to "show off." The contrast of Duncan, wrapt in sleep's security, yet pierced with murder's knife, the contrast of innocent sleep with the guilty deed, its balm his bale, its nourishment his poison, would have tempted a smaller man—but not Shakspere in his Third Period. Each metaphor has its touch, and then off. In Henry IV., Part II., the lower rank of people come more to the front. We've more prominence than before given to the low tavern-life, the country squire and his servants, the administration of justice in town and country which Shakspere's long experience made him sneer at, as against the knightly life of the former Part, notwithstanding its carriers. This prepares us for the fuller sketches of contemporary middle-class life in The Merry Wives. The chief characters of Part I. are further developed. Though the hand of sickness is on the King, yet "Ready, aye ready" is still his word; and as soon as Hotspur is beaten, another army marches against Northumberland and the Archbishop, whose two separate rebellions Shakspere has put into one. But his cares tell on him: the chronicler Hall calls his reign the "unquiete tyme of Kyng Henry the Fourth." His mind goes back o'er the troublous past, thinks on his old close friendship with his now foe Northumberland, and the dead Richard's prophecy of their falling out. And as the past has little to comfort him, so the future has less. His son's going back, like a sow to wallow again in the mire, cuts him to the heart, as sovereign even more than as father— "O my poor kingdom, sick with civil blows! When that my care could not withhold thy riots, O, thou wilt be a wilderness again, Peopled with wolves, thy old inhabitants!" Was it for this that he'd suffered exile, risked his life, won England, and held it with his strong right hand? Surely a pathetic figure the strong man worn with care, disappointed in his dearest wish, the labour of his life made vain. Still, comfort was to come; the son who once before won back his father's willingly forgiving heart, again spoke words that again at-oned them. And in the King's last speech to his gallant heir we see the man's whole nature—wily to win, strong to hold, a purpose in all he did; not perhaps a hero, but a ruler and a king, a father too. Such political lesson as Shakspere preached in these plays was, that though, like Elizabeth's crown, the succession to it might not be clear, the way to hold it was to govern strongly and well, and that the sovereign must not only attack his foes at home, but unite the nation by foreign war, as Henry V., Napoleon, Cavour, and Bismarck did. For Prince Hal: we have one unworthy scene, two worthy ones. The shadow of his father's death-sickness is on him, and he goes for relief-half disgusted with himself (feeling that every one would call him a hypocrite if he looked sorry) to his old, loose companions. But there's not much enjoyment in his forced mirth. He feels ashamed of himself, and soon leaves Falstaff and his old life forever-"let the end try the man," as he says. It is clear that he now feels the degradation of being Falstaff's friend and Poins's reputed brother-in-law. On hearing of the war again, as in Part I., he changes at a touch, and is himself. The next time we see him is by his father's sickbed, and again he wins to him his father's heart. But surely by a bit of Falstaff-like cleverness and want of truth. Compare his first speech to the crown with his second giving an account of it to his father. But one part of that first speech he meant: that he'd hold his crown against the world's whole strength; and that was what King Henry wanted. When Hal becomes king, his treatment of his brothers, the Chief-Justice, and Falstaff is surely wise and right, in all three cases. One does feel for Falstaff; but certainly what he ought to have had he got-the chance of reformation. What other reception could Henry, in the midst of his new state, give in public to the dirty, slovenly, debauched, old sinner who thrust himself upon him, than the rebuke he did? Any other course would have rendered the king's own professed reform absurd. In Falstaff we have in this Part II. the old wit and humour, the old slipperiness when seemingly caught, the old mastery over every one, till the triumph should come, when comes catastrophe instead. But we have more of the sharper, the cheat, the preyer on others (the hostess, Shallow, the soldiers at the choosing), brought out. The slipperiness is seen in his answers to the Chief-Justice's attendant, the Chief-Justice himself, the hostess, Prince Hal, and Doll. (His excuse for dispraising Hal before Doll is repeated by Parolles for abusing Bertram to Diana in All's Well.) The scenes with Shallow and Silence, and the choice of soldiers, are of course beyond the reach of praise. We cannot help noting the use that the old rascal meant to make of his power over the young king: "Let us take any man's horses; the laws of England are at my commandment. Happy are they which have been my friends, and woe unto my lord chief-justice !" His end here is imprisonment for a time; and worse, to be chaffed by Shallow the despised, and not return it. This prepares us for his fate in The Merry Wives. The moral is the same as that of Love's Labours Lost. What is mere wit so valued by men really worth? Wit "Whose influence is begot of that loose grace Which shallow, laughing hearers give to fools." "The rogues," says Miss Constance O'Brien, "all come to a bad end. Falstaff dies in obscure poverty, Nym and Bardolph get hung in France, Pistol is stripped of his braggart honour, and even the 'boy and the luggage,' as Fluellen puts it, are killed together. Poins alone, the best of the set, vanishes silently, without a word as to his fate; and so that wild crew breaks up and disappears, leaving the world to laugh over them and their leader forever. (If Falstaff was drawn from a living man, that man must have been a little Irish; no purely English brains work quite so fast.)" The contemporary allusions are still kept up in this play. We have the landlady's disjointed talk, which Dickens has reproduced for us Victorians, the Wincot of The Shrew Induction again, the tradesmen who now wear nothing but high shoes and bunches of keys at their girdles," the coming in of glass drinking-vessels for silver ones, specially noted by Harrison, the Thames tide in ii. 3. 63, as in the Rape of Lucrece, the University and Inns of Court, the school-boys' breaking-up, the Cotswold man. All through, the play is Shakspere's England. One Amurath succeeded another in 1596. We may also notice the dwelling on special words, as "security," "accommodate." "rebellion," like Falconbridge's "commodity," and Lucrece's "opportunity." * * See Harrison's Description of England, edited by F. J. Furnivall (published by the New Shakspere Society, 1877), p. 147.—Ed. † See R. of L. 1667: "As through an arch the violent roaring tide;" which was evidently suggested by the tide running through Old London Bridge.-Ed. |