SOURCE: Champion, Larry S. “The Evolution of Mistress Quickly.” Papers on English Language and Literature 1, no. 2 (spring 1965): 99-108.

[In the following essay, Champion details the transformation of Nell Quickly in the Henry plays from a mere sketch to “a full-sized portrait.”]

One frequently encounters remarks extolling the fullness of Shakespeare's description of London low life in the comic scenes of 1, 2 Henry IV. Mark Van Doren writes, for instance, that nothing Shakespeare wrote “is more crowded with life or happier in its imitation of human talk. … History is enlarged to make room for taverns and trollops and potations of sack, and the heroic drama is modified by gigantic mockery, by the roared voice of truth.”¹ Other commentators have noted a “growing mastery of realistic delineation”² in the dramatist's “vivid transcripts of contemporary life”;³ the comic crew “move about in an English setting and provide an atmosphere of tavern life that has been as pervasive as Shakespeare's legacy of historical interpretation.”⁴

Yet, frequently, the critic has been unable to circumnavigate “that bolting hutch of beastliness,” that “huge bombard of sack.” And the result is an astounding library of Falstaffian literature.⁵ This discussion purports neither to challenge Falstaff's importance in Shakespeare's playworld nor to presume to attempt to add anything new about him, but rather to assert that Falstaff is only one of the characters, albeit the largest, important to the dramatist in creating his comic milieu. Doll Tearsheet, Justice Shallow, Ned Poins, Bardolph, Nell Quickly—each is important, at least as a device for exposing Falstaff's comic dexterity. My particular object is to demonstrate that the hostess should not be written off lightly.

To be sure, this loquacious wench has always fascinated the critics. J. B. Priestley, for instance, lauds her as “the mother of a great line of comic Cockney landladies, charwomen, and the like, in her wandering but vehement speech, her oscillation between a native delight in mirth and easy living and an equally innate desire for respectability and a good name in the parish. … There is not a moment when the Hostess is not alive, not a sentence of her speech that does not ring true to nature.”⁶ To Brander Matthews she is a veritable sister to Juliet's nurse, alive with the same coarse humor;⁷ to Professor E. M. W. Tillyard she is a stupid, good-natured woman, whose presence “reassures us that civil war will yield, as the play's main theme, to England.”⁸ Most frequently, she is cited as important to the revelation of the ugly side of Falstaff, who, with his “cruel depredations on the woman whose affection he has secured,”⁹ reflects “the more loathsome aspects of civil disorder and mismanagement.”¹⁰ These critics, however, have been absorbed in other issues or characters of the drama, with the result that their comments concerning the hostess are random and relatively superficial. Certainly Nell Quickly is no Falstaff; she is no more than what Shakespeare would have her—a minor character of folk merriment—but one observes through the nature and the extent of her growth in importance in 1, 2 Henry IV and Henry V something of Shakespeare's solution to the problem of maintaining the vitality of his comic crew even while Falstaff must be darkened and ultimately banished.

The barest of sketches can reveal the extent of Nell's literal growth as a character in the three plays. She appears in 1 Henry IV simply as the “hostess of the tavern in Eastcheape.” In III, iii, there are numerous references to her honest husband and the respectability of their inn. In 2 Henry IV, now “Mistress Quickly,” she claims to be a “poor widow of Eastcheape” and asserts that Falstaff, whom she has known for twenty-nine years, has promised to marry her. Here her circle of acquaintances has widened to include the prostitute Doll Tearsheet, and together they entertain Falstaff before he sets out for Gloucestershire. In V, iv, she is carried off to prison with Doll, vaguely on the charge that the brothels are being torn down with the advent of the reign of the new Henry, specifically on the charge that “the man is dead that you and Pistol beat amongst you.” In Henry V “Nell” Quickly has married Pistol, although Nym was trothplight to her, a union in itself curious since Dame Quickly in 2 Henry IV could not abide the sight of Pistol and implored Falstaff to drive him from her inn.

