[In the following essay, Roberts surveys the critical assessment of the character of Falstaff, focusing on the treatment of the character by neoclassicists, Romantics, and Romantic Victorians. In particular, Roberts discusses critical concern over the discrepancies between the character of Falstaff in The Merry Wives of Windsor and the Falstaff character from the Henry IV plays.]

The history of critical reactions to the Falstaff of Shakespeare's The Merry Wives of Windsor recapitulates the history of Shakespeare criticism as a whole. The development has been complicated by the idiosyncrasies of individual critics and by uncertainty as to the date, occasion, and textual peculiarities of the play; but as in other Shakespeare criticism, one may clearly perceive the shaping patterns of Neoclassical, Romantic, Victorian, and Modern critical premises and attitudes of mind behind individual judgments of the Windsor Falstaff.¹ The various critical theories have typically evolved in response to one problem, a problem that has been considered by nearly all critics: how should the Windsor Falstaff be related to the man of Eastcheap?²

Curiously enough, this “problem” was of very little concern to Neoclassical critics, but from the late eighteenth century to the present it has caused consternation and endlessly ingenious efforts at explanation. Generally speaking, one distinguishes in Neoclassical criticism of The Merry Wives the same concerns with dramatic structure and morality which marked other Shakespeare criticism of the period. “Character” criticism of the sort that develops with Maurice Morgann and the Romantics simply does not enter the writing of the typical Neoclassicists. Their concern with morality leads them to applaud Falstaff's defeat both in The Merry Wives and in Henry IV, Part II, and their rather sophisticated awareness of “personalities” as primarily instruments of plot made them indifferent to apparent inconsistencies in character.

The start of Neoclassical criticism of The Merry Wives may be dated with John Dryden's praise of the structure of the play. In his discussion of the unities in his Of Dramatic Poesy in 1668, he says, “I could produce even in Shakespeare's … works some plays which are almost exactly formed; as the Merry Wives of Windsor.”³ Substantially the same attitudes, with some individual variations, continue to appear throughout the eighteenth century and indeed well into the nineteenth, long after the Romantic emphasis on character has become the dominant approach.

Neoclassical critics tend to write of Falstaff, in the three plays which include him, as one man and occasionally even to single out the figure of the comedy for special praise. Perhaps understandably, John Dennis in 1702 prefers the character of the comedy he chose to adapt in his version of The Merry Wives to the Falstaff of Henry IV, Part II. His preference is based on the critical premise that actions in drama are better than words, and he notes that in most of Henry IV, Falstaff “does nothing but talk,” whereas “in the Merry Wives he every where Acts.”⁴ In 1709 Nicholas Rowe seems to notice no discrepancy between the various views of the character, saying that it “is always well-sustain'd, tho' drawn out into the length of three Plays.”⁵ And Lewis Theobald is apparently satisfied by the picture of Falstaff in The Merry Wives, finding that he is “design'd the Favourite Character in the Play … and that he is sufficiently punish'd, in being disappointed and expos'd.”⁶

In her discussion of Shakespeare's morality, Mrs. Griffith speaks of Falstaff seemingly with equal delight in each of the three plays, and she even mentions favorably the scene of Falstaff's humiliation which particularly disturbs later critics: “There is a very good reflection made here, upon the nature of fear or guilt being apt to confound our reason and senses, so as to lead us to mistake appearances for realities.”⁷ Elizabeth R. Montagu agrees in regarding the portrait as sustained through all its appearances: “We must every where allow his wit is just, his humour genuine, and his character perfectly original, and sustained through every scene, in every play, in which it appears.”⁸

Similarly Richard Cumberland in 1785 continues to speak of Falstaff as one man: “a character, which neither ancient nor modern comedy has ever equalled, which was so much the favourite of its author as to be introduced in three several plays, and which is likely to be the idol of the English stage as long as it shall speak the language of Shakespear.”⁹ And from Henry Mackenzie's account in The Lounger, one gathers that the novelist sees nothing incongruous in the Falstaff of The Merry Wives. For his comparison of Falstaff and Richard III Mackenzie draws on the three Falstaff plays without distinction.¹⁰

