They
have words at will and a flow of wit, like a flow of animal spirits.
The difference between Falconbridge and the others is that he is a
soldier, and brings his wit to bear upon action, is courageous with
his sword as well as tongue, and stimulates his gallantry by his
jokes, his enemies feeling the sharpness of his blows and the sting
of his sarcasms at the same time. Among his happiest sallies are his
descanting on the composition of his own person, his invective
against 'commodity, tickling commodity', and his expression of
contempt for the Archduke of Austria, who had killed his father,
which begins in jest but ends in serious earnest. His conduct at the
siege of Angiers shows that his resources were not confined to
verbal retorts.--The same exposure of the policy of courts and
camps, of kings, nobles, priests, and cardinals, takes place here as
in the other plays we have gone through, and we shall not go into a
disgusting repetition.
This, like the other plays taken from English history, is written in
a remarkably smooth and flowing style, very different from some of
the tragedies, MACBETH, for instance. The passages consist of a
series of single lines, not running into one another. This
peculiarity in the versification, which is most common in the three
parts of HENRY VI, has been assigned as a reason why those plays
were not written by Shakespeare.
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