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 reveals 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 29 years.
Role in the plays In
Henry IV, Part 1, Mistress Quickly is described as the proprietor of the
Boar's Head Tavern in the London neighbourhood 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. In
The Merry Wives of Windsor she works as nurse to Caius, a French physician, but primarily acts as a messenger between other characters, communicating love notes in a plot largely concerned with misdirected letters. At the end she takes the role of the queen of the fairies in the practical joke played on Falstaff. In
Henry V, she is referred to as Nell Quickly. She is with Falstaff at his deathbed, and describes his death to his friends. She marries Falstaff's ensign, Ancient Pistol, despite having previously been engaged to
Corporal Nym. While Pistol is away in France, he receives a letter from which he learns that "my Doll is dead", having succumbed to the "malady of France" (
syphilis). Many editors take the name Doll to be a misprint for "Nell", but it has also been interpreted as a reference to Doll Tearsheet rather than Quickly.
Continuity issues File:Falstaff and other theatrical characters.jpg|thumb|The earliest depiction of Mistress Quickly (labelled "hostes[s]") with Falstaff, in a print from 1662 that depicts popular stage characters of the time Quickly's role in
The Merry Wives is sufficiently different from her role in the other plays that some critics have suggested that she cannot be the same character. There are some signs of attempts to make the events fit the action of the
Henriad plays, for example the brief scene in which Pistol expresses his attraction to her and says "she is my prize". This fits with his marriage to her in
Henry V. There is no further reference to his pursuit of her in the play, but he plays the part of her consort in the fairy masque at the end. There are similar, less glaring problems with the Henriad plays. In
Henry IV, Part 1 she is evidently a married innkeeper. No reference is made to the death of her husband in
Part 2, just that Falstaff promises to marry her. Likewise, the tavern seems to evolve into a reputed brothel by the beginning of
Henry V. ==In other literature==