160 Down! Down, dogs! Possibly an allusion to Cerberus (cf. 168), this is more likely a comic echo of vaunt such as ‘Down, dog, and crouch before the feet / Of great Morocco’, from The Famous History of the Life and Death of Captain Thomas Stukeley (Edelman, 22.61–2), or ‘Now crouch, ye kings of greatest Asia’, from 2 Tamburlaine (4.3.98), with Pistol appropriating the role of conqueror.

  faitours obsolete term for traitors or rogues. F’s ‘fates’ is probably a compositor’s misreading.

  160–1 Have … here Probably borrowed from a lost play by Peele, The Turkish Mohamet and Hiren the Fair Greek (c. 1594), this line was repeated as a comic tag in later plays such as Middleton’s Old Law, 4.1.52–5 (‘CLOWN: No dancing with me; we have Siren here. COOK: Siren? ’Twas Hiren the fair Greek, man’); Jonson, Chapman and Marston’s Eastward Ho, 2.1.107–8 (‘hast thou not Hyren here?’; Jonson, 4.539); and Dekker’s Satiromastix, 4.3.243–4 (‘we have Hiren here’) – evidence of Pistol’s lingering popularity as a fantastic. Hiren (or Irene) came to mean whore and thus, here, may refer to Doll. Pistol, however, is more likely naming the sword he brandishes Hiren, playing on the homophony with ‘iron’; he does so again at 175. In doing so, he follows the chivalric practice of Amadis du Gaul, who, according to Theobald, named his sword Hiren.

  162 Peesel colloquial pronunciation of Pistol which emphasizes an already latent pun on ‘pizzle’ (from piss), meaning penis. Cf. 111–13n., and the tavern scene in 1H4 when Falstaff calls the Prince ‘You bull’s pizzle’ (2.4.239). The Hostess’s pronunciation both here and at 2.1.88 (Wheeson for Whitsun) possibly indicates a northern or midland dialect.

  163 beseek, aggravate The Hostess is in rare malapropian form: she confuses beseek with beseech and aggravate with its opposite, assuage or placate.

  164 good humours fine sentiments

  164–6 Shall … day Pistol butchers one of Tamburlaine’s most famous lines, in which he bullies the captive kings who drag his chariot: ‘Holla, ye pampered jades of Asia! / What, can ye draw but twenty miles a day … ?’ (2 Tamburlaine, 4.3.1–2).

  158 by this hand] Q; not in F th’infernal] Q; the Infernall F with] Q; where F 159 vile] Q; vilde F 160 faitors] Q (faters), Capell; Fates F 161 SD] Oxf1; [clapping his Hand to his Sword. Capell; not in QF 162 ’tis] Q; it is F 163 i’faith] Q; not in F 164–9 Shall … toys?] prose QF; Pope lines packhorses, / Asia, / day, / Cannibals, / with / roar! / toys? / ; Oxf lines pack-horses, / Asia, / day, / cannibals, / Greeks? / Cerberus, / toys? /

  165 hollow an apparent echo of Tamburlaine’s ‘Holla’

  jades contemptuous term for worn-out horses

  166 compare with rival. The implication is that the kings who draw Pistol’s imaginary chariot should, by their breeding, be able to cover far more territory than ordinary horses.

  166–7 Caesars … Greeks Attempting to outdo Tamburlaine in heroic rant, Pistol borrows the ludicrously bungled classical names dropped by the Braggart in Eliot’s Ortho-epia Gallica. Particularly amusing is the substitution of Cannibals for Hannibals (the appropriate pairing with Caesars) and his conflation of Trojans with Greeks.

  168 King Cerberus Cerberus was not a king, but the three-headed dog who guarded the gates of the underworld.

  168–9 let … roar a popular refrain in drinking songs, meaning ‘Let the heavens resound’ or, more secularly, ‘Let the clouds thunder’. Cf. 1 Tamburlaine, 4.2.45, ‘the welkin crack’.

