Robert Shallow

Robert Shallow is a fictional character who appears in Shakespeare's plays Henry IV, Part 2 and The Merry Wives of Windsor.

He is a wealthy landowner and Justice of the Peace in Gloucestershire, who at the time of The Merry Wives of Windsor is said to be over 80 ("four score years and upward").

It has long been speculated that Shallow is a satire of Sir Thomas Lucy, a local landowner near Stratford-upon-Avon, with whom Shakespeare is said to have got into trouble as a young man.

In Henry IV, Part 2 Falstaff is commissioned to raise troops for the royal army to deal with a rebellion in the north.

Shallow appears at the beginning of the play to complain that Falstaff has been poaching deer from his land, has broken into a lodge and has assaulted his servants.

Shallow's young cousin Abraham Slender adds that he was robbed by Falstaff's cronies Bardolph, Nym and Pistol: "They carried me to the tavern and made me drunk, and afterward picked my pocket".

G. Beiner argues Shallow's self-deceiving vanity provides a kind of "comic justification" for Falstaff's exploitation of him, since we feel more sympathy for "clever knave than a foolish citizen".

[2] Critics have noted that Shakespeare gives Shallow a distinct style of speech, characterised by constant repetition with slight variation.

[3] Both the pathos and the comedy of the character derive from the contrast between the aged Shallow and the lusty, riotous figure he imagines himself to have been in his youth.

[4] It has been speculated that Shallow, at least as portrayed in The Merry Wives of Windsor, is a parody of Sir Thomas Lucy, a local landowner in Charlecote, near Stratford upon Avon, with whom Shakespeare is supposed to have had conflicts when he was young.

[10] Other critics have argued that Shallow comes from a long theatrical tradition of depicting bumbling old men, derived ultimately from the Roman stock character of the senex amans.

[12] Nevertheless, even if the character of Shallow in Henry IV, Part 2 was not invented as a parody of either Lucy or Gardiner, it may have been adapted in the Merry Wives to become one.

[10] Shallow appears along with Falstaff's other cronies in the play Falstaff's Wedding (1766), a comedy by William Kenrick, which is set in the period between the end of Henry IV, Part 2 and the beginning of Henry V. A subplot involves Mistress Quickly and Doll Tearsheet disguising themselves as gentlewomen to find rich husbands, targeting Shallow and Slender.