pparently, that
the work of revisal must have been done some time after the accession
of King James, which was in March, 1603. That passage is the odd
reason Mrs. Page gives Mrs. Ford for declining to share the honour of
knighthood with Sir John: "These knights will _hack_; and so thou
shouldst not alter the article of thy gentry"; which can scarce bear
any other sense than as referring to the prodigality with which the
King dispensed those honours in the first year of his English reign;
knighthood being thereby in a way to grow so _hackneyed_, that it
would rather be an honour not to have been dubbed. As for the reasons
urged by Knight and Halliwell for dating the first writing as far back
as 1593, they seem to me quite too far-fetched and fanciful to be
worthy of notice; certainly not worth the cost of sifting, nor even of
statement.

* * * * *

Much question has been made as to the particular period of his life in
which Sir John prosecuted his adventures at Windsor, whether before or
after the incidents of _King Henry the Fourth_, or at some
intermediate time. And some perplexity appears to have arisen from
confounding the order in which the several plays were written with the
order of the events described in them. Now, at the close of the
History, Falstaff and his companions are banished the neighborhood of
the Court, and put under strong bonds of good behaviour. So that the
action of the Comedy cannot well be referred to any point of time
after that proceeding. Moreover we have Page speaking of Fenton as
having "kept company with the wild Prince and Pointz." Then too, after
Falstaff's experiences in the buck-basket and while disguised as "the
wise woman of Brentford," we have him speaking of the matter as
follows: "If it should come to the ear of the Court, how I have been
transformed, and how my transformation hath been washed and cudgelled,
they would melt me out of my fat drop by drop, and liquor fishermen's
boots with me: I warrant they would whip me with their fine wits till
I were as crestfallen as a dried pear." From which it would seem that
he still enjoys at Court the odour of his putative heroism in killing
Hotspur at the battle of Shrewsbury, with which the First Part of the
History closes. The Second Part of the History covers a period of
nearly ten years, from July, 1403, to March, 1413; in which time
Falstaff may be supposed to have found leisure for the exploits at
W