Mistress Quickly
Mistress Quickly is a fictional character, an inn-keeper, who appears in four plays by William Shakespeare:
Character and role
In Henry IV, Part 2, Mistress Quickly is described as the proprietor of the Boar's Head Tavern in a London neighborhood called Eastcheap. She asks the authorities to arrest Falstaff, accusing him of running up excessive debts and making a fraudulent proposal of marriage to her.[1] Mistress Quickly has a friendship of long standing with Doll Tearsheet, a prostitute who frequents the tavern, and protects her against aggressive men she calls "swaggerers".[2] Quickly's speech is filled with double entendres and "bawdy innuendo".[3] At the end of that play. Mistress Quickly and Doll Tearsheet are arrested in connection with the beating to death of a man. In Henry V, she is referred to as Nell Quickly, and has married a character called Pistol.[4] In The Merry Wives of Windsor she works as nurse to Caius, a French physician, but primarily acts as a messenger between other characters, communicating love notes in a plot largely concerned with misdirected letters.[5]
Master Quickly
Alan Skinner's novel Master Quickly attempts to fill in the gaps in Shakespeare by revealing the truth about her neglected husband.
References
- ↑ Silverbush, Rhona; Plotkin, Sami (2002). Speak the Speech!: Shakespeare's Monologues Illuminated. Macmillan Publishers. pp. 87–90. ISBN 9780571211227.
- ↑ Jay, Milinda (2008). Female Friendship Alliances in Shakespeare. ProQuest. pp. 12–13. ISBN 9781109046014.
- ↑ Hattaway,, Michael (2002). The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare's History Plays. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. pp. 169–171. ISBN 9780521775397.
- ↑ A Shakespeare Encyclopaedia. Taylor & Francis. 1966. p. 670.
- ↑ Wright, Courtni Crump (1993). The Women of Shakespeare's Plays: Analysis of the Role of the Women in Select Plays with Plot Synopses and Selected One-Act Plays. University Press of America. pp. 59–62.
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