Mistress Quickly

Eleanor Quickly
Henriad character
Falstaff and Mistress Quickly from The Merry Wives of Windsor, Francis Philip Stephanoff, circa 1840
First appearance	Henry IV, part I
Last appearance	Henry V
Created by	William Shakespeare
Information
Nickname(s)	Nell
Gender	Female
Occupation	Innkeeper
Religion	Christian
Nationality	English

Mistress Nell Quickly is a fictional character who appears in several plays by William Shakespeare. She is an inn-keeper, who runs the Boar's Head Tavern, at which Sir John Falstaff and his disreputable cronies congregate.

The character appears in four plays: Henry IV, Part 1, Henry IV, Part 2, Henry V and The Merry Wives of Windsor.

In all the plays Quickly is characterised as a woman with strong links to the criminal underworld, but who is nevertheless preoccupied with her own respectable reputation. Her speech is filled with malapropisms, double entendres and "bawdy innuendo".

Her name may be a pun on "quick lay", though "quick" also had the meaning of "alive", so it may imply "lively", which also commonly had a sexual connotation. Quickly's character is most fully developed in Henry IV, part 2 in which her contradictory aspirations to gentility and barely concealed vulgarity are brought out in her language. According to James C. Bulman, she "unwittingly reaveals her sexual history" by her blithe malapropisms and "her character is both defined and undone by her absurdly original speech"

Though her age is not specified, the comment that she is "pistol proof" has been interpreted to mean that she is past childbearing age, and she says she has known Falstaff for twenty nine years.

In Henry IV, Part 1, Mistress Quickly is described as the proprietor of the Boar's Head Tavern in the London neighborhood of Eastcheap. She is married, as Prince Hal asks after her husband, referring to him as "an honest man"; he does not appear in the play. She participates in the mock-court scene in which Falstaff pretends to be the king.

In Henry IV, Part 2, she asks the authorities to arrest Falstaff, accusing him of running up excessive debts and making a fraudulent proposal of marriage to her (implying that she is now a widow). Mistress Quickly has a friendship of long standing with Doll Tearsheet, a prostitute who frequents the tavern, and protects her against aggressive men she calls "swaggerers". At the end of that play, Mistress Quickly and Doll Tearsheet are arrested in connection with the beating to death of a man by Ancient Pistol.

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