page_title: Doll Tearsheet
section_title: Character
hierarchical_section_title: Doll Tearsheet / Character
caption_attribution_description: English: Henry Fuseli, "Henry_IV_part_2_act_II_scene_4" for Boydell Shakespeare Gallery
context_page_description: Dorothy "Doll" Tearsheet is a fictional character who appears in Shakespeare's play Henry IV, Part 2. She is a prostitute who frequents the Boar's Head Inn in Eastcheap. Doll is close friends with Mistress Quickly, the proprietress of the tavern, who procures her services for Falstaff.
  Doll is noted for her wide repertoire of colourful insults and her sudden switches from wild tirades to sentimental intimacy and back again.
context_section_description: Doll's name is obviously emblematic of her trade. A contraction of Dorothy, the name "Doll", with its connotation of "plaything", was often given to prostitute characters, as with Doll Common in Jonson's play The Alchemist. Her surname is suggestive of her activities, as is that of the other "loose woman" mentioned in the play, Jane Nightwork. Stanley Wells and Eric Partridge say she is "so called, either because she tore the bed-sheets in her amorous tossings or because her partners did so while consorting with her". According to René Weis, 
  "Tearsheet' has been read as a misprint for 'Tearstreet' (i.e. street-walker) in the light of Hal's anticipating to meet 'some road' ( 2. 2.158), but a 'sheet-walker' or 'tearer' is equally plausible, in view particularly of Beaumont and Fletcher Valentinian 3. 1.340-1, where Maximus says 'If my wife for all this should be a whore now, / A kind of kicker out of sheets'"
  Harold Bloom says that Doll's eccentric compliments to Falstaff ("thou whoreson little tidy Bartholomew boar-pig") complement Hal's own apparently affectionate insults, with the difference that Doll's are sincere, since "Falstaff the Bartholomew boar-pig has just proved himself to his doxy as being, in her words, a 'whoreson little valiant villain', and is fully to her taste. Falstaff the Manningtree ox, however, has just been unmercifully made game of by the Prince for running away at Gadshill in a fashion that could only, by everyone in the tavern company except Falstaff, be taken as showing downright cowardice."
caption: Falstaff with Doll Tearsheet, print after Henry Fuseli
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