Such development is the more striking when one considers that the hostess, sketchily drafted in 1 Henry IV as a comic character in the circle of Falstaff, is essentially a composite portrait created from suggestions in The Famous Victories of Henry V. Three women in the comic scenes (two by description, one by appearance) must have furnished Shakespeare's inspiration for the garrulous proprietress. First to mind when Hal and Ned are considering where they will celebrate following their successful robbery of the king's receivers is the ale house and “our old hostes at Feversham” (ll. 111-12),¹¹ but Henry suggests the tavern in Eastcheap, where there is “a pretie wench that can talke well” (l. 120). Later the shrewish wife of John Cobler engages in a wit combat with Dericke, a fat rover who parasitically attaches himself to Cobler's household. Dericke, in many ways similar to Falstaff,¹² brands her “a stinking whore,” “a verie knave” for serving him a dish of roots, though she implies he has offered no payment to merit being otherwise served. When called with Cobler to the wars against France, Dericke struts out with her potlid for a shield, but she overtakes him and, in the best of the tradition of dramatic termagants, “raps him about the pate.” Flustered, the braggadocio cries, “And I had my dagger here I would worie you al to peeces, that I would.”¹³ With his threats to “clap the law on [her] back,” Dericke reminds one of the hostess in her vain attempts in Henry IV to have the law on Falstaff for refusal to pay his tavern reckonings.

There is, then, no single character from the old play which provides a clear prototype for Nell, but, admitting the critics' case that Shakespeare is indebted in matters of comic incident and specific characteristics of Falstaff, Ned Poins, and Hal,¹⁴ one must conclude the composite female personality which emerges to be more than sheer coincidence. Shakespeare draws freely for Dame Quickly, the “old hostes,” not at Feversham but at “the olde taverne in Eastcheape,” certainly a “wench that can talke well.” And, along with her loquacity, there is a verbal bantering and contentiousness with Falstaff, who like Dericke plays the parasite and makes no proffer of payment for services rendered.

In 1 Henry IV the hostess's role is primarily to illumine certain humorous aspects of Falstaff. Before she appears, Hal tell us that she is “a sweet wench of the tavern” at which he has often paid Falstaff's reckonings (I, ii, 45 ff.). As the robbery and counter-robbery at Gadshill are planned, Falstaff, Hal, and Poins, just as in The Famous Victories, plan to reconvene at the Eastcheap tavern. The hostess actually appears in only two scenes. In II, iv, she twice announces the arrival at the inn of persons from the serious world of history outside—first of Sir John Bracy with news of the rebellion against Henry IV and, later, of the sheriff and the watch who are come “to search the house” concerning the Gadshill robbery. Evidently a fluttering and excitable soul (hence the pertinence of Falstaff's later calling her “Dame Partlet, the hen”), she rushes in, distractedly wailing “O, Jesu! my Lord, my Lord!” Part of the comic effect is gained by the agitated flurry and the way in which she breaks in upon moments of high comedy. Further, throughout the scene in which Hal and Falstaff parodically exchange the role of father and prodigal son, she augments Falstaff's wit by her actions more than by her conversation. As Falstaff assumes the “chair of state” and speaks with passion “in King Cambyses' vein,” the hostess is unable to restrain her laughter and tears of merriment (“O Jesu, this is excellent sport, i' faith! … O, the father, how he holds his countenance! … O, Jesu, he doth it as like one of these harlotry players as ever I see!”). Falstaff, equal to the occasion, incorporates her tears into his parody of Henry IV's parental grief by elevating her to the queenship. “Weep not, sweet queen; for trickling tears are vain. / For God's sake, lords, convey my tristful queen; / for tears do stop the floodgates of her eyes” (ll. 426 ff.). As the only character in the tavern crowd to interrupt the lengthy dialogue between Falstaff and Hal, her role is a small one, but the scene on the boards is definitely funnier for her presence.

