The Merry Wives of Windsor (Vol. 83) - Jonathan Hall (essay date 1998)
Jonathan Hall (essay date 1998)
SOURCE: Hall, Jonathan. “The Evacuations of Falstaff (The Merry Wives of Windsor).” In Shakespeare and Carnival, edited by Ronald Knowles, pp. 123-51. Houndsmills, Great Britain: Macmillan, 1998.
[In the following essay, Hall examines the language of The Merry Wives of Windsor and views the play “as a successor to 2 Henry IV.”]
Counterfeit? I lie, I am no counterfeit. To die is to be a counterfeit, or he is but the counterfeit of a man who hath not the life of a man. But to counterfeit dying when a man thereby liveth is to be no counterfeit, but the true and perfect image of life indeed.
(Falstaff)1
Laughter is essentially not an external but an interior form of truth; it cannot be transformed into seriousness without destroying and distorting the very contents of the truth which it unveils. Laughter liberates not...
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