As early in the century as 1744, however, signs of a shift toward the Romantic view begin to appear. Corbyn Morris, Francis Gentleman, Thomas Davies, Samuel Johnson, and August Schlegel may all be considered transitional figures. All of them mention some inferiority in the Windsor Falstaff, although all are able to account for it satisfactorily in either moral or dramatic terms. Morris in 1744 gives a curious description of the Falstaff in The Merry Wives, which sounds like a reference to a real man, saying that he finds him “greatly below his true character” (italics mine); but he immediately supplies a moral explanation, attributing to Shakespeare a desire to “avoid the Imputation of encouraging Idleness and mirthful Riot by too amiable and happy an Example.”¹¹

Francis Gentleman in 1774 evidently views this Falstaff as good but not equal to that in Henry IV, “beyond doubt, a rich, well-drawn, ably-finished portrait.” He adds that “maintaining him with so much, though not equal, vigour, through three pieces, shows most evidently a rich and powerful genius.”¹² And speaking of the play as performed at Lincoln's Inn Fields, Thomas Davies in 1784 simply refers to this Falstaff as the “feeblest” without explanation.¹³ Samuel Johnson considers the portrait shadowed by the poet's lack of enthusiasm in an assigned task:

Shakespeare knew what the queen, if the story be true, seems not to have known, that by any real passion of tenderness, the selfish craft, the careless jollity, and the lazy luxury of Falstaff must have suffered so much abatement, that little of his former cast would have remained. Falstaff could not love, but by ceasing to be Falstaff. He could only counterfeit love, and his professions could be prompted, not by the hope of pleasure, but of money. Thus the poet approached as near as he could to the work enjoined him; yet having perhaps in the former plays completed his own idea, seems not to have been able to give Falstaff all his former powers of entertainment.¹⁴

The last critic who could be called Neoclassical is Schlegel. As late as 1808 he finds the situations of the play “droll beyond all description.” His judgment of Falstaff seems to combine the ideas of Johnson with those of Gentleman. If the first infatuation or pretended infatuation can be admitted, he feels the events are probable, though not very flattering to Falstaff.¹⁵

The first great landmark of Romantic criticism of Falstaff is Maurice Morgann's An Essay on the Dramatic Character of Sir John Falstaff (London, 1777). It deserves particular attention for its emphasis on nonrational as well as rational elements in the reactions of the audience to Shakespeare's characters. Specifically with regard to Falstaff, Morgann shows a new subtlety and complexity in character criticism, insisting that Falstaff cannot be a coward, because of the feeling of affection and admiration which he evokes in his audience. Morgann is the first of a long line of passionate apologists for Falstaff. Although he recognizes in the character a kind of dramatic device, he also credits him with some of the complexity and mystery of a real person and thus partially foreshadows the development of Romantic criticism. Certainly the image of Falstaff here is, to use M. H. Abram's figures, not simply a mirror skillfully reflecting life, but also something of a lamp illuminating reality and providing the audience with an opportunity for experimental identification, interaction, and interpretation.¹⁶ And yet, in spite of his admiration for Falstaff, Morgann never laments his rejection by Hal nor commits himself about the play in which his hero is defeated by two women. His essay omits all mention of The Merry Wives. This omission may be taken as a dismissal of the play as insignificant, or as a tacit recognition of the fact that the picture of Falstaff there is damaging to his thesis; but Morgann makes one comment which possibly implies (in the words “at least”) that he has not been disturbed by the variety of Falstaff's portrayals. He says that Shakespeare's purpose was “to furnish out a Stage buffoon of a peculiar sort; a kind of Game-bull which would stand the baiting thro' a hundred Plays. … There is in truth no such thing as totally demolishing Falstaff; he has so much of the invulnerable in his fame that no ridicule can destroy him.” And Morgann adds that “He is not formed for one Play only, but was intended originally at least for two” (pp. 299-300). One must conclude, then, of Morgann that, although his comments help to prepare the ground for critical discussion of discrepancies among the portraits of Falstaff, he himself has not dealt with the problem.

