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Page 24
None of Shakespeare's plays are more read than the first and second
parts of Henry the fourth. Perhaps no authour 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 or two, sufficiently probable; the
incidents are 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 comick and tragick 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 is dissipated
by levity. In his idle hours he is rather loose than wicked, and
when the occasion forces out his latent qualities, he is great
without effort, and brave without tumult. The trifler is roused into
a hero, and the hero again reposes in the trifler. This character
is great, original, and just. Piercy is a rugged soldier, cholerick,
and quarrelsome, and has only the soldier's virtues, generosity
and courage.
But Falstaff unimitated, unimitable Falstaff, how shall I describe
thee? Thou compound of sense and vice; of sense which may be
admired but not esteemed, of vice which may be despised, but hardly
detested. Falstaff is a character loaded with faults, and with
those faults which naturally produce contempt. He is a thief, and a
glutton, a coward, and a boaster, always ready to cheat the weak,
and prey upon the poor; to terrify the timorous and insult the
defenceless. At once obsequious and malignant, he satirises in their
absence those whom he lives by flattering. He is familiar with the
prince only as an agent of vice, but of this familiarity he is so
proud as not only to be supercilious and haughty with common men,
but to think his interest of importance to the duke of Lancaster.
Yet the man thus corrupt, thus despicable, makes himself necessary
to the prince that despises him, by the most pleasing of all
qualities, perpetual gaiety, by an unfailing power of exciting
laughter, which is the more freely indulged, as his wit is not of
the splendid or ambitious kind, but consists in easy escapes and
sallies of levity, which make sport but raise no envy. It must be
observed that he is stained with no enormous or sanguinary crimes,
so that his licentiousness is not so offensive but that it may be
borne for his mirth.
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 Henry seduced by Falstaff.
HENRY V
ACT. II. SCENE iv. (II. iii. 27-8.)
Cold as any stone. Such is the end of Falstaff,
from whom Shakespeare had promised us in his epilogue to Henry
IV. that we should receive more entertainment. It happened to
Shakespeare as to other writers, to have his imagination crowded
with a tumultuary confusion of images, which, while they were yet
unsorted and unexamined, seemed sufficient to furnish a long train
of incidents, and a new variety of merriment, but which, when he
was to produce them to view, shrunk suddenly from him, or could
not be accommodated to his general design. That he once designed
to have brought Falstaff on the scene again, we know from himself;
but whether he could contrive no train of adventures suitable
to his character, or could match him with no companions likely to
quicken his humour, or could open no new vein of pleasantry, and
was afraid to continue the same strain lest it should not find the
same reception, he has here for ever discarded him, and made haste
to dispatch him, perhaps for the same reason for which Addison
killed Sir Roger, that no other hand might attempt to exhibit him.
Let meaner authours learn from this example, that it is dangerous
to sell the bear which is yet not hunted, to promise to the publick
what they have not written.
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