ABSTRACT
Hostess Quickly (also known as ‘Hostess’ and ‘Mistress Quickly’) is a widow and the hostess (mistress / proprietress) of the ‘Boar’s Head Tavern’ in Eastcheap in the City of London. She is a warm-hearted woman who has known the famously fat and debauched Sir John Falstaff for ‘these twenty-nine years’. She is very fond of him and he exploits this affection by borrowing money from her and neglects to pay it back. She has just summoned two officers, Fang and Snare, to arrest him for the debt. The officers hesitate, fearing for their own safety (‘It may chance cost some of us our lives, for he will stab’), and she interrupts with this outburst. In her verbosity she often gets her words confused. She could be any age from thirty upwards.
