Doll. I'll tell thee what, thou thin man in a censer! I will have you as soundly swinged for this, you blue-bottle rogue! you filthy famished correctioner! if you be not swinged, I'll forswear halfkirtles.2 1 Bead: Come, come, you she knight-errant, come. Host. O, that right should thus overcome might! Well; of sufferance comes ease. Doll. Come, you rogue, come; bring me to a justice. Host. Ay; come, you starved blood-hound. Doll. Come, you thin thing; come, you rascal! 1 Bead. Very well. [Exeunt. SCENE V-A public place near Westminster Abbey. Enter two Grooms, strewing rushes. 1 Groom. More rushes, more rushes. 2 Groom. The trumpets have sounded twice. 1 Groom. It will be two o'clock ere they come from the coronation: Despatch, despatch. [Exeunt Grooms. Enter Falstaff, Shallow, Pistol, Bardolph, and the Page. Fal. Stand here by me, master Robert Shallow; I will make the king do you grace: I will leer upon him, as 'a comes by; and do but mark the countenance that he will give me. Pist. God bless thy lungs, good knight. Fal. Come here, Pistol; stand behind me.-O, if I had had time to have made new liveries, Í would have bestowed the thousand pound I borrowed of you. [To Shallow.] But 'tis no matter this poor show doth better: this doth infer the zeal I had to see him. Shal. It doth so. Fal. It shows my earnestness of affection. Shal. It doth so. Fal. My devotion. Shal. It doth, it doth, it doth. Fal. As it were, to ride day and night; and not to deliberate, not to remember, not to have patience to shift me. Shal. It is most certain. Pist. The heavens thee guard and keep, most royal imp of fame! Fal. God save thee, my sweet boy! King. My lord chief justice, speak to that vain man. Ch. Just. Have you your wits? know you what 'tis you speak Fal. My king! my Jove! I speak to thee, my heart! King. I know thee not, old man: Fall to thy prayers; How ill white hairs become a fool, and jester! Give you advancement.-Be it your charge, my lord, To see perform'd the tenor of our word.— Set on. [Exeunt King, and his train. Fal. Master Shallow, I owe you a thousand pound. Shal. Ay, marry, sir John; which I beseech you to let me have home with me. Fal. That can hardly be, master Shallow. Do not you grieve at this; I shall be sent for in private to him: look you, he must seem thus to the world. Fear not your advancement; I will be the man yet, that shall make you great. Shal. I cannot perceive how; unless you give Fal. But to stand stained with travel, and sweat-me your doublet, and stuff me out with straw. I ing with desire to see him thinking of nothing beseech you, good sir John, let me have five hunelse: putting all affairs else in oblivion; as if there dred of my thousand. were nothing else to be done, but to see him. Pist. 'Tis semper idem, for absque hoc nihil est :3 'Tis all in every part. Shal. 'Tis so, indeed. Pist. My knight, I will inflame thy noble liver, And make thee rage. Thy Doll, and Helen of thy noble thoughts, By most mechanical and dirty hand: Rouse up revenge from ebon den with fell Alecto's snake, For Doll is in; Pistol speaks nought but truth. [Shouts within, and the trumpets sound. Pist. There roar'd the sea, and trumpet-clangor sounds. Enter the King and his train, the Chief Justice among them. Fal. God save thy grace, king Hal! my royal Hal! (1) Beadles usually wore a blue livery. Fal. Sir, will be as good as my word: this that you heard, was but a colour. Shal. A colour, I fear, that you will die in, sir John. Fal. Fear no colours; go with me to dinner. Come, lieutenant Pistol; come, Bardolph:-1 shall be sent for soon at night. Re-enter P. John, the Chief Justice, Officers, &c. Ch. Just. Go, carry sir John Falstaff to the Fleet; Take all his company along with him. Fal. My lord, my lord, Ch. Just. I cannot now speak: I will hear you Appear more wise and modest to the world. P. John. The king hath call'd his parliament, Ch. Just. He hath. the First and Second Parts of Henry the Fourth. Perhaps no author has ever, in two plays, afforded so much delight. The great events are interesting, for the fate of kingdoms depends upon them; the slighter occurrences are diverting, and, except one P. John. I will lay odds,-that, ere this year or two, sufficiently probable; the incidents are expire, We bear our civil swords, and native fire, As far as France: I heard a bird so sing, EPILOGUE, SPOKEN BY A DANCER. [Exeunt. multiplied with wonderful fertility of invention; and the characters diversified with the utmost nicety of discernment, and the profoundest skill in the nature of man. The prince, who is the hero both of the comic and tragic part, is a young man of great abilities, and violent passions, whose sentiments are right, though his actions are wrong; whose virtues are obscured by negligence, and whose understanding FIRST, my fear; then, my court'sy; last, my is dissipated by levity. In his idle hours he is speech. My fear is, your displeasure; my court'sy, rather loose than wicked; and when the occasion my duty; and my speech, to beg your pardons. If forces out his latent qualities, he is great without you look for a good speech now, you undo me: for effort, and brave without tumult. The trifler is what I have to say, is of mine own making; and roused into a hero, and the hero again reposes in what, indeed, I should say, will, I doubt, prove the trifler. The character is great, original, and just. mine own marring. But to the purpose, and so to Percy is a rugged soldier, choleric and quarrelthe venture. Be it known to you, (as it is very some, and has only the soldier's virtues, generosity well,) I was lately here in the end of a displeasing and courage. play, to pray your patience for it, and to promise But Falstaff! unimitated, unimitable Falstaff! you a better. I did mean, indeed, to pay you with how shall I describe thee? thou compound of sense this; which if, like an ill venture, it come unluck- and vice; of sense which may be admired, but not ily home, I break, and you, my gentle creditors, esteemed; of vice which may be despised, but lose. Here, I promised you, I would be, and here hardly detested. Falstaff is a character loaded I commit my body to your mercies: bate me some, with faults, and with those faults which