Mistress Quickly: Difference between revisions

| jfm = }}</ref> Her name may be a pun on "quick lay", though "quick" also had the meaning of "alive", so it may imply "lively", which also commonly had a sexual connotation.<ref name = "mad">J. Madison Davis, ''The Shakespeare Name and Place Dictionary'', Routledge, 2012, p.406.</ref> Quickly's character is most fully developed in ''Henry IV, part 2'' in which her contradictory aspirations to gentility and barely concealed vulgarity are brought out in her language. According to James C. Bulman, she "unwittingly reaveals her sexual history" by her blithe malapropisms and "her character is both defined and undone by her absurdly original speech"<ref>James C. Bulman "Henry IV, Parts 1 and 2", ''The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare's History Plays'', Cambridge University Press, 2002, p.170.</ref> Though her age is not specified several, the comment that she is "pistol proof" has been interpreted to mean that she is past childbearing age,<ref>Melchiori, G (ed), ''The Second Part of King Henry IV'', Cambridge University Press, 2007, p.126.</ref> and she says she has known Falstaff for twenty nine years.<ref>Henry IV, Part 2, Act 2, Scene 4.</ref>