Concern such as Morgann's with the personality and psychology of Falstaff continues to manifest itself throughout the nineteenth century and is, indeed, the distinguishing mark of Romantic criticism. In the nineteenth century, critics tend to see Falstaff less as a vehicle of humor or an instrument of plot or moral teaching than their predecessors have and treat him more as a real man. This attitude leads some critics to begin to resent the rejection of Falstaff in Henry IV, Part II and frequently engenders problems in dealing with The Merry Wives. Interestingly, however, their psychological concern does not always lead to the rejection of the Windsor Falstaff.

Charles Lamb, certainly one of the subtlest of the Romantic critics, is maddeningly silent about The Merry Wives, but there is no indication that he would follow the line of reasoning laid out by Morgann.¹⁷ His comments about cowardice on the stage show a sensitivity to psychological argument, but he focuses on the actor and his interaction with the audience rather than on the character in the play. Taken seriously, Lamb could have provided a corrective to the extreme Romantic impetus of Morgann's apology for Falstaff, enlarging the psychological focus beyond the characters in the play. Although he is not speaking specifically of Falstaff, Lamb says that cowardice is the “most mortifying infirmity in human nature,” and that depicted naturally on the stage, it would never evoke laughter. Mirth at cowardice, he continues, is “effected … by the exquisite art of the actor in a perpetual subinsinuation to … the spectators … that he was not half such a coward as we took him for.”¹⁸

Lamb's single reference to The Merry Wives is an oblique one, but it does reveal an interest in the psychological relationship between author and audience, combined with a curious desire to exclude the actor altogether. At the end of the essay “On the Tragedies of Shakespeare,” in which he contends that the tragedies are for the study rather than the stage, Lamb adds intriguingly: “It would be no very difficult task to extend the inquiry to his comedies, and to show why Falstaff, Shallow, Sir Hugh Evans, and the rest are equally incompatible with stage representation” (Dramatic Essays, pp. 195-96). Lamb did not initiate a trend, in this respect, and one can only speculate how such an argument might have been developed. The questions of psychological interaction between actor and audience and between playwright and audience are not pursued by Romantic critics. Such problems remain to be taken up again in the twentieth century.

Sharing the dominant nineteenth-century interest in personalities in the plays are Samuel Weller Singer, William Mark Clark, Charles Knight, and Charles Cowden Clarke. All of them analyze Falstaff somewhat in the spirit of Morgann, but none of them carries his sympathy so far as to be forced to reject The Merry Wives because it shows Falstaff's defeat. In 1826 Singer finds the Falstaff of The Merry Wives still “inimitable,” still “a butt and a wit,” and still “the most perfect comic character that ever was exhibited.”¹⁹ Clark considers the Windsor Falstaff “as rosy and as rubicund as ever. … With his powers of entertainment undiminished—as full of wit and waggery as when he marched his ragged regiment of mortal men to fill a pit at the battle of Shrewsbury.”²⁰

Charles Knight wrote in 1846 that the Falstaff of the “first sketch” is “not at all adroit, and not very witty.”²¹ By 1854, however, he seems to admit of no basic change in the character:

The sensual and rapacious Falstaff is so steeped in overweening vanity and loose principle, that we rejoice in every new turn of his misadventures, but we never hate him. We laugh at his degradations and feel that shame is the severest infliction that is necessary for the correction of such follies; and that the unclean knight is fully punished when he says, “I begin to perceive that I am made an ass.”²²

