To-day might I, hanging on Hotspur's neck, North. Beshrew 5 your heart, Fair daughter! you do draw my spirits from me, With new lamenting ancient oversights. But I must go, and meet with danger there; And find me worse provided. Lady N. O, fly to Scotland, Till that the nobles, and the armed commons, Have of their puissance made a little taste. Lady P. If they get ground and vantage of the king, Then join you with them, like a rib of steel, North. Come, come, go in with me: 'tis with my As with the tide swell'd up unto its height, 5 Ill-betide. 6 Alluding to the plant rosemary, so called because it was the symbol of remembrance, and therefore used at weddings and funerals. Thus Ophelia says: 'There's rosemary, that's for remembrance.' And Perdita gives it the same attribute. SCENE IV. London. A Room in the Boar's Head Tavern in Eastcheap. Enter Two Drawers. 1 Draw. What the devil hast thou brought there? apple-Johns? thou know'st, Sir John cannot endure an apple-John 1. 2 Draw. Mass, thou sayest true: The prince once set a dish of apple-Johns before him, and told him, there were five more Sir Johns: and, putting off his hat, said, I will now take my leave of these six dry, round, old, withered knights. It angered him to the heart; but he hath forgot that. 1 Draw. Why then, cover, and set them down: And see if thou canst find out Sneak's noise2; mistress Tear-sheet would fain hear some musick. Despatch: The room where they supped is too hot; they'll come in straight. 2 Draw. Sirrah, here will be the prince, and master Poins anon: and they will put on two of our jerkins, 1 This apple, which was said to keep two years, is well described by Philips : 'Nor John-apple, whose wither'd rind entrench'd By many a furrow, aptly represents Decrepid age.' Falstaff has already said of himself, ' I am withered like an old apple-John.' In Ben Jonson's Bartholomew Fair, where Littlewit encourages Quarlous to kiss his wife, he says, ' She may call you an apple-John if you use this.' Acti. Sc. 3. Here apple-John evidently means a pimp, or pander, then called an apple-squire. 2 A noise, or a consort, was used for a set or company of musicians. Sneak was a street minstrel, and therefore the drawer goes out to listen for his band. Falstaff addresses them as a company in another scene. In the old play of King Henry IV. There came the young prince, and two or three more of his companions, and called for wine good store, and then sent for a noyse of musitians,' &c. Vide Macbeth, Act iv. Sc. i. and aprons; and Sir John must not know of it: Bardolph hath brought word. 1 Draw. By the mass, here will be old utis3: It will be an excellent stratagem. 2 Draw. I'll see if I can find out Sneak. [Exit. Enter Hostess and DOLL TEAR-SHEET. Host. I'faith, sweet heart, methinks now you are in an excellent good temperality: your pulsidge beats as extraordinarily as heart would desire; and your colour, I warrant you, is as red as any rose; But, i'faith, you have drunk too much canaries; and that's a marvellous searching wine, and it perfumes the blood ere one can say,-What's this? How do you now? Dol. Better than I was. Hem. Host. Why, that's well said; a good heart's worth gold. Look, here comes Sir John. Enter FALSTAFF, singing. Fal. When Arthur first in court.-Empty the jordan.-And was a worthy king: [Exit Drawer.] How now, mistress Doll? 3 Old utis is old festivity, or merry doings. Utis, or utas, being the eighth day after any festival; any day between the feast and the eighth day was said to be within the utas. So Sir Thomas More, in the last letter he wrote to his daughter the day before his execution, desires to die on the morrow,' For it is Saint Thomas' even, and the utas of Saint Peter.' In A Contention between Liberality and Prodigality, 1602 : Then, if you please, with some roysting harmony Utis is said to be still used for what is called a row, a scene of noisy turbulence, in Warwickshire. Old was a common augmentative for abundant, or as of old time; it can hardly yet be considered as obsolete. So in The Merry Wives of Windsor :'Here will be an old abusing of God's patience and the king's English.' See Macbeth, Act ii. Sc. 3; and Taming of the Shrew, Act iii. Sc. 2, p. 348. 4 The entire ballad is in the first volume of Dr. Percy's Reliques of Antient Poetry. Host. Sick of a calm: yea, good sooth. Fal. So is all her sect5; an they be once in a calm, they are sick. Dol. You muddy rascal, is that all the comfort you give me? Fal. You make fat rascals, mistress Doll. Dol. I make them! gluttony and diseases make them; I make them not. Fal. If the cook help to make the gluttony, you help to make the diseases, Doll: we catch of you, Doll, we catch of you; grant that, my poor virtue, grant that. Dol. Ay, marry; our chains, and our jewels. Fal. Your brooches, pearls, and owches7;—for to serve bravely, is to come halting off, you know: To come off the breach with his pike bent bravely, and to surgery bravely; to venture upon the charged chambers bravely: Dol. Hang yourself, you muddy conger, hang yourself! Host. By my troth, this is the old fashion; you two never meet, but you fall to some discord: you are both, in good truth, as rheumatick9 as two dry 5 Steevens is right in his assertion that sect and sex were anciently synonymous; the instances of the use of the one for the other are too numerous for it to have been a mere vulgar corruption. 6 Falstaff alludes to a phrase of the forest. Rascall (says Puttenham, p. 150) is properly the hunting term given to young deer leane and out of season, and not to people.' 7 Falstaff gives these splendid names to something very different from gems and ornaments, as we still use carbuncle. The passage, as Johnson observed, is not deserving of further illustration. 8 To understand this quibble it is necessary to remember that a chamber signifies not only an apartment, but a small piece of ordnance. 9 Mrs. Quickly means splenetic. It should be remarked, however, that rheum seems to have been a cant word for spleen. In toasts; you cannot one bear with another's confirmities. What the good-year! one must bear, and that must be you: [To DOLL.] you are the weaker vessel, as they say, the emptier vessel. Dol. Can a weak empty vessel bear such a huge full hogshead? there's a whole merchant's venture of Bourdeaux stuff in him: you have not seen a hulk better stuffed in the hold.-Come, I'll be friends with thee, Jack: thou art going to the wars; and whether I shall ever see thee again, or no, there is nobody cares. Re-enter Drawer. Draw. Sir, ancient 10 Pistol's below, and would speak with you. Dol. Hang him, swaggering rascal! let him not come hither it is the foul-mouth'dst rogue in Eng land. Host. If he swagger, let him not come here; no, by my faith; I must live amongst my neighbours; I'll no swaggerers: I am in good name and fame with the very best:-Shut the door;-there comes no swaggerers here: I have not lived all this while to have swaggering now:-shut the door, I pray you. Fal. Dost thou hear, hostess?— Host. 'Pray you, pacify yourself, Sir John; there comes no swaggerers here. Every Man in his Humour, Cob says, Nay, I have my rheum, and I can be angry as well as another.' To which Cash replies, Thy rheum, Cob! thy humour, thy humour; thou mistak'st.' But Daniel, in the Queen's Arcadia, Act iii. Sc. 1, uses it also for spleen : 'But now, in faith, I have found out a trick That will perpetually so feed their rheums.' 10 That is, he that carrieth the colours to a company of foot soldiers, an ensign bearer.'-PHILIPS. Falstaff was captain, Peto lieutenant, and Pistol ensign. I have met with the word in old MSS. written ansine. |