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

Conclusion

Falstaff will continue to intrigue audiences and readers for many generations to come. He has become a cultural icon, a shining example of the playwright’s art, and a figure who symbolizes the spirit of comic invention. He is without equal. Yet, at the same time, he is also a perplexing figure for the literary critic and the student of English literature. For generations, critics have debated on how to define the character and how to label him. For some critics, he is a complex and intriguing composite of many literary figures and types. For other critics, he is an unstable figure who apparently differs remarkably as Shakespeare moves him from one history play to another and from the history plays to the comedy. One possible answer to this perplexity is that William Shakespeare was deliberately manipulating and altering the character of Falstaff as he appears in the three separate plays. As Shakespeare had done elsewhere, he was experimenting with dramatic conventions. He was stretching those conventions and even breaking them. In the particular instance of Falstaff, Shakespeare was playing with the concept of comic character types. During the Classical Age, Aristotle (or his followers) clearly distinguished among three comic types: the Jester, the Impostor, and the Buffoon (“characters of comedy are the buffoonish, the ironical and the boasters”). Shakespeare, in fashioning his grand and immortal comic creation, decided to experiment with those three types by devising a character that has