This matter has a direct bearing in reference to the date of the writing. King Henry the Fourth, the First Part certainly, and probably the Second Part also, was on the stage before 1598.  And in the title-page to the first quarto copy of The Merry Wives, we have the words, “As it hath been divers times acted by the Right Honourable my Lord Chamberlain’s Servants, both before her Majesty and elsewhere.”  This would naturally infer the play to have been on the stage a considerable time before the date of that issue.  And all the clear internal evidences of the play itself draw in support of the belief, that the Falstaff of Windsor memory was a continuation from the Falstaff of Eastcheap celebrity.  And the whole course of blundering and exposure which Sir John here goes through is such, that I can hardly conceive how the Poet should have framed it, but that he was prompted to do so by some motive external to his own mind.  That the free impulse of his genius, without suggestion or inducement from any other source, could have led him to put Falstaff through such a series of uncharacteristic delusions and collapses, is to me wellnigh incredible.  So that I can only account for the thing by supposing the man as here exhibited to have been an after-thought sprung in some way from the manner in which an earlier and fairer exhibition of the man had been received.

All which brings the original composition of the play to a point of time somewhere between 1598 and 1601.  On the other hand, the play, as we have it, contains at least one passage, inferring, apparently, 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