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THE MERRY WIVES OF WINDSOR is no doubt
a very amusing play, with a great deal of humour,
character, and nature in it: but we should
have liked it much better, if any one else had
been the hero of it, instead of Falstaff. We could
have been contented if Shakespear had not been
"commanded to shew the knight in love." Wits
and philosophers, for the most part, do not shine
in that character; and Sir John himself, by no
means, comes off with flying colours. Many
people complain of the degradation and insults
to which Don Quixote is so frequently exposed
in his various adventures. But what are the
unconscious indignities which he suffers, compared
with the sensible mortifications which
Falstaff is made to bring upon himself? What
are the blows and buffettings which the Don receives
from the staves of the Yanguesian carriers
or from Sancho Panza's more hard-hearted
hands, compared with the contamination of the
buck-basket, the disguise of the fat woman of
Brentford, and the horns of Herne the hunter,
which are discovered on Sir John's head? In reading
the play, we indeed wish him well through
all these discomfitures, but it would have been
as well if he had not got into them. Falstaff in
the MERRY WIVES OF WINDSOR is not the man
he was in the two parts of Henry IV. His wit
and eloquence have left him. Instead of making
a butt of others, he is made a butt of by them.
Neither is there a single particle of love in him
to excuse his follies: he is merely a designing,
bare-faced knave, and an unsuccessful one. The
scene with Ford as Master Brook, and that with
Simple, Slender's man, who comes to ask after
the Wise Woman, are almost the only ones
in which his old intellectual ascendancy appears.
He is like a person recalled to the stage
to perform an unaccustomed and ungracious
part; and in which we perceive only "some
faint sparks of those flashes of merriment, that
were wont to set the hearers in a roar." But
the single scene with Doll Tearsheet, or Mrs.
Quickly's account of his desiring "to eat some
of housewife Keach's prawns," and telling her
"to be no more so familiarity with such people,"
is worth the whole of the MERRY WIVES
OF WINDSOR put together. Ford's jealousy,
which is the main spring of the comic incidents,
is certainly very well managed. Page, on the
contrary, appears to be somewhat uxorious in
his disposition; and we have pretty plain indications
of the effect of the characters of the husbands
on the different degrees of fidelity in their
wives. Mrs. Quickly makes a very lively go-between,
both between Falstaff and his Dulcineas,
and Anne Page and her lovers, and seems
in the latter case so intent on her own interest
as totally to overlook the intentions of her employers.
Her master, Doctor Caius, the Frenchman,
and her fellow-servant Jack Bugby, are
very completely described. This last-mentioned
person is rather quaintly commended by Mrs.
Quickly as "an honest, willing, kind fellow, as
ever servant shall come in house withal, and I
warrant you, no tell-tale, nor ho breed-bate;
his worst fault is that he is given to prayer; he
is something peevish that way; but no body
but has his fault." The Welch Parson, Sir
Hugh Evans (a title which in those days was
given to the clergy) is an excellent character in
all respects. He is as respectable as he is laughable.
He has "very good discretions, and very
odd humours." The duel-scene with Caius
gives him an opportunity to shew his "cholera
and his tremblings of mind," his valour and his
melancholy, in an irresistible manner. In the
dialogue, which at his mother's request he holds
with his pupil, William Page, to shew his progress
in learning, it is hard to say whether the
simplicity of the master or the scholar is the
greatest. Nym, Bardolph, and Pistol, are but
the shadows of what they were; and Justice
Shallow himself has little of his consequence
left. But his cousin, Slender, makes up for the
deficiency. He is a very potent piece of imbecility.
In him the pretensions of the worthy
Gloucestershire family are well kept up, and
immortalized. He and his friend Sackerson and
his book of songs and his love of Anne Page
and his having nothing to say to her can never
be forgotten. It is the only first-rate character
in the play: but it is in that class. Shakespear
is the only writer who was as great in describing
weakness as strength.
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