In contrast to Knight's Victorian strictures is Charles Cowden Clarke's description in 1863 of Falstaff as the “sunniest” part of The Merry Wives: “incomparable Sir John Falstaff! … it would be an absolute indignity to this sunshiny play, (like flouting the sun itself!) to omit mentioning Falstaff. … He, in himself, is all sunshine; for he is capable of dazzling the eyes with his brilliancy, even while they look upon roguery and vice.” Clarke specifically deals with what are by now the fairly wide-spread objections to this character and finds him not unequal to his previous appearances, concluding that “if we call to mind some of his finest passages here, we shall find, I think, that he scarcely, if at all, comes short of himself, in the other two dramas. For instance, what can exceed the insolent self-possession and sublime coolness, with which he throws over-board the accusations of Shallow and Slender?” Citing with praise the first scene, the buck-basket adventure, and the “mountain of mummy speech” he says of the latter, “No description in the previous plays exceeds this, both in wit and humour.” And, he continues,

If proof were wanting of Falstaff's being equal in this play to himself in the “Henry the Fourth,” witness that single little speech of his, when Mrs. Page affects to reproach him with his joint lovemaking to Mrs. Ford. In the midst of his eagerness to make his escape, he says:—“I love thee, and none but thee: Help me away!” …

Never was there a bolder jest than the one with which the following speech concludes. It forms a climax to Falstaff's daring impudence of wit. … if my wind were but long enough to say my prayers, I would repent!²³

This conviction that the Falstaff of the three plays is equal in appeal becomes, however, a minority view in the nineteenth century. For all that a number of eighteenth-century critics apparently noticed no incongruity in the character of Falstaff and, indeed, would probably not have thought of looking for the kind of consistency one might expect of a real person, it is, nevertheless, true that others noticed a difference in the conception of the character but considered it necessary for the carrying out of poetic justice and were pleased by the action of The Merry Wives or at least found it understandable and accounted for by circumstances. Once the idea became established that a character in a play might be considered as a person with whom one might identify and through whom one might explore realms beyond experience, it is hardly surprising that the Falstaff of Henry IV should capture the imagination and loyalty of the romantic rebel and the antiauthoritarian and would later provide a delightful and acceptable extension of emotional activity for the conventional Victorian theatre-goer. The more extreme partisans of this Falstaff simply refuse to accept the portrait of the man in The Merry Wives. The idea that this Falstaff is not the same man began to be voiced in the nineteenth century, chiefly as a protest against the debasement of a favorite hero. The notion of the duality of Falstaff—seen by some even within The Merry Wives—has been picked up by twentieth-century critics to bolster their theories of composite authorship or of Shakespeare's adaptation of an old play.

Focus on the psychology of the character of Falstaff dominates the criticism of William Hazlitt, and more than anyone else it is he who sets the tone for Romantic reactions to the Windsor Falstaff. He is the first to say that the Falstaff of The Merry Wives is not the same man as the Falstaff of Henry IV, although Hazlitt seems to mean simply that the character is not as effectively displayed at Windsor as at Eastcheap. Thus Falstaff's “re-appearance in the Merry Wives of Windsor is not ‘a consummation devoutly to be wished’ for we do not take pleasure in the repeated triumphs over him.” Hazlitt adds that

Falstaff in the Merry Wives of Windsor is not the man he was in the two parts of Henry IV. His wit and eloquence have left him. Instead of making a butt of others, he is made a butt of by them. Neither is there a single particle of love in him to excuse his follies: he is merely a designing, bare-faced knave, and an unsuccessful one. The scene with Ford as Master Brook, and that with Simple, Slender's man, who comes to ask after the Wise Woman, are almost the only ones in which his old intellectual ascendancy appears. He is like a person recalled to the stage to perform an unaccustomed and ungracious part; and in which we perceive only “some faint sparks of those flashes of merriment, that were wont to set the hearers in a roar.”²⁴

Hartley Coleridge carries this suggestion of a different man to its logical extreme: “But the Falstaff of the Merry Wives is not the Falstaff of Henry the Fourth. It is a big-bellied imposter, assuming his name and style, or at best it is Falstaff in dotage.”²⁵

