Yet motivation must be considered here, for Falstaff mimics the ‘conventicler style’ not unselfconsciously, as naturalized discourse, but ironically, for comic effect. Can Falstaff be deliberately parodying Calvinist cant if he is himself a parodic embodiment of the Rabelaisian Puritan akin to those circulated in contemporary pamphlets and stage lampoons? Although Poole asserts that he does not ‘parody the self-styled saints in a determined, willful way’ (Religion, 37), Falstaff in Part Two is certainly a knowing parodist, a strategic mocker of nonconformists who uses their cant wittily to excuse his gratuitous insults of the Prince. ‘I dispraised [thee] before the wicked, that the wicked might not fall in love with thee’ (2.4.323– 4), he explains, using a term – ‘the wicked’ – that Puritans adopted from the book of Proverbs to apply to non-believers (Shaheen, History, 165); to which the Prince responds in kind: ‘Is thine hostess here of the wicked? Or is thy boy of the wicked? Or honest Bardolph, whose zeal burns in his nose, of the wicked?’ (331– 4). The mention of Bardolph’s ‘zeal’, a favourite Puritan term for religious fervour, prompts Falstaff to respond with another Calvinist affront: ‘The fiend hath pricked down Bardolph irrecoverable’ (336 –7). Others in the play apply sectarian terminology to Falstaff with equal irony: the Prince calls him a ‘withered elder’, punning on the term used for an officer in the Presbyterian church (261), and the Page refers to Falstaff and his dining companions, Doll and the Hostess, as ‘Ephesians … of the old church’ (2.2.146) – a possible reference to ‘the prime church of the Ephesians … which was the Puritan court of appeal for purity of life’ (Ard2, 2.2.142n.).

  Falstaff derides Puritanism most explicitly when he condemns those smug city tradesmen to whom he owes so much on credit. ‘Let him be damned like the glutton!’ he curses the silk merchant who won’t take his bond (1.2.35), alluding to the parable of Dives, the rich glutton who goes to hell and asks that Lazarus ‘dippe the tip of his finger in water, and coole my tongue: for I am tormented in this flame’ (Luke, 16.19 –31):

  Pray God his tongue be hotter! A whoreson Achitophel, a rascal – yea forsooth knave – to bear a gentleman in hand and then stand upon ‘security’. The whoreson smoothy-pates do now wear nothing but high shoes and bunches of keys at their girdles

  (1.2.35 – 40)

  Falstaff’s biblically inflected invective runs through the catalogue of anti-Puritan slurs. He calls the merchant a ‘whoreson Achitophel’, alluding to the counsellor who was treacherous to King David (2 Samuel, 15.12), and ‘a rascal’, a ‘yea forsooth knave’, belittling the merchant’s use of the citizens’ oath ‘yea forsooth’ as a sign of tradesmen’s fawning respectability. He then mocks these grasping tradesmen as ‘whoreson smoothy-pates’ – smooth because they eschewed fashionably long hair and cropped their hair short, thus becoming known as Roundheads; their ‘high [cork-soled] shoes’, a sign of pride which revealed their social aspirations; and their ‘bunches of keys’, suggestive of the prosperity such nonconformists had achieved in the burgeoning market economy of London. References such as these contribute to the topicality of the play and its immersion in Elizabethan material and political culture. As a comment on those religious reformers whose influence within the Anglican Church was growing stronger as the century drew to a close, Shakespeare’s choice of Oldcastle as the name for his fat knight had undeniable satiric point.

  The tavern world: wordplay as social critique

  The figures who frequent the tavern represent Shakespeare’s most imaginative foray into the material world of Elizabethan ‘low’ culture. Mistress Quickly’s role, in particular, is different from what it was in Part One, more deeply embedded in the social matrix of Elizabethan London. Managing a tavern was one of the few avenues by which lower-class women could achieve economic independence and social recognition, and Mistress Quickly is acutely aware of her position.53 A widow past her prime, she has lived in hope for the past twenty years that Falstaff would marry her and thus, as a knight, offer her social advancement by making her ‘my lady’ (2.1.91); and although she attempts to have him arrested for non-payment of his tavern debt – a debt which substitutes for his failure to honour his promise of marriage – her affection for him eventually prompts her, in a comic about-face, to yield to his asking to borrow yet another ten pounds, evidence of her prosperity as a businesswoman.

