Sir, here comes the nobleman that committed the prince for striking him about Bardolf.

-Page

King Henry The Fourth Part II            Act I scene ii line 59

This is the beginning of the play, and this scene is dominated by, you guessed it, Falstaff. I’m not quite sure what the reference regarding ‘the prince for striking him about Bardolf’ is, but that might be irrelevant. At issue is the fact that Falstaff does not want to deal with this nobleman so that he tells his page ‘Wait close; I will not see him’. First he's going to pretend not to see him. And then a few lines further down he tells the page ‘Boy, tell him I am deaf’. Now he will pretend not to hear him. Anything to avoid dealing with the nobleman because Falstaff is certain that the fellow is going to try to hold him responsible for something, which of course he is. And certainly Falstaff does not want to be held accountable for anything. This is the guy, Falstaff, that is supposedly Shakespeare’s greatest creation. I still don’t get it.

First, my own little Falstaff is trying to pretend that he doesn't see or hear me.

 

 

Then, well I'm not even sure he's doing now. Very Falstaffian indeed!

O, there be players that I have seen play, and heard others praise, and that highly, not to speak it profanely, that, neither having the accent of Christians nor the gait of Cristian, pagan, nor man, have so strutted and bellowed that I have thought some of nature’s journeymen had made men and not made them well, they imitated humanity so abominably.

-Hamlet

Hamlet                                    Act III scene ii line 34

This is the last sentence of the ‘Speak the speech’ speech that Hamlet gives to the players. It’s a couple of paragraphs long where he’s telling the players, who are going to be putting on a play for the court, how to act. In this last sentence, above, he’s going on about some of the bad actors that he has seen. Strutted and bellowed! Those are good words.

So I guess there are a lot of different ways to go about discussing the ‘Speak the speech’ speech, or even just this one sentence in the last paragraph. But I have work to do right now, so I’m going to leave it to you. It’s a good sentence, albeit a bit long. So do what you will with it. Strut and bellow if you like!

 

This is WP's one hand performance at the roman amphitheater in Merida, Spain. It's wonderfully understated, don't you agree? And not one bit of strutting or bellowing.

Heaven be my witness you do, if you suspect me in any dishonesty.

-Mistress Ford

The Merry Wives Of Windsor             Act IV scene ii line 123

I’ve been trying to do some reading in my Shakespeare criticism books in the past few days to see if I can figure out what is so great about this Falstaff character. So it's fortuitous that I randomly picked a line from Merry Wives today because, after all, this is a play that was specifically written as a vehicle for Falstaff. But I believe I managed to pick a scene without Sir John in it. Oh well, I think I’ll talk about my search anyway.

Since it is Harold Bloom more than any of them who seems to think that Sir John Falstaff is such an incredibly important character, I started with his book and I’ve got to tell you that Professor Bloom is either on a higher level of thought processing, or just bad at explicating ideas (I’ve got to believe it’s the former), because I have a very hard time following his train of thought. So I didn’t read his whole chapter on Henry IV. Instead I switched over to the other Harold, Harold Goddard. And he’s a little easier to read. Not funny papers easy, mind you, but definitely easier than Harold number one. But I don’t have any conclusions yet. I haven’t gotten all of the way through Goddard yet, so I’ve got more reading to do. And of course I still have Marjorie Garber left, and there might be some stuff in the Asimov book. And I have some other books that have Henry IV analysis. So we’re not done yet. Bottom line, I’ll have to get back to you on this Falstaff question, but sooner or later I should be able to tell you what makes Falstaff such a great character. And I’m going to tell you in language you can understand, not Bloomese.

So, in the meantime should we spend a few minutes on Mistress Ford’s line? Nah. 

 These are the four books that I rely on for a lot of my info. Each one of them has a chapter for each of the plays, and each one of them has a slightly different approach to talking about the plays. I have a lot of other books, but none that are as comprehensive as these four.