There is a chorus of similar comments from other critics. William Oxberry finds “there can be no comparison” between the two Falstaffs. Although he likes The Merry Wives, he admits to strong ambiguity of feeling about Falstaff: “when at last he is punished, I know not whether more regret is not excited that his wit is foiled, than pleasure that his vice is punished.”²⁶ The comment in the 1836 Hilliard, Gray edition is equally ambivalent:

Animated as this comedy is with much distinct delineation of character, it cannot be pronounced to be unworthy of its great author. But it evinces the difficulty of writing upon a prescribed subject, and of working with effect under the control of another mind. As he sported in the scenes of Henry IV, Falstaff was insusceptible of love; and the egregious dupe of Windsor, ducked and cudgelled as he was, cannot be the wit of Eastcheap, or the guest of Shallow, or the military commander on the field of Shrewsbury. But even the genius of Shakespeare could not effect impossibilities. He did what he could to revive his own Falstaff; but the life which he reinfused into his creature was not the vigorous vitality of Nature: and he placed him in a scene where he could not subsist.²⁷

And Barry Cornwall's fondness for Falstaff, even though he is not so “unctuous and irresistible” as before, leads him to actual hostility toward the “witcheries” of the “wicked wives.”²⁸ Like Cornwall, H. N. Hudson in the 1850s feels that the reader resents Falstaff's downfall because the other characters are colorless beside him. Indeed, Hudson argues that Falstaff comes off best among the disappointed characters; for “all the more prominent characters have to chew the ashes of disappointment in turn, their plans being thwarted, and themselves made ridiculous, just as they are on the point of grasping their several fruitions. But Falstaff is the only one of them that rises by falling and extracts grace out of his very disgraces.”²⁹ A few years later Richard Grant White expresses his agreement with Hazlitt and Coleridge that this Falstaff, “irresistible as he is,” is “far inferior” to the one of the histories. White refers to Dennis as “the critic who, with the feeble perversity of his day and generation, could prefer the least to the most admirable Falstaff.” And he sees Shakespeare as writing the play grudgingly with a heart which ached at causing Falstaff to be unsuccessful, though “There could have been but one thing sadder for Falstaff than want of success in love, and that was, success.”³⁰

Maintaining that Shakespeare must have deliberately reined in the humor of Falstaff to avoid his overshadowing the other characters, William W. Lloyd in 1858 says that if allowed to go one step farther, Falstaff would have “brought in such a blaze of wit” as to have eclipsed the “provincial inanities” which supply much of the pleasure of the play, and we should not have seen what “the highest genius” could create from “the surface deposits of districts as barren as the dullest country town or its still duller neighborhood.” He wonders about the credibility of the final scene, asking whether such superstitious belief in fairies can be believed to exist in a man of Falstaff's social position and habits. He concludes that it is not “an utter improbability” that Falstaff should, when nonplussed, entertain the “possibility of Fairy,” but he feels that it is a low point for him to reach: “he is not only entrapped, but deceived more disgracefully than all the others, and by the very grossest hoax; and neither Simple nor Page, who mistook him for an old woman, nor Caius nor Slender, the chief butts of the piece, who carried off louts of boys for Anne Page, made a fault so inexcusable as taking Parson Hugh for a fairy.”³¹

The transition from Romantic to Victorian criticism is gradual, indeed sometimes imperceptible. One major thread of Romantic criticism recurs almost unchanged in critical patterns throughout the Victorian period and up into the 1950s. The rejectors of the Windsor Falstaff remain vocal and persistent. To draw a line between members of this group is actually quite arbitrary. In 1886, Henry N. Wheatley's comment in his edition of The Merry Wives sounds almost indistinguishable from that of William W. Lloyd in 1858. He regrets to find this Falstaff “sadly deteriorated” with his mental power almost in eclipse. The character is “on a lower line,” he adds, although he can certainly hold his own against Shallow and to some extent against his own men. He is fooled by two women, however, and “his coarseness and bestiality are not redeemed … with much extraordinary wit.” In spite of this weakness, Wheatley finds him “sufficiently the older character to cause the reader to resent his fall.”³²

