II. iv. 36. The ballad sung by Falstaff has been preserved in Percy's Reliques.
II. iv. 52. Another scrap of an old ballad.
II. iv. 91. debuty. Mistress Quickly's pronunciation of deputy, and of Wednesday in line 93, both of which are corrected in the Folio text, indicates that she has a cold in her head.
II. iv. 104, 105. tame cheater. A cant term for a low gamester, especially for a gamester's decoy. Mistress Quickly understands the word in the sense of escheator, or officer of the exchequer. The Cambridge editors suggest the emendation chetah, the hunting leopard, known in Europe as early as the fifteenth century. The sentence, you may stroke him as gently as a puppy greyhound, would indicate at least that Falstaff is playing on the two words cheater and chetah. One would hardly speak of stroking a gamester's decoy.
II. iv. 159. occupy. This word was used only in an obscene sense in Shakespeare's day. From the sixteenth to the nineteenth century it seldom appears in literature.
II. iv. 172. Have we not Hiren here? This phrase, which became proverbial in Elizabethan drama, probably originated in a lost play by George Peele, entitled, The Turkish Mahomet and Hyren (Irene) the Fair Greek. Pistol applies the name to his sword. Mistress Quickly (11. 189, 190) thinks he is inquiring for some woman.
II. iv. 177, 178. Pistol misquotes from Marlowe's Tamburlaine the Great, Pt. II, IV, iv:
'Holla, ye pamper'd jades of Asia!
What! can ye draw but twenty miles a day?'
II. iv. 192. Another burlesque of contemporary drama. This time Shakespeare puts into Pistol's mouth a reference to Peele's Battle of Alcazar,
