Enter BARDOLPH and Page. BARD. 'Save your grace! P. HEN. And yours, most noble Bardolph! 8 BARD. Come, you virtuous ass, [To the Page.] you bashful fool, must you be blushing? wherefore blush you now? What a maidenly man at arms are you become? Is it such a matter, to get a pottlepot's maidenhead? 9 PAGE. He called me even now, my lord, through a red lattice, and I could discern no part of his face from the window: at last, I spied his eyes; and, methought, he had made two holes in the alewife's new petticoat, and peeped through. P. HEN. Hath not the boy profited? BARD. Away, you whoreson upright rabbit, away! PAGE. Away, you rascally Althea's dream, away! P. HEN. Instruct us, boy: What dream, boy? PAGE. Marry, my lord, Althea dreamed she was delivered of a fire-brand;' and therefore I call him her dream. • Bard. Come, you virtuous ass, &c.] Though all the editions give this speech to Poins, it seems evident, by the Page's immediate reply, that it must be placed to Bardolph: for Bardolph had called to the boy from an ale-house, and it is likely, made him half-drunk; and, the boy being ashamed of it, it is natural for Bardolph, a bold unbred fellow, to banter him on his aukward bashfulness. THEOBALD. 9 through a red lattice,] i. e. from an ale-house window, See Vol. V. p. 83, n. 4. MALOne. 1 -Althea dreamed &c.] Shakspeare is here mistaken in his mythology, and has confounded Althea's firebrand with Hecuba's. The firebrand of Althea was real: but Hecuba, when she was big with Paris, dreamed that she was delivered of a firebrand that consumed the kingdom. JOHNson. P. HEN. A crown's worth of good interpretation.-There it is, boy. [Gives him money. POINS. O, that this good blossom could be kept from cankers!-Well, there is sixpence to preserve thee. BARD. An you do not make him be hanged among you, the gallows shall have wrong. P. HEN. And how doth thy master, Bardolph ? BARD. Well, my lord. He heard of your grace's coming to town; there's a letter for you. POINS. Delivered with good respect.-And how doth the martlemas, your master ?3 BARD. In bodily health, sir. POINS. Marry, the immortal part needs a physician: but that moves not him; though that be sick, it dies not. P. HEN. I do allow this went to be as familiar with me as my dog: and he holds his place; for, look you, how he writes. POINS. [Reads.] John Falstaff, knight, 2 A crown's worth of good interpretation.] A Pennyworth of good Interpretation, is, if I remember right, the title of some old tract. MALONE. 3 the martlemas, your master?] That is, the autumn, or rather the latter spring. The old fellow with juvenile passions. JOHNSON. In The First Part of King Henry IV. the Prince calls Falstaff "the latter spring,-all-hallown summer.” MALONE. . Martlemas is corrupted from Martinmas, the feast of St. Martin, the eleventh of November. The corruption is general in the old plays. So, in The Pinner of Wakefield, 1599: "A piece of beef hung up since Martlemas." STEEVENS. this wen JOHNSON. -] This swoln excrescence of a man. Every man must know that, as oft as he has occasion to name himself. Even like those that are kin to the king; for they never prick their finger, but they say, There is some of the king's blood spilt: How comes that? says he, that takes upon him not to conceive: the answer is as ready as a borrower's cap;5 I am the king's poor cousin, sir. P. HEN. Nay, they will be kin to us, or they will fetch it from Japhet. But the letter: POINS. Sir John Falstaff, knight, to the son of the king, nearest his father, Harry prince of Wales, greeting.-Why, this is a certificate. 