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- Appendix 215
The Time-Analysis of the Play
As Mr. P. A. Daniel shows in his paper " On the Times or Dura-
tions of the Action of Shakspere's Plays " ( Trans, of New Shaks.
Soc. 1877-79, p. 124 fol.), it is impossible, as the play now stands,
to make out any consistent time-division of it. The chief difficulty
is in the confusion with reference to FalstafTs meetings with Mrs.
Ford, which he states as follows (cf. note on iii. 5. i above) : —
" The first meeting, which ends with the buck-basket, takes place
between ten and eleven on one morning ; the second meeting is
determined for the morrow of the first, and actually follows it ; but
yet the invitation to it and its actual occurrence are fixed by the
play at an earlier hour of the same day as that on which the first
takes place ; and when it has thus got in advance of the first. Ford
refers to the first as being before it. And the confusion does not
end here, for on the very day of the second meeting Ford refers to
that second meeting as having taken place on the * yesterday,' and
thus the third meeting, which is on the night of the day of the
second, is driven forward to the night of the day following it. . . .
"The chief error, then, lies in sc. v. of Act III.; that scene
must, I think, have been formed by the violent junction — I cannot
call it fusion — of two separate scenes representing portions of two
separate days. The first part of the scene — Mrs. Quickly and Fal-
staff — is inseparably connected with the day of Falstaff's first inter-
view with Mrs. Ford ; the second part is as inseparably connected
with the day of the second interview. The first part clearly shows
us Falstaff in the afternoon, just escaped from his ducking in the
Thames ; the second part as clearly shows him in the early morning
about to keep his second appointment with Mrs. Ford. Cut this
actual scene v. into two, ending the first with Mrs. Quickly 's last
speech — ' Peace be with you, sir,' — and the main difficulty van-
ishes, and the only change required in the text of the Folio to make
it agree with the previous scenes is the alteration of two tvords. In
her first speech Mrs. Quickly says, * Give your worship good mor-
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