Robert Shallow
fictional character in Shakespeare's plays Henry IV, Part 2 and The Merry Wives of Windsor
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").
A thin, vain and often self-deluding individual, used to life in the provinces, Shallow functions as a dramatic foil to the rotund and worldly Sir John Falstaff, who visits Shallow's lands on royal business, but later returns intending to fleece Shallow of his money. In the Merry Wives he visits Windsor with his relative Slender, encountering Falstaff once more.
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. Other real-life models have also been proposed.
Henry IV, Part 2
In Henry IV, Part 2 Falstaff is commissioned to raise troops for the royal army to deal with a rebellion in the north. Shallow has been tasked to find suitable recruits in his locality. He tells his colleague Justice Silence that he looks forward to meeting Falstaff, who he hasn't seen for many years. He then reminisces about his youthful wild antics as a law student at Clement's Inn when Falstaff was a boy.
The public source identifies “Robert Shallow” as fictional character in Shakespeare's plays Henry IV, Part 2 and The Merry Wives of Windsor. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Robert, Shallow and fictional.
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This entry incorporates text from “Robert Shallow” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.