France. The Emperor was entertained with great magnificence, but his mission accomplished nothing to the purpose. After divers attempts at a settlement by negotiation, the King renewed the war in 1417, and in August landed in Normandy with an army. From that time he had an almost uninterrupted career of conquest till the Spring of 1420, when all his demands were granted, and himself publicly affianced to the Princess Catharine. From this sketch it may well be judged that the matter was not altogether fitted for dramatic use, as it gave too little scope for those developments of character and passion ' wherein the interest of the serious drama mainly consists. For, as Schlegel remarks, "war is an epic rather than a dramatic subject: to yield the right interest for the stage, it must be the means whereby something else is accomplished, and not the last aim and substance of the whole." And perhaps it was a sense of this unfitness of the matter for dramatic use that led the Poet, upon the revisal, to pour through the work so arge a measure of the lyrical element, thus penetrating and filling it with the efficacy of a grand national song of triumph. Hence comes it that the play is so thoroughly charged with the spirit and poetry of a sort of jubilant patriotism, of which the King himself is probably the most eloquent impersonation ever delineated. Viewed in this light, the piece, however inferior to others in dramatic effect, is as perfect in its way as any thing the Poet has given us. And it has a peculiar value as indicating what Shakespeare might have done in other forms of poetry, had he been so minded; the Choruses in general, and especially that to the fourth Act, being unrivalled in spirit, clearness, and force. Of course the play has its unity in the hero; who is never for a moment out of our feelings: even when he is most absent or unseen, the thought and expression still relish of him; and the most prosaic parts are touched with a certain grace and effluence from him. Why Falstaff is not Introduced. For some cause or other, the promise, already quoted, touching the continuation of Sir John was not made good. Falstaff does not once appear in the play. I suspect that, when the author went to planning the drama, he saw the impracticability of making any thing more out of him; while there was at least some danger lest the part should degenerate into clap-trap. And indeed the very fact of such a promise being made might well infer a purpose rather too theatrical for the just rights of truth and art. At all events, Sir John's dramatic office and mission were clearly at an end when his connection with Prince Henry I was broken off; the design of the character being to explain the Prince's wild and riotous courses. Besides, Falstaff must have had so much of manhood in him as to love the Prince, else he were too bad a man for the Prince to be with; and when he was so sternly cast off, the grief of this wound must in all reason have sadly palsied his sportmaking powers. To have continued him with his wits shattered or crippled, had been flagrant injustice to him; to have continued him with his wits sound and in good trim, had been something unjust to the Prince. To be sure, Falstaff repenting and reforming might be a much better man; but in that capacity he was not for us. In such a man as he has been, the process of repentance must be secret, else it would not be edifying; and to set it forth upon the stage as matter of public amusement, were a clear instance of profanation. Such a thing ought never to be shown all at, save as it transpires silently in the fruits of an amended life. So that the Poet did well to keep Falstaff in retirement where, though his once matchless powers no longer give us pleasure, yet the report of his sufferings gently touches our pity, and recovers him to our human sympathies. And when at last the Hostess tells us "the King has killed his heart," what a volume of redeeming matter is suggested concerning him! We then for the first time begin to respect him as a man, because we see that he has a heart as well as a brain; and that his heart is big and strong enough to outwrestle his profligacy, and give death the advantage of him. And it is observable that those who see much of him, although they do not respect him, and can but stand amazed at his overpowering freshets of humour, nevertheless get strongly attached to him. This is especially the case with that strangely-interesting creature, Mrs. Quickly; and now we can hardly choose but think the better both of Falstaff and of Bardolph, when, the former having died, and a question being raised as to where he has gone, the latter says, "Would I were with him, wheresome'er he is, either in Heaven or in Hell!" In Quickly's account of his last moments there is a pathos to which I know of nothing similar, and which is as touching as it is peculiar. It is in Shakespeare's choicest vein of humour. His make-up being so original, and so plenipotent in wit and humour, it was but natural that Sir John, upon his departure, should leave some audible vibrations in the air behind him. The last of these dies away upon the ear when Fluellen uses him to point a moral; and this reference, so queerly characteristic of the speaker, is abundantly grateful as serving to start up a swarm of laughing memories. The Comic Characters. In the comic portions of this play we have a fresh illustration of the Poet's versatility and range of genius. There is indeed nothing here that comes up to the earlier scenes at Eastcheap so much is implied in the absence of Falstaff; for nothing else in the comic line can be expected to equal that delineation. But Hostess Quickly reappears as Mrs. Pistol, the same character, but running into an amusing variety of development: the swaggering Pistol is also the same as before, only in a somewhat more efflorescent stage; ranting out with greater gust than ever the picked-up fustian of the bear-garden and the play-house; a very fuliginous pistol-without fire: Bardolph, too, with his "face all bubukles, and whelks, and knobs, and flames of fire," but advanced in rank, and carrying a sense of higher importance. With these we have an altogether original addition in Corporal Nym, a delineation of low- character in the Poet's most realistic style; with a vein of humour so lifelike as to seem a literal transcript from fact; while the native vulgarity of the man is kept from being disgusting by the freshness and spirit with which his characteristic traits are delivered. These three good-for-nothing profligates are a fitting example of the human refuse and scum which lately gravitated round Sir John; and they serve the double purpose of carrying into the new scenes the memory of the King's former associations, and also of evincing the King's present severity and rectitude of discipline. They thus help to bridge over the chasm, which might else appear something too abrupt, between what the hero was as Prince of Wales and what he is as King therewithal their presence shows him acting out the purpose, which he avowed at our first meeting with him, of imitating the Sun, who causes himself to be more wondered at By breaking through the foul and ugly mists That some such clouds of vileness, exhaled from the old haunts of his discarded life, should still hang about his path, was natural in the course of things, and may be set down as a judicious point in the drama. The Boy who figures as servant to "these three swashers" is probably the same whom we met with as Page to Falstaff in the preceding play. His arch and almost unconscious shrewdness of remark was even then a taking feature; and it encouraged the thought of his having enough healthy keenness of perception to ward off the taints and corruptions that beset him. And he now translates the follies and vices of his employers into apt themes of sagacious and witty reflection, touching at every point the very pith of their distinctive features. The mixture of penetration and simplicity with which he moralizes their pretentious nothings is very charming. Thus Pistol's turbulent vapourings draw from him the sage remark, "I did never know so full a voice issue from so empty a heart but the saying is true, The empty vessel makes the greatest sound. Bardolph and Nym had ten times more valour than this roaring Devil i' the old play, and they are both hang'd; and so would this be, if he durst steal any thing adventurously." Shakespeare specially delights in thus endowing his children and youngsters with a kind of unsophisticated shrewdness, the free outcome of a native soundness that enables them to walk unhurt amid the contagions of bad example; their own minds being kept pure, and even furthered in the course of manhood, by an instinctive oppugnance to the shams and meannesses which beset their path. : |