I see what thou wert if fortune, thy foe, were with nature, thy friend. (54-55)
Fortune and Nature are frequently personified by Shakespeare as Dame Fortune and Mother Nature. With this personification Shakespeare frequently comments on fortune (meaning fate) in his plays and most frequently refers to the negative role of fate – misfortune. Nature is Mistress Ford’s friend, according to Falstaff, because she is endowed with beauty and grace. But Fortune is Mistress Ford’s enemy because she did not have the good fortune to be born an aristocrat.
When Mistress Ford modestly protests that she does not deserve such high praise, Falstaff declares that he cannot speak pretentiously like the numerous “lisping hawthorn-buds that come like women in men’s apparel” (59-60). During the Renaissance they were many young aristocratic lovers who wore perfume and dressed in fancy clothes (perhaps like the character of Osric in Hamlet or the dandy messenger mentioned by Hotspur in Act I, Scene 3, Lines 32-38, of 1 Henry IV: “neat and trimly dressed, fresh as a bridegroom” and “perfumed like a milliner”). Falstaff is not one of these sweet- smelling, sweet-talking fashionable wooers; and the old knight (as well as Shakespeare) deplores them. Thus, Shakespeare inserts a bit of social criticism at this juncture; but the line also helps the knight to get down to business and simply declare his love to Mistress Ford.