  169 fall … toys quarrel over trifles (OED fall v. 87b)

  174 Die … dogs proverbial fustian: ‘To die like a dog (a dog’s death)’ (Dent, D509). Either the Q compositor or his copy-text apparently omitted a word; for without Die, Pistol’s two imperative clauses form one declarative sentence – ‘Men like dogges give crowns like pins’ – which makes no sense.

  give … pins Pistol attempts to outdo the largesse of Tamburlaine, who gives conquered kingdoms to his loyal followers as though they were trifles: cf. 1 Tamburlaine, 4.4.114–21.

  176–7 there’s … her? The Hostess takes Hiren to be the name of a whore and, by assuring Pistol that she would never deny such a woman to him, inadvertently confesses what she has tried so hard to deny: that she runs a brothel. Her humorous confusion may have given rise to Hiren’s reputation in later plays: see 160–1n.

  166 mile] Q; miles F Caesars] Q; Caesar F 167 Cannibals] QF1–2; Canniball F3–4 167–9 and Troyant … toys?] prose QF; Capell lines Greeks? / Cerberus; / toys? / 167 Troyant] Q (troiant); Troian F 170 captain] captaine Q(corr); captane Q(uncorr); Captaine F 174–5] prose QF; Oxf lines pins! / here? / 174 Die] F; not in Q dogs, give] F; dogges giue Q 176 A’my] Q (A my); On my F

  177 What the goodyear See 59–60n.

  179 feed … Calipolis Pistol echoes a speech in Peele’s Battle of Alcazar in which Muly Mahamet enters with raw meat on the tip of his sword, ‘forcèd from a lioness’, to offer to his starving wife: ‘Feed then and faint not fair Calypolis, / … Feed and be fat that we may meet the foe / With strength and terror to revenge our wrong’ (2.3.71–102 passim). As Cowl observes (Ard1), the scene was sensational enough to inspire parody in other plays such as Dekker’s Satiromastix, 4.1.150: ‘Feede and be fat my faire Calipolis’, Marston’s What You Will (exactly the same line, 5.1.1) and Thomas Heywood’s The Royall King, and the Loyall Subiect, 2.2: ‘Here I do meane to cranch, to munch, to eate. / To feed, and be fat my fine Cullapolis’. Wilson (Cam1) speculates that Pistol is offering the Hostess an apple-john on the tip of his sword.

  180–1 Si … contento an ungrammatical mix of Italian, Spanish and French for ‘If fortune torments me, hope contents me’, a popular motto which Pistol repeats as his exit line at 5.5.95, though with enough deviation to suggest that he has no idea what he is saying. Melchiori, who rewrites the line in grammatically correct Italian, suggests that Pistol is singing a snatch of an Italian madrigal, but there is scant justification for such emendation. See Dent, F614, and, for earlier instances, Wilson, Dictionary, 282b.

  181 broadsides the full array, or simultaneous discharge, of artillery on one side of a warship (OED sb. 2)

  fiend figurative for the artillery in broadsides

  182 give fire shoot

  sack See 1.2.198n. on new … sack.

  182–3 sweetheart … there Weapons were commonly personified by their bearers. Cf. Jonson, Every Man Out, where Cavalier Shift protests, ‘Sell my rapier? no, my deare, I will not bee diuorc’t from thee, yet’ (3.6.80–1), and Mucedorus, 2.3, in which the wild man Bremo says to his club, ‘lie thou there, / And rest thyself, till I haue further neede’ (Dodsley, 7.220).

  183–4 Come … no things? ‘Are we to stop here? Is there no further entertainment?’ Pistol may be responding to the others’ attempts to quiet him. The phrase full points puns on the tips of swords and on full stops (periods) as marks of punctuation, while etceteras and things are both bawdy references to the female pudendum. Cf. Q1 of RJ, ‘O that she were / An open etcetera’ (2.1.37–8) and ‘to sink in it, should you burden love – / Too much oppression for a tender thing’ (1.4.23–4). F’s ‘nothing’ may diminish the sexual innuendo, but if ‘thing’ denotes a penis, as it does elsewhere in Shakespeare, then Q’s no things, with its buried pun on ‘O things’, vaginal orifices, would signify the lack of a penis, and so, a vagina. This is the sense in which Hamlet plays on ‘nothing’ in his banter with Ophelia (Ham 3.2.111, 114).