Edward Dowden agrees, in 1892, that “the fatuous Falstaff of the Merry Wives is far different from the ever-detected yet never-defeated Falstaff of the historical play.”³³ And in 1901 he speaks even more strongly, saying that although the Queen and the court probably did not know the difference, Shakespeare has hardly fulfilled the royal command: “Falstaff he was not prepared to recall from heaven or from hell. He dressed up a fat rogue, brought forward for the occasion from the back premises of the poet's imagination, in Falstaff's clothes; he allowed persons and places and times to jumble themselves up as they pleased, he made it impossible for the most laborious nineteenth century critic to patch on The Merry Wives to Henry IV.”³⁴

And Algernon Swinburne adds to this chorus, speaking with the fervor of Hazlitt. Comparing The Merry Wives to Paradise Regained, he depicts Falstaff as “shorn of his beams, so much less than archangel (of comedy) ruined, and the excess of (humorous) glory obscured.” He maintains that the genuine Falstaff could not have played such a part: “To exhibit Falstaff as throughout the whole course of five acts a credulous and baffled dupe, one ‘easier to be played on than a pipe,’ was not really to reproduce him at all.” And Swinburne considers the “apology” made for Falstaff's errors which explains them as due to his “guiltiness of mind” to be the “best excuse that can be made” but for “the pristine Falstaff” totally inadequate.³⁵

Going still farther, Frederick Boas dismisses the Falstaff of The Merry Wives as Shakespeare's “literary crime”: a creature recognizably like his former self but lacking “fascination.” Similarly, although acknowledging a few signs of the high spirits of the earlier man, George Brandes finds Falstaff for the most part an unbelievable blunderer, “so preternaturally dense that his incessant defeats afford his opponents a very poor triumph.”³⁶

Probably the best known of the rejectors of the Windsor Falstaff is A. C. Bradley, who, viewing the Falstaff of Henry IV as a source of “sympathetic delight” because of his superiority to everything serious and his tremendous “freedom of soul,” is outraged by the “hasty farce” in which Falstaff is “baffled, duped, and treated like dirty linen, beaten, burnt, pricked, mocked, insulted, and worst of all, repentant and didactic.” He specifically excludes the man of The Merry Wives from his discussion of Falstaff, saying that the separation of the two characters has been long effected and insisted on by competent critics.³⁷ Like Bradley, Sidney Lee regrets the portrait in The Merry Wives and considers this man “a caricature of his former self.” “His power of retort has decayed, and the laugh invariably turns against him. In name only is he identical with the potent humororist of ‘Henry IV’.”³⁸

Given the repeated insistence on the discrepancies between the two Falstaffs and the preoccupation of early twentieth-century critics with textual studies, it was probably inevitable that someone should suggest a relationship between the character and the genesis of the text. J. M. Robertson in 1917 and Alfred Pollard and J. Dover Wilson in 1919 are the first to explore the possibility seriously. Therefore, although they continue to be influenced by the Romantic-Victorian attitude toward Falstaff, they merit consideration as founders of one branch of modern criticism, while Lee and Bradley may be categorized as the last of the Victorians.

I have traced the progress of the group that may be called the Romantic Victorians—those who insist that The Merry Wives's Falstaff is not the same man as their hero of Henry IV. Another strong tendency manifests itself during the late nineteenth century—a tendency which may be thought of as perhaps more typically Victorian in its emphasis on morality. Beginning with the critique of James O. Halliwell in 1853 and continuing through that of William Winter in 1916, the two Falstaffs are reunited by critics who usually see a “decline” in The Merry Wives but believe it to be dictated by the exigencies of plot or setting or by moral imperatives. These critics often sound like so many reincarnations of the Neoclassicists, differing chiefly from their predecessors in their continuing focus on Falstaff the “man.”