5 the answer is as ready as a borrower's cap;] Old copy-a borrowed сар. STEEVENS. But how is a borrowed cap so ready? Read, a borrower's cap, and then there is some humour in it: for a man that goes to borrow money, is of all others the most complaisant; his cap is always at hand. WARBURTON. Falstaff's followers, when they stole any thing, called it a purchase. A borrowed cap, in the same dialect, might be a stolen one; which is sufficiently ready, being, as Falstaff says, “to be found on every hedge." MALONE. Such caps as were worn by men in our author's age, were made of silk, velvet, or woollen; not of linen; and consequently would not be hung out to dry on hedges. STEEvens. I think Dr. Warburton's correction is right. A cap is not a thing likely to be borrowed, in the common sense of the word: and in the sense of stealing the sense should be a cap to be borrowed. Besides, conveying was the cant phrase for stealing. FARMER. Dr. Warburton's emendation is countenanced by a passage in Timon of Athens: 66 be not ceas'd "With slight denial; nor then silenc'd, when "Plays in the right hand, thus:" STEEVENS. P. Hen.] All the editors, except Sir Thomas Hanmer, have POINS. I will imitate the honourable Roman in brevity-he sure means brevity in breath; shortwinded.-I commend me to thee, I commend thee, and I leave thee. Be not too familiar with Poins; for he misuses thy favours so much, that he swears, thou art to marry his sister Nell. Repent at idle times as thou may'st, and so farewell. Thine, by yea and no, (which is as much as to say, as thou usest him,) Jack Falstaff, with my familiars; John, with my brothers and sisters; and sir John with all Europe. My lord, I will steep this letter in sack, and make him eat it. 8 P. HEN. That's to make him eat twenty of his words. But do you use me thus, Ned? must I marry your sister? left this letter in confusion, making the Prince read part, and Poins part. I have followed his correction. JOHNSON. 7 I will imitate the honourable Roman in brevity:] The old copy reads Romans, which Dr. Warburton very properly corrected, though he is wrong when he appropriates the character to M. Brutus, who affected great brevity of style. I suppose by the honourable Roman is intended Julius Cæsar, whose veni, vidi, vici, seems to be alluded to in the beginning of the letter, I commend me to thee, I commend thee, and I leave thee. The very words of Cæsar are afterwards quoted by Falstaff. HEATH. • That's to make him eat twenty of his words.] Why just twenty, when the letter contained above eight times twenty? We should read plenty; and in this word the joke, as slender as it is, consists. WARBURton. It is not surely uncommon to put a certain number for an uncertain one. Thus, in The Tempest, Miranda talks of playing "for a score of kingdoms." Busby, in King Richard II. observes, that" each substance of a grief has twenty shadows." In Julius Cæsar, Cæsar says that the slave's hand " did burn like twenty torches." In King Lear we meet with “ twenty silly ducking observants," and "not a nose among twenty," POINS. May the wench have no worse fortune! but I never said so. P. HEN. Well, thus we play the fools with the time; and the spirits of the wise sit in the clouds, and mock us.—Is your master here in London? BARD. Yes, my lord. P. HEN. Where sups he? doth the old boar feed in the old frank?9 BARD. At the old place, my lord; in Eastcheap. P. HEN. What company? PAGE. Ephesians,' my lord; of the old church. P. HEN. Sup any women with him? PAGE. None, my lord, but old mistress Quickly, and mistress Doll Tear-sheet. 2 P. HEN, What pagan may that be?3 Robert Green, the pamphleteer, indeed, obliged an apparitor to eat his citation, wax and all. In the play of Sir John Oldcastle, the Sumner is compelled to do the like; and says on the occasion,—“ I'll eat my word." Harpoole replies, "I meane you shall eat more than your own word, I'll make you eate all the words in the processe." STEEvens. 9 1 -frank?] Frank is sty. POPE. Ephesians,] Ephesian was a term in the cant of these times, of which I know not the precise notion: it was, perhaps, a toper. So, the Host, in The Merry Wives of Windsor: "It is thine host, thine Ephesian calls." JOHNSON. . -Doll Tear-sheet.] Shakspeare might have taken the hint for this name from the following passage in The Playe of Robyn Hoode, very proper to be played in Maye Games, bl. 1. no date: "She is a trul of trust, to serve a frier at his lust, STEEVENS. -3 What pagan may that be?] Pagan seems to have been a cant term, implying irregularity either of birth or manners. |