The manner in which she plays the straight man to Falstaff is more obvious in III, iii, where, incidentally, Hal first calls her Mistress Quickly and twice alludes to her husband. On numerous occasions she furnishes a line which triggers Falstaff's witty retort. For example, called to account for his tavern reckonings, Falstaff claims his pockets have been picked, a charge to which the hostess reacts with indignation. “Why, Sir John, what do you think, Sir John? Do you think I keep thieves in my house? I have searched, I have inquired, so has my husband. … The tithe of a hair was never lost in my house before.” Falstaff's ready wit immediately turns upon the last line: “Ye lie, hostess: Bardolph was shaved and lost many a hair.” To her later comment that, unless she has reported correctly his slanderous remarks concerning the prince, “there's neither faith, truth, nor womanhood in me,” Falstaff retorts: “There's no more faith in thee than in a stewed prune; nor no more truth in thee than in a drawn fox; and for womanhood, Maid Marian may be the deputy's wife of the ward to thee.” Such verbal parrying, with Mistress Quickly inevitably on the short end, is perhaps most effectively illustrated in Falstaff's charge that she is an otter—neither fish nor flesh—and that a man knows not where to have her. Her feeble reply that indeed “thou or or any man knows where to have me” only adds to the revelry.

In 1 Henry IV, then, Mistress Quickly is little more than the amorphous sketch suggested in The Famous Victories. As either the butt or the recounter of Falstaff's badgering, she draws her vitality from “the cause that is wit in other men,” who is at the height of his comic fortunes. Falstaff, however, is simply not as funny in 2 Henry IV. Here he is seen less in the company of Hal, and much of his conversation, especially with the Lord Chief-Justice, is developed around his moral degeneracy. His misuse of the King's press (something merely reported of him in Part I, actually shown in Part II) and his covetous reaction to news of the death of Henry IV seriously mar his comic image. Similarly, his contentious squabbling with Hostess Quickly reflects a basic change in the nature of the comic matter of the play. Whereas in 1 Henry IV Falstaff is, practical jokes to the contrary, a harmonious part of the bawdy comic crew which is pitted against the respectable characters, here (in his association with Pistol, with Shallow, above all with Mistress Quickly) Falstaff clearly reveals the potential threat to Hal and to the crown through his willingness to manipulate friend and cohort to his own avaricious schemes. While Falstaff's gaiety wanes, however, that of Mistress Quickly increases. To be sure, she is still humorous in relation to Sir John, as the garrulous gossip and the butt of his clever and evasive retorts. But more important, she is independently comic—a dizzard of high merriment apart from Falstaff. And, as such, her comic function (in combination with the newly created roles of Pistol, Doll, Shallow, Silence, Fang, and Snare) is to provide Shakespeare a means by which he might maintain the vitality of the comic subplot even in the face of Falstaff's decline. Her growth in comic importance is effected through her new status as a widow with aspirations both for Falstaff and social prestige and through her newfound linguistic dexterity as a bungler of language who commits malapropisms and doubles entendres with equal aplomb.

The first mention of Mistress Quickly in Part II signals the important comic alteration in her relationship with Falstaff. As Falstaff prepares to depart for the wars to fight under Prince John, he commands his page to bear a letter to the hostess, here fondly referred to as Ursula (little she-bear), “whom I have weekly sworn to marry since I perceived the first white hair on my chin” (I, ii, 269-70). Later, stressing that she is “a poor widow of Eastcheape” arresting Falstaff not for “sum” (“some”) but for “all,” she avers that her due is, “if thou wert an honest man, thyself and the money too.” With a wonderful flow of chatter which gushes out in a continuous and illogical torrent, she vacillates between infatuation and exasperation with the “huge bombard of sack” who continually abuses her.

Thou didst swear to me upon a parcel-gilt goblet, sitting in my dolphin-chamber, at the round table, by a sea-coal fire, upon Wednesday in Wheeson week, when the prince broke thy head for liking his father to a singing-man of Windsor, thou didst swear to make me then, as I was washing thy wound, to marry me and make me my lady thy wife. Canst thou deny it? Did not Goodwife Keech, the butcher's wife, come in then and call me Gossip Quickly? Coming in to borrow a mess of vinegar; telling us she had a good dish of prawns; whereby thou didst desire to eat some; whereby I told thee they were ill for a green wound? And didst thou not, when she was gone downstairs, desire me to be no more so familiarity with such poor people; saying that ere long they should call me madam?

