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Scene Two liberty hall In the British Magazine (February, March, and April 1760) Oliver Goldsmith published an essay that placed him in Shakespeare’s most famous site of drinking, “the Boar’s-head tavern, still kept at Eastcheap ”: Here, by a pleasant fire, in the very room where old Sir John Falstaff cracked his jokes, in the very chair which was sometimes honoured by prince Henry, and sometimes polluted by his immoral merry companion, I sat, and ruminated on the follies of youth; wished to be young again; but was resolved to make the best of life while it lasted, and now and then compared past and present times together. I considered myself as the only living representative of the old Knight, and transported my imagination back to the times when the Prince and he gave life to the revel, and made even debauchery not disgusting. As Goldsmith drinks and talks to the landlord, something strange happens : “His cravat seemed quilled into a ruff, and his breeches swelled out into a fardingale. I now fancied him changing sexes; and, as my eyes began to close in slumber, I imagined my fat landlord actually converted into as fat a landlady.” The essayist recognizes this figure to be “Dame Quickly, mistress of the tavern in the days of Sir John”; likewise, “the liquor we were drinking . . . seemed converted into sack and sugar.”35 She regales him with the history of the building, as it runs through various incarnations: a convent, a brothel (the two are of course virtually indistinguishable), and a fashionable or less fashionable gathering place for Whigs or for Tories. And she counters his claim that “those were merry times when you drew sack for prince Henry: men were twice as strong, and twice as wise, and much braver, and ten times more charitable, than now” with a narrative of vanity, folly, and vice. In a passage which Goldsmith did not include when revising the essay for its appearance in his collected essays, she regales her listener with a description of the age of Henry V: “King Henry V. who was one of the best princes that ever sat on the throne, was fond of burning those Wickliffites. There were few feasts or entertainments, in which the people were not delighted with two or three roasted Wickliffites. ’Tis certain, if what was alledged against them be true, they deserved no mercy; they were magicians or witches every one of them; they were sometimes seen eating dead bodies torn from the grave. Sir John Oldcastle , one of the chief of the sect, was particularly fond of human flesh” (3:100n34, 104 –5). This passage goes far in challenging the simple nostalgia of the narrator of the essay: and it partakes of the irony with which the whole essay debunks the notion of a glorious and less vicious past. But more strikingly, it conflates the fictional death of Falstaff (“Sir John’s death afflicted me to such a degree, that I sincerely believe, I drank more liquor for myself than I drew for my customers” [3:101]) with the martyrdom of Sir John Oldcastle, the character’s original name in the earliest versions of the Henry IV plays. Oldcastle’s appearance in the British Magazine version of the essay provides a collision between the sentimental treatment of Falstaff ’s rejection and death and the barbarous treatment accorded his historical original. The Boar’s Head Tavern becomes, in the “Reverie,” a place where the essayist must confront a past dominated by superstition, intolerance, and persecution. “Would it were bed time and all were well,” says Kate Hardcastle at the end of the first scene of She Stoops to Conquer. She is quoting Falstaff on the eve of the battle at Shrewsbury as she and Miss Neville prepare for their own campaign.36 As she exits on this allusion to Falstaff, the scene changes: “SCENE, An Alehouse Room. Several shabby fellows, with Punch and Tobacco.” The scenic transformation of Mr. Hardcastle’s “old-fashioned House” into the Three Pigeons alehouse, where Tony Lumpkin holds forth, is seemingly conjured by Kate’s invocation of Falstaff. The Three Pigeons merges with the Boar’s Head as a site of self-consciously theatrical confusion and displacement. Lumpkin’s joke is predicated on the likeness between Hardcastle’s house and a tavern like the Boar’s Head, where, the essayist remarks, “the room also conspired to throw my reflections back into antiquity: the...

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