naturally and I will pay you some, and, as most debtors do, produce contempt. He is a thief and a glutton, a promise you infinitely. coward and a boaster; always ready to cheat the If my tongue cannot entreat you to acquit me, weak, and prey upon the poor; to terrify the timowill you command me to use my legs? and yet rous, and insult the defenceless. At once obsequithat were but light payment,-to dance out of your ous and malignant, he satirizes in their absence debt. But a good conscience will make any possi- those whom he lives by flattering. He is familiar ble satisfaction, and so will I. All the gentlewo- with the prince only as an agent of vice; but of men here have forgiven me; if the gentlemen will this familiarity he is so proud, as not only to be not, then the gentlemen do not agree with the gen- supercilious and haughty with common men, but tlewomen, which was never seen before in such an to think his interest of importance to the duke of assembly. Lancaster. Yet the man thus corrupt, thus despiOne word more, I beseech you. If you be not cable, makes himself necessary to the prince that too much cloyed with fat meat, our humble author despises him, by the most pleasing of all qualities, will continue the story, with sir John in it, and perpetual gaiety; by an unfailing power of exciting make you merry with fair Katharine of France: laughter, which is the more freely indulged, as his where, for any thing I know, Falstaff shall die of a wit is not of the splendid or ambitious kind, but sweat, unless already he be killed with your hard consists in easy scapes and sallies of levity, which opinions; for Oldcastle died a martyr, and this is make sport, but raise no envy. It must be obnot the man. My tongue is weary; when my legs served, that he is stained with no enormous or sanare too, will bid you good night: and so kneel guinary crimes, so that his licentiousness is not so down before you;-but, indeed, to pray for the offensive but that it may be borne for his mirth. queen. I fancy every reader, when he ends this play, cries out with Desdemona, 'O most lame and im potent conclusion! As this play was not, to our knowledge, divided into acts by the author, I could be content to conclude it with the death of Henry the Fourth: The moral to be drawn from this representation is, that no man is more dangerous than he that, with a will to corrupt, hath the power to please; and that neither wit nor honesty ought to think themselves safe with such a companion, when they see JOHNSON. Henry seduced by Falstaff. called the First and Second Parts of Henry the Mr. Upton thinks these two plays improperly Fourth. The first play ends, he says, with the 'In that Jerusalem shall Harry die.' peaceful settlement of Henry in the kingdom by These scenes, which now make the fifth act of the defeat of the rebels. This is hardly true; for Henry the Fourth, might then be the first of Henry the rebels are not yet finally suppressed. The the Fifth; but the truth is, that they do not unite second, he tells us, shows Henry the Fifth in the very commodiously to either play. When these various lights of a good-natured rake, till, on his plays were represented, I believe they ended as they father's death, he assumes a more manly character. are now ended in the books; but Shakspeare seems This is true; but this representation gives us no to have designed that the whole series of action, idea of a dramatic action. These two plays will from the beginning of Richard the Second, to the appear to every reader, who shall peruse them end of Henry the Fifth, should be considered by without ambition of critical discoveries, to be so the reader as one work upon one plan, only broken connected, that the second is merely a sequel to into parts by the necessity of exhibition. the first; to be two, only because they are too None of Shakspeare's plays are more read than long to be one. JOHNSON. Duke of Exeter, uncle to the king. Duke of York, cousin to the king. Charles the Sixth, king of France. Dukes of Burgundy, Orleans, and Bourbon. Rambures, and Grandpre, French lords. Earls of Salisbury, Westmoreland, and Warwick. Governor of Harfleur. Montjoy, a French herald. Archbishop of Canterbury. Bishop of Ely. Earl of Cambridge, Lord Scroop, conspirators against the king. Sir Thomas Grey, Sir Thomas Erpingham, Gower, Fluellen, Macmorris, Jamy, officers in king Henry's army. Bates, Court, Williams, soldiers in the same. Nym, Bardolph, Pistol, formerly servants to Falstaff, now soldiers in the same. Boy, servant to them. A Herald. Chorus. Enter Chorus. O, FOR a muse of fire, that would ascend Crouch for employment. But pardon, gentles all, Think, when we talk of horses, that you see them Carry them here and there; jumping o'er times; (1) An allusion to the circular form of the theatre. Ambassadors to the king of England. Isabel, queen of France. Katharine, daughter of Charles and Isabel. Lords, ladies, officers, French and English soldiers. messengers, and attendants. The Scene, at the beginning of the play, lies in England; but afterwards, wholly in France. ACT I. SCENE I.-London. An ante-chamber in the King's palace. Enter the Archbishop of Canterbury, and Bishop of Ely. Canterbury. MY lord, I'll tell you, that self bill is urg'd, Which, in the eleventh year o'the last king's reign Was like, and had indeed against us pass'd, But that the scambling and unquiet time Did push it out of further question.4 Ely. But how, my lord, shall we resist it now? Cant. It must be thought on. If it pass against us, We lose the better half of our possession: For all the temporal lands, which men devout By testament have given to the church, Would they strip from us; being valued thus,As much as would maintain, to the king's honour, Full fifteen earls, and fifteen hundred knights; Six thousand and two hundred good esquires; And, to relief of lazars, and weak age, Of indigent faint souls, past corporal toil, A hundred alms-houses, right well supplied; And to the coffers of the king beside, A thousand pounds by the year: Thus runs the bill. Ely. This would drink deep. Cant. "Twould drink the cup and all. To envelop and contain celestial spirits. (2) Helmets. (3) Powers of fancy. (4) Debate. |