We could have been contented if Shakespeare had
not been 'commanded to show the knight in love'. Wits and
philosophers, for the most part, do not shine in that character; and
Sir John himself by no means comes off with flying colours. Many
people complain of the degradation and insults to which Don Quixote
is so frequently exposed in his various adventures. But what are the
unconscious indignities which he suffers, compared with the sensible
mortifications which Falstaff is made to bring upon himself? What
are the blows and buffetings which the Don receives from the staves
of the Yanguesian carriers or from Sancho Panza's more hard-hearted
hands, compared with the contamination of the buck-basket, the
disguise of the fat woman of Brentford, and the horns of Herne the
hunter, which are discovered on Sir John's head? In reading the
play, we indeed wish him well through all these discomfitures, but
it would have been as well if he had not got into them. Falstaff in
the MERRY WIVES OF WINDSOR is not the man he was in the two parts of
HENRY IV. His wit and eloquence have left him. Instead of making a
butt of others, he is made a butt of by them. Neither is there a
single particle of love in him to excuse his follies: he is merely a
designing, bare-faced knave, and an unsuccessful one.
The scene with Ford as Master Brook, and that with Simple, Slender's
man, who comes to ask after the Wise Woman, are almost the only ones
in which his old intellectual ascendancy appears.
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