(II, i, 93-109)

Indeed her social sights are set high—the wife of a knight, the title of a madam—though obviously the social gain to be realized as the wife of Sir John is humorously suspect. Nonetheless, she is vociferous in her denunciation of the swaggering Pistol, who seeks entrance at her inn:

I must live among my neighbors; I'll no swaggerers: I am in good name and fame with the very best. … I'll foreswear keeping house, afore I'll be in these tirrits and frights.

(II, iv, 80-82, 219-21)

Yet at the very moment she defends her decency and integrity so adamantly, she is playing the common procuress in encouraging, arranging, and overseeing the assignation in her tavern between Falstaff and Doll Tearsheet. And her own virtue is far from spotless; in another scene the Lord Chief-Justice berates Falstaff because he has “practised upon the easy-yielding spirit of this woman, and made her serve your uses both in purse and in person” (II, i, 125-27). While there is nothing funny in the desire for a good name and a social position per se, the comic gap between appearance and reality—culpable venality and hypocritical pretension—has always been grist for the mill of comedy.

Mistress Quickly's numerous doubles entendres effectively illustrate this comic gap. When Snare warns Fang to beware of Falstaff's stab, the hostess retorts: “Alas the day! take heed of him; he stabbed me in mine own house, and that most beastly; in good faith, 'a cares not what mischief he does, if his weapon be out: he will foin like any devil; he will spare neither man, woman, nor child” (II, i, 14-19). In describing the extent of Falstaff's indebtedness to her, she blurts: “A hundred mark is a long one for a poor lone woman to bear; and I have borne, and borne, and borne, and have been fubbed off, and fubbed off, and fubbed off, from this day to that day, that it is a shame to be thought on. There is no honesty in such dealing; unless a woman should be made an ass and a beast to bear every knave's wrong” (II, i, 34-41). She swears, unless Falstaff pay her, to “ride thee o'nights like the mare”; to which Falstaff's reply determines the context: “I think I am as like to ride the mare, if I have any vantage of ground to get up” (II, i, 82-85). In a later scene, to Falstaff's charge that Pistol discharge himself, Mistress Quickly naïvely exclaims: “No, good Captain Pistol; not here, sweet Captain” (II, iv, 149-50). Nor has the laughter subsided before she addresses Pistol as “Good Captain Peesel” (“pizzle”) and fears for Falstaff that he is “hurt i' the groin. Methought a' made a shrewd thrust at your belly” (II, iv, 174, 227-28).

Undoubtedly her leading comic quality is her linguistic ineptness resulting in flagrant and continual malapropisms, several of which occur in passages cited above (familiarity-familiar, debuty-deputy, tirrits-terrors, Peesel-Pistol). No one, not even Dogberry and Verges, is in this respect the equal of Mistress Quickly, whose speech is riddled with such error. For example, there occur the following in II, i: infinitive-infinite; continuantly-continuously; indited-invited; Lubber's Head-Leopard's Head; Lumbert-Lombard; exion-action; honey-suckle - homicidal; honey-seed - homicide; man-queller - man killer. And there are others in II, iv: temperality-temper; pulsidge-pulse; calm-qualm; confirmities-infirmities; beseek-beseech; aggravate-moderate. While a bare listing can do little to suggest the humor of such blunders in context, it at least serves to illustrate a significant comic development in the hostess of 2 Henry IV.

In the final act Mistress Quickly, with Doll, is dragged off to jail as an accomplice of Pistol in a case of manslaughter. At this point Shakespeare meaningfully relates Nell's action to the serious matter; for the laws of England which Falstaff thought to be at his command are seen in active operation against his old associates. His later boast, “I will deliver her,” immediately precedes his own arrest and dispatch to prison. Surely there is humor in Nell's reliance on Falstaff for rescue and Doll's unsuccessful attempts to escape imprisonment by claiming pregnancy with the help of “a dozen of cushions.” But there is thematic aptness in the hostess' flustered quip, “O God, that right should thus overcome might.”

