" The form too is Shakespeare's.
Who does not remember the magic line in "The Two Noble Kinsmen "?
"She is all the beauty extant."
And the next speech of Falstaff is just as illuminating:
"
Fal. You rogue, here's lime in this sack, too; there is nothing
but roguery to be found in villainous man: yet a coward is worse than a
cup of sack with lime in it--a villainous coward.--Go thy ways, old
Jack; die when thou wilt, if manhood, good manhood, be not forgot upon
the face of the earth, then am I a shotten herring. There live not three
good men unhanged in England, and one of them is fat and grows old: God
help the while! A bad world I say----"
At the beginning the concrete fact, then generalization, and then merely
a repetition of the traits marked in the first scene, with the addition
of bragging. Evidently Shakespeare has the model in memory as he writes.
I say "evidently," for Falstaff is the only character in Shakespeare
that repeats the same words with damnable iteration, and in whom the
same traits are shown again and again and again.
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