Halliwell finds the Falstaff of The Merry Wives inferior to the wit of the Boar's Head but not different enough to justify the theory that the roles represent two characters. He thinks Shakespeare has “compromised his original character … as little as possible” by not showing him actually in love but by “bringing his addiction to the fair sex more prominently before the spectator,” and thereby obeying the Queen but changing his original conception as little as possible.³⁹ John A. Heraud is more clearly sympathetic toward The Merry Wives. He finds its Falstaff the “worthiest” character of the play. Writing in 1865, he sees the differences in the portrait here from that of the histories as dictated chiefly by setting. He points out that we see him here “independent of court life” in his natural character with private temptations. “The carnal man is free, and misuses his liberty,” he says, but finds Falstaff at least not guilty of hypocrisy. Falstaff has outgrown both the sentiment and the appetite of love, but he uses an offered opportunity which pleases his vanity and seems to offer monetary gain. When he finds out that he has been fooled, he appreciates the joke even though it is on himself. Heraud finds that there is “something noble in the fat old sinner,” which leads Page to promise that Falstaff shall yet laugh at his wife. He believes that Shakespeare meant Falstaff to have even here a positive value and not to be viewed with contempt.⁴⁰

Even more clearly Georg Gervinus is led by the urgency of his moral concern to applaud the action of The Merry Wives and to explain its place in the series of plays. He thinks that this Falstaff is the same man as before, now declined in effectiveness, and indeed that he was never intended as the completely sympathetic figure Hazlitt took him to be. He believes that Falstaff's decline is shown in contrast to the growing greatness of Henry and that this play would have been written whether the Queen had commanded it or not. He feels that it was “unquestionably Shakespeare's intention” to repeat the moral lesson of Henry IV, Part II and that to do so was necessary because he saw the bad effects on the audience of Falstaff and his friends in Part I. Therefore he here degraded Falstaff “in the highest point of his distinction, that is, in his wit,” and provided “glaring example of punishment” for Bardolph and Nym in Henry V. Gervinus insists that Shakespeare was startled at the popularity of these characters and for this reason “emphasized so strongly the moral tendency of the play, as far as was practicable with retaining the merry pleasantry of the comedy.” And he shows why he believes that the basic moral pattern of the four plays demands that Falstaff be discredited:

Unclouded honest sense is always superior to base passion. And this moral, which links together these four intrigues, will be found, if we consider the piece from an ethical point of view … to have a special reference to Falstaff's position and character. … An egoist like Falstaff can suffer no severer defeat than from the honesty in which he does not believe, and from the ignorance which he does not esteem. The more ridiculous side of self-love is, therefore, in this play subjected to a ridiculous tragic-comic fall, which, as regards time and the development of the plot, precedes the serious comic-tragic fall which meets Falstaff on the accession of the king, when the serious and mischievous side of his self-love was just on the point of a dangerous triumph.⁴¹

In 1902, Rosa Grindon's praise of The Merry Wives is probably the high point of apology both for the play and for its protagonist. She considers the decline of Falstaff the result of a natural process, already begun in Henry IV: “It is one thing to say we do not like the Falstaff of the ‘Merry Wives,’ but quite another to say that Falstaff of even the first part of ‘Henry IV.’ (let alone the second) would not have degenerated into the man as we see him there.” Pointing out that Falstaff must have had great potentiality in his younger days, she suggests that Elizabeth may have wished to see him under the redeeming influence of a “really good woman” and adds that the Queen was not dramatist enough to see that “certain evils were too ingrained for him to love anyone but himself.” She considers it “a trenchant playing forth of the irony of life” that Falstaff, who considered women fair game, should be “put to shame and made to ‘quake for fear’” by two women. Her final startling hyperbole comes in reference to the showing up of Falstaff's “guiltiness of mind” in the last scene: “then comes in one of the most magnificent and meaningful touches to be found in literature. Before he is condemned, he has to be tried by fire.” The presence of Parson Hugh, she adds, supplies the judgment of the church.⁴²