  No one is better at recounting the past or has a keener memory for domestic detail than the Hostess. Her recollection of Falstaff’s marriage proposal years earlier has the digressive anecdotal structure, redundancy and unsophisticated paratactic syntax characteristic of oral storytelling (Thorne, 58): ‘Thou didst swear to me upon a parcel-gilt goblet,’ she reminds him, ‘sitting in my Dolphin chamber at the round table by a seacoal fire upon Wednesday in Wheeson week, when the Prince broke thy head for liking his father to a singing man of Windsor’ (85 –9). The momentous event that spurs her memory is overwhelmed by a wealth of detail about her material surroundings which reveals a great deal about her commercial success and her standing as a member of the mercantile class. Her reminiscence continues with a seemingly random narrative which, through its piling up ‘superfluous circumstantial detail’ and its ‘compulsive repetition of the past’, seeks ‘to halt time’s advance’ and even ‘to deny temporality itself’ (Thorne, 58–9): ‘goodwife Keech the butcher’s wife’, she recalls, came upstairs ‘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’; but ‘when she was gone downstairs,’ the Hostess recalls, Falstaff told her ‘to be no more so familiarity with such poor people, saying that ere long they should call me madam’ (2.1.92–100). Falstaff’s promise to gentle the Hostess’s condition by marrying her is given shape and substance by the mundane details of its retelling, a rambling account of past events brought vividly to life by the selective memory of a woman for whom they have become the only history that matters.

  Furthermore, to a much greater degree than in Part One, Mistress Quickly has a riotously original way of speaking through which she unwittingly reveals her sexual history with Falstaff and punctures her pretence to respectability. Unlike Falstaff’s devious and self-serving wordplay, the Hostess’s involves the use of malapropisms and unintentional double entendres. Her comic attempt to use a vocabulary beyond her ken betrays her bourgeois social aspirations, just as her bawdy puns betray her profession as a brothel-keeper. Her conversation with the two officers whom she has enlisted to arrest Falstaff for non-payment of debt is riddled with humorous sexual innuendo. The Hostess admits that Falstaff has ‘stabbed’ her ‘most beastly’ in her ‘house’ (13–14), conjuring an image of his mounting her from the rear in the manner of beasts; and further, she claims that if his weapon is out, he will ‘foin like any devil’ (16), foin being a fencing term meaning to pierce with a pointed weapon.54 And to his face, she decries him as ‘a honeyseed, a man queller, and a woman queller’ (51–2), malapropisms for ‘homicide’ and man- or woman-‘killer’ which suggest that he will stab either sex indiscriminately.

  13 Sir John, I arrest you at the suit of Mrs. Quickly (2.1). Painted by Henry Singleton; engraved by Gilbert Stuart; published by Longman in 1807

  At the opening of her next speech, the Hostess inadvertently reveals two sources of frustration with Falstaff rather than one: his refusal to repay the money he owes her and his unwillingness to compensate her with marriage for his use of her body. Her being ‘undone’ by his ‘going’ (22) most obviously refers to her being financially ruined by his leaving for the wars, either because he owes her a vast sum which he presumably will never repay or because she will be losing her best customer. But ‘go’ was also a slang term for having sex, and her being ‘undone’ by Falstaff’s ‘going’ thus glances ironically at the use he has presumably made of her virtue and the consequent damage to her reputation. She further accuses him of spending his money on indulgences elsewhere, such as at ‘Pie Corner’ (25).

  Adjacent to the centre of horse-trading in Smithfield and so named for the cooks’ shops there, Pie Corner was a familiar resort of prostitutes. Known for its brothels since at least 1393, it was still being mentioned in court records two centuries later: in 1586 a parson ‘most shamfully committed carnall copulacon … twise in one Treales house a cook by Pye Corner’, and in 1608 a woman was seen ‘occupied in a stable at Pye Corner’.55 Unsurprisingly, the phrase itself had become slang for the female pudendum. Therefore, by complaining that Falstaff comes ‘continuantly’ (a humorous malapropism which conflates ‘continually’ and ‘continently’) to Pie Corner ‘to buy a saddle’ (25 – 6), the Hostess unwittingly intimates that he frequents her own tavern for sex as well, especially since buying a saddle (as in a saddle of mutton; hence, a piece of flesh) was a popular euphemism for whoring. Her double entendres thus sound like what today might be called unconscious slips by which she reveals what she would fain deny.