Nell Quickly in Henry V is present, of course, in only two scenes of the first two acts, before the action shifts permanently to France. Here, she retains her comic functions from 2 Henry IV. Caught between two linguistic fantastics—Nym (her trothplight), who uses words in completely contrary senses, and Pistol (her husband), who spews extravagant epithets, tags from current plays, and scraps of foreign languagees—she is quite their equal in verbosity. Nor is she any more adept at correctly using the English language. Atwitter at the possibility of conflict between Nym and Pistol, she blurts, “We shall see wilful adultery and murder committed” (II, i, 39-40), just as she jumbles terms later in describing Falstaff's illness as a “quotidian tertian” (II, i, 124) or misuses Arthur's bosom for Abraham's bosom, “christom” for chrisom, and “carnation” for incarnate. And Nell, now at the nadir of her social fortunes, feels her social aspirations all the more poignantly. Pistol, indeed a comedown for her after her days with Sir John, scorns being called “mine host” and avers that his Nell shall no longer keep lodgers. The hostess, swearing now politely by the Virgin, reiterates: “No, by my troth, not long; for we cannot lodge and board a dozen or fourteen gentlewomen that live honestly by the prick of their needles, but it will be thought we keep a bawdy house straight” (II, i, 34-38). Nevertheless, as Pistol departs for France, he bids her ply her work diligently and insist on “pitch and pay” (cash payment). Her husband, who affectionately calls Nell his “lambkins” and his “quondom Quickly” (his “former quick-lie”),¹⁵ scornfully abuses her former associate Doll Tearsheet as “the lazar kite of Cressid's kind,” one not fit for her company.

As for the Hostess Quickly of The Merry Wives of Windsor, she is in name only the garrulous wench of Eastcheap. With the lone exception of “fartuous” for virtuous, she is no longer a malapropian character, and her loquacity is a poor comic third to the wretched mauling of the language by the Welsh parson and the French physician, both of whom constantly spout malapropisms and doubles entendres. Moreover, Ford's flustered and harried attempts to net Falstaff in his own jealous trap are infinitely more humorous than any such characteristics evidenced in Mistress Quickly. Nor does she any longer ludicrously claim, as in the histories, a social position which her actions belie; instead she is a reasonably respectable housekeeper for a French physician, Dr. Caius. In this capacity her importance to the structure of the comedy is admittedly paramount. Motivated now solely by the urge for monetary profit, she serves as the wives' accomplice in their multiple strategems against Falstaff as well as managing a thriving personal enterprise at the expense of Ann Page's three suitors. While the epitome of cleverness, she is comic essentially as a manipulator; no longer the butt of Falstaff's jokes, the pattern now completely reversed, she has lost much of the quality for which she is memorable as Falstaff's crony and the hostess of the tavern at Eastcheap. The comedy of the histories is grounded in character—the pomposity and the wittiness of Falstaff, the marvelous naïveté of Mistress Quickly, the bumbling sentimentality of Justice Shallow, the boisterous and nonsensical exclamations of Pistol. On the other hand, the comedy of The Merry Wives of Windsor is grounded in plot or narrative. The Plautine intrigues are clever and ingenious, the resultant laughter derisive. Instead of laughing with the braggadocio and his gullible wench, we laugh at his making a fool of himself at every turn, and we chuckle at the shrewd and calculating Mistress Quickly who manipulates everything to her own profit.

Thus, it may be said in conclusion that the evolving role of Mistress Quickly, most clearly seen in the Henry IV plays, reveals both the increasing importance of her comic function to the artistic purposes of the individual play and also Shakespeare's general amplification of her comic personality. Falstaff must ultimately fall from his throne of misrule; the development of Mistress Quickly from a sketch to a full-sized portrait best reflects the dramatist's method of enlarging the comic scope of the minor characters to allay the loss of the giant of wits and to maintain a meaningful interrelationship between the comic and serious scenes. In The Merry Wives of Windsor the dupe has become the duper, the hub of the complex comic machinery of plot and counterplot. As for the personality of Nell Quickly, John Palmer has suggested that sympathy, not satire, is the inspiration of Shakespeare's comedy. “The appeal of his comic characters, even as we laugh at them, is to the touch of human nature which makes the whole world kin.”¹⁶ As the character emerges throughout the trilogy of histories, her earthy affability and blundering naïveté typify Shakespeare's ability to touch even his minor characters with the magic of life. Regretfully, the Mistress Quickly of The Merry Wives of Windsor signals, as effectively as Falstaff, a new modus operandi in a world in which she well-nigh perishes in the bourgeois confines of Windsor Park.

