Understanding Shakespeare: The Merry Wives of Windsor by Robert A. Albano - HTML preview

Falstaff Two’s big comic scene is the recruiting, when he looks at the prospective draftees and coins them into a mint of witty remarks. In short, he becomes the walking embodiment of everything the play rejects: appetite, wordmongering, resistance to one’s proper role. He becomes, like Iago in the tragedies, or Autolycus and Caliban in the last plays, Shakespeare’s homo repudiandus, the character who focuses in himself everything to be rejected. This then is the essential difference … the earlier Falstaff actively tries on different roles; the later and more passive Falstaff finds himself forced into a pattern laid down for him by his context. (Holland lxxviii)

Holland’s description of Falstaff here (appetite, wordmongering, resistance to one’s proper role) also aptly describes the Impostor in a more general sense. Falstaff, like Volpone and Subtle, is an overreacher, a figure so greatly involved in his own sense of desire and purpose that he fails to recognize the turning tide of events of which he is a part. He is unable to predict his own downfall.