  177 goodyear] Q; good-yere F 178 For God’s sake] Q; I pray F 179–84] prose QF; Capell lines Calipolis! / sack. / contento. / there. / nothing? / 180 give’s] Q (giues); giue me F 180–1 Si … contento.] Q, F (contente); [Sings] Se fortuna mi tormenta, ben sperato mi contenta – Cam2 (Keightley) 182–3 sweetheart, lie] Q(corr)F; sweet hartlie Q(uncorr) SD] Capell subst.; not in QF 184 no things] Q; nothing F

  186 neaf northern dialect for hand or fist: cf. MND 4.1.19: ‘Give me your neaf’. Pistol vulgarizes the chivalric Spanish custom of kissing the hand of a fellow knight.

  186–7 We … stars a nostalgic claim of good fellowship: ‘We have caroused together till all hours’: cf. Falstaff’s ‘We have heard the chimes at midnight’ (3.2.214) and, more pertinent, his admission, ‘we that take purses go by the moon and the seven stars’ (1H4 1.2.12–13). By the seven stars, Pistol means the Pleiades, or Great Bear, a point of reference in the night sky. But ‘The Seven Stars’ was also the name of an Elizabethan tavern near the Inns of Court that figured in the anonymous Timon comedy (Bulman, ‘Timon’, 115–16), an appropriate – if anachronistic – venue for Pistol and Falstaff to drink in.

  189 fustian bombastic, ranting. The term derived from a coarse cloth of cotton and flax, worn by those who could not afford better.

  190–1 Galloway nags small horses bred in Scotland, used in London to draw light carriages and often for hire. But nag was also slang for prostitute, a woman who could be easily ridden (cf. AC 3.10.10: ‘Yon ribaudred nag of Egypt’): so in effect, Pistol asks, ‘Don’t we know a whore when we see one?’

  192 Quoit toss like a quoit, a discus of metal or stone thrown into a ring. Cf. 247.

  192–3 shove-groat shilling a coin (usually an Edward VI shilling) propelled by hand along a polished board into pockets at the end during a game (shove-groat) akin to shuffleboard

  193–4 an … here if he does nothing but speak nonsense, he’ll have to leave. By thrice repeating nothing, Falstaff satirically echoes Pistol’s no things at 184.

  197 incision blood-letting (a term from medicine)

  188 For God’s sake] Q; not in F 189 endure] Q (indure), F 192 Quoit] Q (Quaite), F 193 an ’a … ’a] Q (and); if hee … hee F 196 SD] Rowe subst. (after 200), Capell subst.; not in QF 196–200] prose QF; Capell lines imbrue? / days! / wounds / say! / 197 imbrue] Q (imbrew), F (embrew)

  imbrue shed blood, wound one another. In a similarly silly situation, Thisbe cries, ‘Come, blade, my breast imbrue!’ (MND 5.1.331).

  197–8 death … asleep the opening line of a song attributed to both Anne Boleyn and her brother as they awaited execution in 1536 (‘O Death! rocke me on slepe’) but also included in a volume written by Arnold Cosbie as he lay in the Marshalsea prison in 1591 (Ard1). See Duffin, 281–3.

  198 abridge … days burlesques the laments in heroic plays such as Locrine, ‘I my selfe … Meane to abridge my former destenies’ (5.4.238–9, in Brooke) and 1 Tamburlaine, ‘Now Bajazeth, abridge thy baneful days’ (5.1.286).

