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

portrait: we see Falstaff Two do this with himself, his page, his tailor. Pistol, Prince Hal, Poins, Bardolph, Shallow, Prince John, and, of course, sherris-sack, in monologues quite different in style from his catechism of honor in 1 Henry IV (which tests a role). Falstaff Two may be responding to the same taste that led Jonson to pat such incidental character sketches into Every Man Out of his Humor and Cynthia's Revels or that accounts for the popularity of the character-books of Hall, Overbury, and others in the early seventeenth century, but, in any case, he has shifted from acting out different roles (often taken from books and the Bible) to a more passive taking in of what he sees, then spewing it out in words (the image of vomit occurs several times in 2 Henry IV). Falstaff One's big comic scene is the play-within-the- play in the tavern, when he tries on die roles of King Henry and Prince Hal. 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 lago 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 between the Falstaffs of 1 Henry IV and 2 Henry IV: 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 lxxvii-lxxviii in Signet 2