Henry IV, Parts 1 and 2 (Vol. 90) | Tom McAlindon (essay date 2001)
Tom McAlindon (essay date 2001)
SOURCE: McAlindon, Tom. “Perfect Answers: Religious Inquisition, Falstaffian Wit.” Shakespeare Survey 54 (2001): 100-07.
[In the following essay, McAlindon agrees with literary scholars who maintain that Falstaff is a parody of both Sir John Oldcastle and contemporary Puritans. The critic also contends that in addition to creating a humorous caricature of Puritanism in the fat knight, Shakespeare ingeniously transformed “a Puritan butt into an exceptionally appealing character with a quicksilver mind and tongue.”]
I
Few would now deny that in Henry IV the character of Falstaff constitutes a deliberate and audacious caricature of a Protestant hero, the fourteenth-century champion of Wycliffe's doctrines, Sir John Oldcastle, the first Lord Cobham, ‘Lollardus Lollardorum’.1 Shakespeare's wicked joke, as Ernst Honigmann has called it,2 gave offence in his own...
[The entire page is 5522 words long]
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