54 L. A. Sherman 



top of marvel. We can in the main understand how Shakespeare 

 made Cleopatra, one of the notorious women of history, come out 

 from the company of Semiramis, Thais, Catherine II, and be- 

 come acceptable among reputable literary subjects. ' Sover- 

 eignty of nature,' quantum of personality, explains many riddles, 

 both in books and in real life. But Falstaff can lay claim to 

 no such exemption. Shakespeare would have had to be at pains, 

 under modern distinctions, to keep him from being entered in 

 the class of degenerates or defectives. He is as revolting to the 

 physical as to the spiritual eye, he cumbers the ground even of 

 sensuality. He robs on the king's highway, is in everything but 

 fact a murderer, is insensible to every sort of obligation. As if 

 all this were not enough, Shakespeare assails our sense of decency 

 and shows him to us with his harlot upon his knee. 



Quiller-Couch naively evades and even begs the question at the 

 beginning of his seventh section : 



In this short study I shall not indulge in any panegyric upon Falstaff : 

 and I ask the reader to credit this to a Roman fortitude, since they say 

 that all who write about Falstaff, loving him, write well. The perform- 

 ance I like best is Dr. Johnson's singular outburst beginning, " But Fal- 

 staff — unimitated, inimitable Falstaff — how shall I describe thee?" — be- 

 cause it breaks from the heart of a moralist who, being human, could not 

 help himself. 



Exactly. But why could not this stern moralist, intolerant evea 

 to common human frailties, ' help himself ' ? Talk of Shake- 

 speare's workmanship on this play that does not first or finally 

 answer that, seems to the writer beside the mark. Our author 

 discourses suggestively on the necessity of inventing ' protagonist ' 

 characters, such as this one, for plays or novels dealing with his- 

 toric figures. Also, he propounds a theory of the Interlude, to 

 which type, he would hold, the ' Second Part ' of Henry IV be- 

 longs. All this of course can count only as means to an end — an 

 end not in sight — namely, how Shakespeare has made Falstafif 

 inimitable, being a nature that one does not at all wish imitated or 

 for one's own part to imitate. Society — that association of men 

 and women that has for its object the standardization of human 

 values — is at work trying to be rid of Falstafifs, and to prevent so 

 far as possible more Falstafifs from being born. 



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