Notes

1. Shakespeare (New York, 1939), p. 97.

2. H. B. Charlton, Shakespearian Comedy (London, 1938), p. 197.

3. E. K. Chambers, Shakespeare: A Survey (London, 1925), p. 118.

4. Louis B. Wright, ed., Henry IV, Part I (New York, 1961), p. xvi.

5. Hal's boon companion in fun has been analyzed as the Elizabethan counterpart of the miles gloriosus of Latin comedy, the devil of the miracle plays, the vice of the moralities; he has been traced with little real success to the historical figures of Oldcastle and Fastolfe, branded a coward, and exalted à la Morgann as courageous. A useful summary of the varied evaluations is provided by A. R. Humphreys in the Arden edition of The First Part of Henry IV (London, 1960), pp. xxxix-xliv See also E. E. Stoll, Shakespeare Studies (New York, 1942), pp. 404 ff; and J. I. M. Stewart, Character and Motive in Shakespeare (London, 1949), pp. 111-28.

6. The English Comic Character (New York, 1925), pp. 77-78.

7. Shakespeare as a Playwright (New York, 1913), p. 126.

8. Shakespeare's History Plays (New York, 1947), p. 301.

9. A. C. Bradley, Oxford Lectures on Poetry (New York, 1909), p. 270.

10. L. B. Campbell, Shakespeare's Histories (San Marino, 1947), p. 176. See also Stoll, p. 481; Charlton, pp. 185-88; H. C. Goddard, The Meaning of Shakespeare (Chicago, 1951), I, 175; and G. B. Harrison, ed., Shakespeare's Major Plays and Sonnets (New York, 1948), p. 376. J. I. M. Stewart, describing Falstaff's banishment as a part of the mythic sacrifice in Hal's killing of the father image, sees the hostess as “a creature of the wine cart and cymbal.”

11. Line references accord with the edition of J. Q. Adams, Chief Pre-Shakespearean Dramas (Boston, 1924).

12. Cobler, for instance, berating Dericke for his tremendous appetite, suggests Falstaff's favorite pastime: “Why, thou wilt eate me out of doores”; Cobler and Dericke parody the serious scene of Henry's boxing the ear of the Lord Chief-Justice and being committed to the Fleet, just as Hal and Falstaff parody the serious confrontation of king and prince.

13. Here is the likely source for Shakespeare's double entendre in 2 Henry IV (II, i, 14-19); see my forthcoming note, “Shakespeare's Source for 2 Henry IV, II, i,” in American Notes and Queries. All citations to Shakespeare's plays accord with the lineation of The Complete Plays and Poems of William Shakespeare, ed. William Allan Nielson and Charles Jarvis Hill (Cambridge, Mass., 1942).

14. As the Arden editor comments, reading The Famous Victories “is like going through the Henry IV-Henry V sequence in a bad dream, so close to Shakespeare is it in fragments, so worlds removed in skill” (p. xxxii). For a tracing of particular borrowings, see pp. xxxii-xxxiv and M. M. Reese, The Cease of Majesty (New York, 1961), pp. 293 ff.

15. There are no spelling variants of “Quickly” in the quarto and folio texts of 2 Henry IV and Henry V to clarify such a pun. Helge Kökeritz points out, however, that the “y” ending in Shakespeare frequently is rimed with “eye” and that such practice “would make a pun like Quickly-lie almost unavoidable.”—Shakespeare's Pronunciation (New Haven, 1953), p. 220.

16. Comic Characters of Shakespeare (London, 1949), p. xiv.