United States or Kazakhstan ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Minds cruder than the average see only a jumble of happenings in the life they look upon, and group them, if at all, by propinquity in time, rather than by any deeper law of relation. Such a mind had Dame Quickly, the loquacious Hostess in Shakespeare's "Henry IV." Consider the famous speech in which she accuses Falstaff of breach of promise to marry her:
But as soon as I think about either I believe or disbelieve, and equally whether I judge the object to be a thought or to be a 'real fact, whether I say that I could have seen Lafayette, or that I could not have seen Falstaff. It is not a question between reality or unreality, but between two classes of reality. A dream is a real dream, just as a man is a real man.
But the great masters of the human heart invariably remain true to nature: not merely true to a selected feature, but to the natural form as a whole. Falstaff, in his wildest humour, speaks and acts as such a man really might speak and act. He has no catch-phrase on which he harps, as if he were a talking-machine wound up to emit a dozen sounds.
The title was "Upside Down; or, Philosophy in Petticoats" a comedy. Of this play Cooper's friend Hackett, the American Falstaff of that day, wrote him: "I was at Burton's its first night and saw the whole of the play. The first act told well; the second, pretty well, but grew heavy; the third dragged until the conclusion surprised the attention into warm applause."
If Shakspeare had left personal revelations, how we should value them; if, indeed, he has not in some sense left them if the tragedies and comedies are not personal revelations altogether the multiform nature of the man rushing towards the sun at once in Falstaff, Hamlet, and Romeo. But calling Montaigne an egotist does not go a great way to decipher him.
The first exploit of the page is an encounter with a fraudulent innkeeper, which is described with great spirit, and M. Jusserand has ingeniously surmised that Shakespeare, after reading these pages, determined to fuse the two characters, mine host and the waggish picaroon, into the single immortal figure of Falstaff.
He was exiled to a point three hundred miles from Paris and forbidden to come nearer on penalty, like unto the injunction issued by Prince Henry against the blameless Falstaff. Rumor said that the father had something to do with the matter. But the exile was not for long. The young poet wrote a most adulatory composition to the Regent, setting forth his innocence.
No! but, trouble for trouble, I had rather it came to-morrow than a month hence. COME, I know it will; and, as your country folks say, better soon than syne it will never find me younger and as for hanging, as Sir John Falstaff says, I can become a gallows as well as another. You know the end of the old ballad;
A vaporish place, too delicate and subtle for such fun-loving, corpulent specimens of the Creator's wisdom as old Jack Falstaff. O rare Jack Falstaff! He was a child of nature, and to my thinking, his homely phrases displayed more intuitive knowledge of the laws of nature than the finest transcendental imaginings ever discovered.
The party to whom I was thus indebted seemed a very jovial-looking personage, and appeared to be well known to all hands, and indeed the life of the party, for, like Falstaff, he was not only witty in himself, but the cause of wit in others.
Word Of The Day