  She continues her inadvertent self-exposure by mispronouncing the legal phrase for filing a lawsuit, ‘enter the action’, when she begins her plea with ‘since my exion is entered and my case so openly known to the world’ (28–30). Entering her ‘exion’ plays on sexual penetration, and her phonetic rendering of ‘action’ suggests that she may be imitating the way her betters pronounce it. Furthermore, ‘case’, defined as a receptacle or seed-vessel, was a common slang term for vagina, so the fact that her case is ‘openly known to the world’ becomes a richly humorous confession. As the offending party in her ‘case’, Falstaff, she insists, must be ‘brought in to his answer’ (30): that is, either brought to court to answer the charges, or made to marry her.

  The Hostess’s lust for bourgeois respectability is palpable here. She wants Sir John to make her a lady and thereby to cleanse the unsavoury reputation (the ‘ill name’ she complains of in 2.4.90) that she fears she has gained by running a tavern which, she later protests, is not a bawdy house.56 Although in Part One she identifies herself as ‘an honest man’s wife’ (3.3.119), in this scene she calls herself a ‘poor widow’ (2.1.68), a status that grants her the independence of an entrepreneurial business-owner and at the same time allows her to claim the vulnerability of a ‘poor lone woman’ whose business could be ruined by a customer’s non-payment of debt. As Jean Howard and Phyllis Rackin remark (176 –85), the Hostess is both empowered by her economic independence and yet threatened by a man who has the power to undo her. This threat explains the urgency behind her desire to arrest Falstaff: the only way she can preserve her status will be either through immediate payment, thus securing her economic independence, or through marriage, which, although it would forfeit her legal independence, will ‘gentle’ her condition and allow her not to be bothered by others’ censure. That her unwitting sexual wordplay and malapropisms implicate her in the very behaviours that she is trying to disavow is the major source of humour in this passage; and her final image of herself in this speech as ‘an ass and a beast to bear every knave’s wrong’ (36 –7) rounds out her self-exposure by recalling the image of bestial copulation with which she began her list of grievances against Falstaff.

  The bawdy wordplay in Part Two keeps the play finely poised between chronicle history and contemporary social critique. Prostitution, for example, is of central importance to Part Two, both as a social issue that would resonate with Elizabethan audiences aware of the growing number of prostitutes – and the increasing incidence of sexually transmitted disease – in a burgeoning London,57 and as a metaphor for the behaviour of those historical figures in the play for whom selling themselves, or screwing others, had become a political fact of life. Doll Tearsheet, one of the ‘parish heifers’ (2.2.153), whom Mistress Quickly brings to Falstaff for a last night of merriment before he goes off to war, operates on the lowest rung of a decidedly contemporary social ladder. As a prostitute, she is a woman of independent if meagre means, as she reveals when she accosts Pistol for ‘tearing a poor whore’s ruff in a bawdy house’ (2.4.144 –5), the large ruff being an item commonly worn by Elizabethan prostitutes (Rackin, 138–9).

  Swaggerers such as Pistol were expected to be found in brothels. Indeed, as a brothel ‘captain’ with an anachronistically phallic name whose bawdy potential the Hostess reveals when she pronounces it as ‘Peesel’, or Pizzle (2.4.162), Pistol may be directly involved in Doll’s trade, for she intimates that he ‘lives upon mouldy stewed prunes’ (146 –7), food associated with brothels because they were thought to be ‘part of the cure for venereal disease’ (Clowes, 161). Pistol’s punning exchange with Falstaff about toasting (‘charging’) the Hostess with a cup of sack (111–17) reinforces the sexual underpinnings of their alliance by humorously yoking Pistol’s ostensible military prowess (pistol, discharging, bullets) to his penchant for drinking (charging, proofs) and, finally, to his using the Hostess for sexual gratification (‘I will discharge upon her … with two bullets’, 114 –15). This bond between Pistol and the tavern women grows firmer late in the play when the Beadle who is arresting the Hostess and Doll tells them that ‘the man is dead that you and Pistol beat amongst you’ (5.4.16 –17) – testimony to the violence that commonly erupted in brothels, and evidence that despite her protestations, the Hostess does indeed run a bawdy house.