  198–9 let … wounds parody of alliterative verse found in old-fashioned heroic tragedies, already lampooned by Bottom in Pyramus and Thisbe

  199–200 untwine … I say The sisters three refers to the three Fates of classical mythology, whose functions Pistol has confusedly intertwined: Clotho held the spindle on which life’s thread was spun, Lachesis drew the thread and Atropos cut it. Invocations to Atropos were frequent: cf. Locrine, ‘Sweet Atropos, cut off my fatall thred’ (5.4.222, in Brooke) and Sackville’s ‘Complaint of Henry, Duke of Buckingham’, which abounds in allusions to doleful days, the sisters three and Atropos cutting the thread.

  201 goodly … toward said with irony: a fine ‘to do’ in the making

  205–6 keeping house carrying on a business; i.e. the tavern, but with a possible play on house as brothel

  206 tirrits perhaps a Quicklyism conflating terrors and fits (Ard2), though similar words were current in dialect: e.g. ‘ter’ for anger, ‘tirrivee’ for commotion (Wright, Dictionary)

  208 put … weapons more inadvertent double entendre from the Hostess. Put up means to sheathe or erect; naked weapons refers to unsheathed swords or exposed penises.

  199 untwine] F3; vntwinde Q; vntwin’d F 201 goodly] Q; good F 203 pray thee … pray thee] Q; prethee … prethee F 204 SD] this edn; Drawing, and driving Pistol out. / Rowe; Falstaff thrusts at Pistol. Cam1; not in QF 206 afore] Q; before F 208 SD] Oxf; [Exeunt Pistol and Bardolph. Capell; Exit Bardolph, driving Pistol out. / Collier3; not in QF

  209 be quiet The Hostess urges Falstaff to calm down rather than to be silent: apparently he is still going through the motions of fighting Pistol.

  210 whoreson an abusive epithet, similar to the modern ‘sonofabitch’, which, in context, becomes a term of endearment. Cf. 219, 232.

  211 groin probably a euphemism for the genitals. The Hostess’s solicitude is understandable, given her hopes of marrying Falstaff.

  212 shrewd vicious, nasty

  216 brave challenge, threaten or defy

  217, 219 rogue a term of reproach, here used affectionately to indicate a mischief-maker (OED sb. 3).

  ape fool. Cf. similarly playful usage in 1H4, 2.3.74: ‘you mad-headed ape!’.

  219 chops a person with fat cheeks, also applied to Falstaff at 1H4 1.2.129

  220–1 Hector … Agamemnon two heroes of the Trojan War. Hector, eldest son of King Priam, was the most valiant of the Trojans; Agamemnon was a king and general of the Greek armies.

  222 Nine Worthies a mixture of historical, legendary and biblical heroes celebrated as the noblest of their type in chivalric romances: three pagans (Hector, Alexander, Julius Caesar); three Jews (Joshua, David, Judas Maccabeus); and three Christians (Arthur, Charlemagne, Godfrey of Bouillon). Shakespeare celebrates them in a comic masque of the Worthies in LLL 5.2.531–711.

  209 pray thee] Q; prethee F rascal’s] Q; Rascall is F 210 valiant] Q (vliaunt), F 211 ’a] Q; hee F 212.1] Capell; not in QF 213 a’doors] Q (a doores); of doores F 214 Yea] Q; Yes F 215 i’th’] Q; in the F 217 Ah, you] F, Q (A you) 219 Ah, rogue] F, Q (a rogue) i’faith] Q (yfaith); not in F 222 Ah, villain] F, Q (a villaine)

  223 *A Q’s interjection ‘Ah’ is wrong here, because Falstaff is not directly addressing Pistol: F’s article is correct. Somewhat confusingly, though, Q’s ‘A’ at 217 and ‘a’ at 219 and 222, obviously meant to be interjections, apparently are a variant spelling of ‘Ah’.

  223–4 I … blanket Falstaff is still reliving his victory over Pistol: tossing in a blanket was a punishment for cowards. Dent cites as proverbial ‘To toss like a dog in a blanket’ (D513.1).

