ised by a fashionable Elizabethan audience.

When Shakespeare, through the utterances of the prince, characterises
Falstaff by suggestion upon his first appearance in the play in the
following lines:

"Thou art so fat-witted, with drinking of old sack and unbuttoning
thee after supper and sleeping upon benches after noon, that thou
hast forgotten to demand that truly which thou would'st truly know,"

for the benefit of his initiated friends he links up and continues
Florio's characterisation as Parolles and Falstaff, and in the remainder
of the passage,

"What a devil hast thou to do with the time of the day? Unless hours
are cups of sack, and minutes capons, and clocks the tongues of
bawds, and dials the signs of leaping-houses, and the blessed sun
himself a fair hot wench in flame-coloured taffeta,"

suggests Florio's character from his own utterances in the _Second
Fruites_, where one of the characters holds forth as follows:

"As for me, I never will be able, nor am I able, to be willing but to
love whatsoever pleaseth women, to whom I dedicate, yield, and
consecrate what mortal thing soever I possess, and I say, that a
salad, a woman and a capon, as yet was never out of season."

A consideration of certain of the divergences between the _dramatis
personae_ of the _First Part of Henry IV._ and the _Second Part of Henry
IV._, made in the light of the thread of subjective evidence in the
plays of the Sonnet period, may give us some new clues in determining
the relative periods of their original composition.

In the _First Part of Henry IV._ the hostess of the tavern is referred
to as a young and beautiful woman in Act I. Scene ii., as follows:

FALSTAFF.... And is not my hostess of the tavern a most sweet wench?

PRINCE. As the honey of Hybla, my old lad of the castle. And is not a
buff jerkin a most sweet robe of durance?

FAL. How now, how now, mad wag! what, in thy quips and quiddities?
What a plague have I to do with a buff jerkin?

PRINCE. Why, what a pox have I to do with my hostess of the tavern?

FAL. Well, thou hast called her to a reckoning many a time and oft.

PRINCE. Did I ever call for thee to pay thy part?

FAL. No, I'll give thee thy due, thou hast paid all there. */

PRINCE. Yes, and elsewhere, so far as my coin would stretch; and
where it would not, I have used my credit.

FAL. Y