence, Poins, well knowing the command to which he was destined to submit, exclaims, "My lord, he will drive you out of your revenge, and turn all to merriment, if you take not the heat." Vain caution! The scene, again, ends by the total forgetfulness of Falstaff's offence, and his being sent for to court. When, therefore, the time had come that considerations of the highest importance required that Henry should assume a more dignified character, and shake off his dissolute companions, his own experience and the caution of Poins instruct him that if the thing be not done on the heat,-if the old master-spirit be allowed one moment's ground of vantage,-the game is up, the good resolutions dissipated into thin air, the grave rebuke turned all into laughter, and thoughts of anger or prudence put to flight by the restored supremacy of Falstaff. Unabashed and unterrified he has heard the severe rebuke of the king-"I know thee not, old man," &c. until an opportunity offers for a repartee: "Know, the grave doth gape For thee thrice wider than for other men." Some joke on the oft-repeated theme of his unwieldy figure was twinkling in Falstaff's eye, and ready to leap from his tongue. The king saw his danger: had he allowed a word, he was undone. Hastily, therefore, does he check that word; "Reply not to me with a fool-born jest ;" forbidding, by an act of eager authority,-what he must also have felt to be an act of self-control,-the outpouring of those magic sounds which, if uttered, would, instead of a prison becoming the lot of Falstaff, have conducted him to the coronation dinner, and established him as chief depositary of what in after days was known by the name of backstairs influence. In this we find the real justification of what has generally been stigmatized as the harshness of Henry. Dr. Johnson, with some indignation, asks why should Falstaff be sent to the Fleet?-he had done nothing since the king's accession to deserve it. I answer, he was sent to the Fleet for the same reason that he was banished ten miles from court, on pain of death. Henry thought it necessary that the walls of a prison should separate him from the seducing influence of one than whom he knew many a better man, but none whom it was so hard to miss. He felt that he could not, in his speech of predetermined severity, pursue to the end the tone of harshness towards his old companion. He had the nerve to begin by rebuking him in angry terms as a surfeit-swelled, profane old man,-as one who, instead of employing in prayer the time which his hoary head indicated was not to be of long duration in this world, disgraced his declining years by assuming the unseemly occupations of fool and jester, as one whom he had known in a dream, but had awakened to despise, as one who, on the verge of the gaping grave, occupied himself in the pursuits of such low debauchery as excluded him from the society of those who had respect for themselves or their character. But he cannot so continue; and the last words he addresses to him whom he had intended to have cursed altogether, hold forth a promise of advancement, with an affectionate assurance that it will be such as is suitable to his "strength and qualities." If in public he could scarce master his speech, how could he hope in private to master his feelings? No. His only safety was in utter separation: it should be done, and he did it. He was emancipated by violent effort; did he never regret the ancient thraldom? Shakspeare is silent: but may we not imagine that he who sate crowned with the golden rigol of England, cast, amid all his splendours, many a sorrowful thought upon that old familiar face which he had sent to gaze upon the iron bars of the Fleet? As for the chief justice, he never appears in Falstaff's presence, save as a butt. His grave lordship has many solemn admonitions, nay, serious threats to deliver; but he departs laughed at and baffled. |