It is this inner bond of life which gives to Shakespeare’s plays their unity and their enduring vitality. The superb verse, the faultless expression of every human emotion, from the love of Romeo or the intrepid despair of Macbeth down to the grotesque devotion of Bardolph, “Would I were with him wheresome’er he is, either in Heaven or in Hell,” are the outward and visible signs of this inward and spiritual truth to nature. _Henry IV._ and _Henry V._ may seem to be but straggling plays when they are compared with the exactly fitted plots of Lope de Vega or the arranged, selected, concentrated action of Racine. So the free-growing forest-tree is less trim and balanced than the clipped yew. But it has a higher life and the finer unity. The Henry V. who meets Falstaff with-- “I know thee not, old man: fall to thy prayers; How ill white hairs become a fool and jester!” is the same man as he who said-- “I know you all, and will awhile uphold The unyoked humour of your idleness.... I’ll so offend, to make offence a skill; Redeeming time when men think least I will.” Nor is he altered when he seeks a complacent archbishop to provide him with an excuse for a war of aggression, and so having provided for both worlds, takes advantage of his own wrong to throw the responsibility for the miseries of the war on the French. In the tavern, in the council-chamber, on the battlefield, by the sick-bed of his father, he is always the same Henry of Monmouth, a foundation of cold able selfishness, a surface of valour and showy magnanimity which costs him nothing--a perfect portrait of the “unconscious hypocrite.” The circumstances may change but not the man. He only adapts the outward show to them. The incomparably more honest nature of Falstaff is as consistent as the king’s. He is a Bohemian who is not vicious nor cruel, but who simply follows the lusts of the flesh spontaneously, and is lovable for his geniality, his wit, and his perfect sincerity. Falstaff is not, properly speaking, immoral. He is only exterior to morals. If he were cruel or treacherous he would be horrible, but he is neither. He is only a humorous, fat, meat-, drink-, and ease-loving animal. Given these two, and around them a crowd of others, heroic, grotesque, or even only commonplace, all doing credible things on the green earth, and the result is a coherent action, not made on the model of a Chinese puzzle, but yet consistent, because being real and true to life, the characters act intelligibly, and do nothing uncaused, unnatural, or inconsequent.