  225 an … heart ‘as if your life depended on it’ (OED for conj. 9c); or perhaps more literally, ‘if you don’t fear having a heart attack’. Doll is indulging Falstaff’s fantasy.

  225–6 I’ll … sheets Ironically, Doll will turn Pistol’s punishment into Falstaff’s reward by tossing the latter between a pair of sheets as a sexual favour. There is a pun on canvas meaning (1) to entangle or catch within a net, a term from hawking, and (2) the material of which sheets are made. To make the irony clear, Doll’s emphasis should be on thee.

  226.1–2 *Whether the musicians play onstage or in the music gallery above is unclear (cf. 1H4 3.1.226n.). Also unclear is how long they continue to play, though it is certainly long enough to provide background music for the dialogue between Falstaff and Doll (228–83). The use of musical underscoring to establish mood was rare in Elizabethan drama; here, the mood is likely to have been gently melancholic, the musical selections associated with old age and declining performance – themes picked up again in the snatches of song sung by Silence in 5.3 (Lindley, Music, 147). The musicians may have played beyond 283, for Falstaff doesn’t instruct the Page to pay them until 378.

  229–30 fled … quicksilver proverbial (Dent, Q14.1, ‘To run like quicksilver’, i.e. like mercury). Cf. Ham 1.5.66.

  231 like a church an odd simile, possibly, according to Cowl (Ard1), inspired by Nashe’s Summer’s Last Will and Testament (1030–1; Works, 3.266), in which Bacchus is said to have a ‘paunch … built like a round church’ and filled with ‘tunnes of wine’. In contrasting Pistol’s quicksilver exit with Falstaff’s laborious pursuit, Doll may be gently ridiculing Falstaff’s hulking size; but quite possibly the joke is now lost.

  223 A] F; Ah Q 225 an … An] Q (and … and); if … if F dar’st] F; darst Q 226.1] this edn; enter musicke. Q (after 227); Enter Musique. F 226.2] this edn; Bardolph talks to Hostess. / Collier3 (after 267); not in QF 228 SD] Singer2; not in QF 231 I’faith] Q (Yfaith); not in F

  232 tidy plump, fat

  Bartholomew boar-pig a humorous gloss on Falstaff’s visits to the Pie Corner district of Smithfield (cf. 1.2.51n., 2.1.25n.), site of Bartholomew Fair, a carnival held annually on St Bartholomew’s Day (24 August), at which roast pig was sold by vendors. A boar pig is a young boar; Doll is thus flattering Falstaff, who elsewhere is called an ‘old boar’ (2.2.142).

  233 leave stop, give up

  233–4 foining a’nights nocturnal thrusting (sexual) in contrast to diurnal thrusting (fighting); see 2.1.16n. on foin.

  234–5 patch … heaven remedy your physical ailments in preparation for death, with a possible hint of doing penance as well

  235.2 dressed as drawers The Prince’s and Poins’s disguise presumably consisted of no more than drawers’ aprons and leather jerkins (see 2.2.168), sufficient to convey in dramatic shorthand that they would pass unrecognized, as do Shakespeare’s comic heroines when disguised as young men. But Francis knows about the planned trick on Falstaff (see 15–18), and presumably all the tavern personnel are in on it. Doll’s plying Falstaff with questions about the Prince and Poins immediately after their entrance suggests that she either is already aware of the ruse or has recognized them and is playing along. Her questions otherwise are too coincidental.

  237 death’s-head skull used as a memento mori, a reminder of one’s mortality

  238 humour here, character or temperament

  240 pantler servant of the pantry, a menial position

  a’ have

  chipped bread removed the hard crusts from a loaf of bread before serving it

  241 wit understanding, intellect

  233–4] a’days … a’nights] Q; on dayes … on nights F 235.1–2] this edn; Enter Prince and Poynes. Q; Enter the Prince and Poines disguis’d. F 238 humour’s] Q; humor is F 239–40 ’A … ’a] Q; hee … hee F 240 a’] Q (a); haue F; ha’ Cam2 241 has] Q; hath F