  The insistent references in 2.4 to the world of prostitution in contemporary London invest the scene’s subsequent wordplay with a surprising cultural urgency. The Hostess, for example, reveals her profession when Falstaff accuses her of having ‘another indictment upon thee, for suffering flesh to be eaten in thy house contrary to the law’ (2.4.347–9) – flesh being a double entendre equating meat with women, both of which are consumed on her premises. She unwittingly proves his accusation true by protesting, ‘All vict’lers do so. What’s a joint of mutton or two in a whole Lent?’ (351–2), wherein she uses common terms for whores (cf. her use of ‘saddle’ at 2.1.26) and their purveyors (victuallers). By confessing a minor infringement of the proclamation passed by the Privy Council in 1588 forbidding the consumption of meat during Lent, she also, in a wonderful if inadvertent expression of moral laxity, pleads guilty to the crime of running a brothel. The Hostess’s riotous misuse of language, then, serves as a site of carnivalesque resistance to the laws of the land by which enterprising women such as herself and Doll are criminalized.58

  Like many in the 1590s, Falstaff demonizes prostitutes as threats to the physical health of men and to the moral health of society. He accuses Doll of being a vector of disease who infects her clients: presuming to speak for all men, he says, ‘you help to make the diseases, Doll. We catch of you’ (45 – 6). When she retorts that the only thing her clients ‘catch’ – that is, steal – from her are her ‘chains’ and her ‘jewels’ (49), Falstaff with characteristic dexterity turns her words into their scatological equivalents – ‘Your brooches, pearls and ouches!’ (50) – all of which are euphemisms for the carbuncles, pimples and pustules caused by venereal diseases.

  Falstaff then issues a brilliant barrage of military double entendres which equate the sickness that results from sexual ‘combat’ with the wounds of war and, in so doing, recalls his own service at Shrewsbury. He argues that ‘To serve bravely’ – in bed or in battle – ‘is to come halting off’ (51) – that is, to limp owing to a wound or to sexual exertion that leaves one unable to stand. His wordplay grows more pointed when, as one destined for the war in the north, he figures ‘the rake’s passage from quean to quack … as a move from field of battle to field dressing station’ (Williams, Revolution, 211); for the wounded soldier, he announces, goes ‘to surgery bravely’ (53), an association of the dressing of war wounds with treatment for the pox which continues his demonization of Doll.

  Ultimately, Falstaff asserts, whores lead men to damnation. Doll, he tells the Prince, is ‘in hell already and burns poor souls’ (342–3) – wordplay which condemns the effect of her trade on clients, for burning means infecting with venereal diseases, just as it does in Sonnet 144: ‘Till my bad angel fire my good one out’ (14). Falstaff’s stream of misogynist double entendres in this scene thus potently demeans women as agents of the spiritual and physical corruption of men, a displacement of responsibility that was common among Elizabethan writers. By analogy, too, Falstaff’s wordplay about the pox provides a gloss on the anarchy that has plagued the kingdom since the usurpation of King Richard’s throne – ‘we are all diseased, / And with our surfeiting and wanton hours / Have brought ourselves into a burning fever, / And we must bleed for it’ (4.1.54 –7) – and on those diseases that fester in the King and Northumberland, men whose ills, both physical and moral, inform the scenes that flank 2.4 (2.3, 3.1) and are of greater consequence to the state – if not to the play – than Falstaff’s.

  The diverse idioms in Part Two through which socially marginalized characters reveal differences in region, class and occupation dramatize an expansion of the cultural boundaries of nationhood to a greater degree than Shakespeare’s earlier history plays do.59 In Part One the Prince, who boasts that he ‘can drink with any tinker in his own language’ (2.4.18–19), implies that learning the vernacular will be essential if he intends to govern an emerging English nation, though he does not show much linguistic virtuosity beyond thieves’ cant.60 In Part Two, the importance of a vernacular education is made explicit: ‘The Prince but studies his companions / Like a strange tongue,’ Warwick assures the King, ‘wherein, to gain the language, / ’Tis needful that the most immodest word / Be looked upon and learnt’ (4.3.68–71).61 In the distinctive idioms of the Prince’s companions – Bardolph, Doll, Pistol, the Hostess and, above all, Falstaff – Shakespeare provides alternatives to the official speech of the court for him to study. As Howard and Rackin put it, ‘the distance of various characters from the culture’s center of power and importance is marked by their linguistic distance from perfect command of the King’s English’ (182).