Hostess Quickly
Hostess Quickly anchors the play's brief return to the Eastcheap tavern world of Henry's youth, and her report of Falstaff's death is the clearest reminder of the human cost of the king's transformation from wayward prince to warrior.
Appears In
Biography
Hostess Quickly runs the Eastcheap tavern that was once Prince Hal's favorite haunt, and by the time of this play she is married to Pistol, a fact that does nothing to soften the ongoing rivalry between Pistol and Nym over her that predates the French campaign. She belongs entirely to the world Henry has left behind — the tavern, the drinking, the low company — and her presence in the play's early scenes is a reminder of exactly how far the new king has traveled from where he began.
Her most memorable contribution is her report of Falstaff's death, delivered in a register that mixes comedy and real tenderness in a way few other passages in the play attempt — Falstaff, she says, 'made a finer end, and went away, an it had been any christom child,' babbling of green fields as he died, forsaken, in some readings, by the very king who once called him friend. It is the play's clearest acknowledgment of what Henry's transformation cost the people who loved the prince he used to be.
Quickly herself does not survive to see the campaign's end; Pistol later reports, with characteristic crudity, that his 'Nell' has died of a venereal disease contracted in her trade, a bleak, offhand epitaph for a character the play otherwise treats with real if fleeting warmth.
Motivation
Quickly is motivated by the practical business of keeping her tavern and her marriage functioning amid the general upheaval of men leaving for war, and by real, unguarded affection for Falstaff, whose death she reports with more genuine feeling than almost any other passage in the play affords.
Personality
Quickly's speech runs on in the same comic, malapropism-laden register that marked her in the earlier Henry IV plays, but her account of Falstaff's death shows a capacity for real tenderness beneath the comedy — an unguarded warmth that the play, otherwise occupied with kings and battles, rarely permits itself elsewhere.