Falstaff by Harold Bloom

Author:Harold Bloom
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Scribner

CHAPTER 12

Ancient Pistol and Doll Tearsheet

Disguising themselves as waiters (drawers), the Prince and Poins prepare a jollification in which they will eavesdrop on Falstaff and the vehement whore Doll Tearsheet. Doll is high on Canary wine, an excessively sweet potion I recommend to no one. Falstaff enters singing a distorted version of the ballad “Sir Lancelot du Lake.” Their dialogue, punctuated by Mistress Quickly’s malapropisms, shows that for a moment Doll can hold her own with Sir John:

Mistress Quickly: I’ faith, sweetheart, 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, in good truth, la! 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?

Doll Tearsheet: Better than I was—hem!

Mistress Quickly: Why, that’s well said—a good heart’s worth gold. Lo, here comes Sir John.

[Enter Falstaff, singing.]

Falstaff: ‘When Arthur first in court’—Empty the jordan.—‘And was a worthy king’—How now, Mistress Doll?

Mistress Quickly: Sick of a calm; yea, good faith.

Falstaff: So is all her sect; and they be once in a calm they are sick.

Doll Tearsheet: A pox damn you, you muddy rascal, is that all the comfort you give me?

Falstaff: You make fat rascals, Mistress Doll.

Doll Tearsheet: I make them! Gluttony and diseases make them, I make them not.

Falstaff: 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.

Doll Tearsheet: Yea, joy, our chains and our jewels.

Falstaff: ‘Your brooches, pearls, and ouches’—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;—

Doll Tearsheet: Hang yourself, you muddy conger, hang yourself!

Mistress Quickly: By my troth, this is the old fashion; you two never meet but you fall to some discord. You are both, i’ good truth, as rheumatic as two dry toasts, you cannot one bear with another’s confirmities. What the goodyear! One must bear, [to Doll] and that must be you—you are the weaker vessel, as they say, the emptier vessel.

Doll Tearsheet: Can a weak empty vessel bear such a huge full hogs-head? 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.

Henry IV, Part 2, act 2, scene 4, lines 22–66

Quite aside from the continuous sexual innuendoes, this exchange delights as two carousers highlight the festivity of flesh. Mistress Quickly cannot keep her humors straight and means “choleric” when she says “rheumatic.” The boisterous scene augments with the arrival of Ancient Pistol the Roaring Boy, a street hoodlum adept at annoying passersby but harmless except for the noise:

Falstaff: Welcome, Ancient Pistol.

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