H. C. Hart in his edition of 1904 shares the more general Victorian view of the Windsor Falstaff, calling him “sadly deteriorated” and poor by comparison to the other plays. But he adds that “if there were no other delineation of him, he would be thought excellent.” He prefers to attribute the decline to Shakespeare's deliberate purpose rather than to his haste or carelessness, maintaining that the author has “deliberately and intentionally” pulled Falstaff down “from his pedestal of popularity” for the purpose of showing his vices—“greed, selfishness and lust”—to be contemptible.⁴³

The change in Falstaff is not so much a decline as a logical working out of the effect of character traits inherent in him from the beginning, and simply seen here in a new light, according to Charlotte Porter in 1909: “The true difference between his superficially more flattering appearances earlier than later, when he is held up to somewhat less diverting and much more contemptuous ridicule, consists not in the essential worth of his personal traits, but in the artistic treatment and color used by Shakespeare in order to suit and throw into relief the purport of each plot.” “He is,” she asserts, “throughout the same gross rogue of double-edged laughter and bravado.” Porter opposes Swinburne's view that there has been “organic change” in the character. She agrees with Shallow that even in the histories Falstaff is “vain, credulous, fond, and mercenary.” And she adds that Falstaff, not Ford, is the real dupe and is tricked not by a “temporary aberration but by chronic weaknesses.” These weaknesses are shown in “a more uncompromising and unflattering” light in The Merry Wives than before, but they are “inherent in his nature as … conceived from the first.”

The first scene Porter sees as deliberately contrived to show Falstaff's fallen fortunes: “It shows Falstaff sufficiently under a cloud to be likely to find his followers more of a nuisance than an assistance, and to feel strongly a new and pressing need to undertake some more private and secure kind of ‘coni-catching.’” She attributes the new view partly to the change in Falstaff's relation to Prince Hal, pointing out that the Prince's “mocking favor and semi-protection” and the luster of his companionship shield the “fatuous make-shift, braggart and impotent self-importance” of Falstaff from ridicule in Henry IV for a time at least. She considers “atmospheric changes” both in the play and in England itself partly responsible: Falstaff is no longer seen with Hal's eyes or from the point of view of Hal's time but now “with the eyes of the Windsor burghers and their wives,” from a “more Puritanic view of life.” The rogue who has been “somewhat endearingly indulged, jestingly uncloaked, and only gradually and amid grave responsibilities renounced” is now still amusing but a “hopelessly unlucky lewdster” moving toward shame and confusion. Interpreting Shakespeare's characters as a working out of an interest in certain types or problems, she regards the Falstaff of The Merry Wives as the last stage of Shakespeare's concern with the “plausible rogue,” a characteristic type, seen also in the Parolles of All's Well in “a final phase of the generic figure.”⁴⁴ William Winter's comments in 1916 are very much in the same vein. Rejoicing in the “healthfulness of moral quality” in the play, he points out that although it “relates to the lewdness of an old sensualist, and is, therefore, intrinsically and ineradicably vulgar in subject, yet its treatment of that subject is strong, sensible, and humorous. If it depicts the grossness and the craft of animal desire, it does not omit to defeat, humiliate, and ridicule what it thus depicts.”⁴⁵

After Bradley and Lee on one hand and Grindon and White on the other, the two channels of Victorian criticism, similar in their grounding in the psychology of character but contradictory in their outcomes, may be seen to change their directions under the influence of modern theory. To be honest one must admit that the change is not so much an abrupt turn as a gradual modification. Similarly, two channels continue to characterize modern criticism, and for both channels the origins are clearly discernible in the nineteenth century.

One suspects that at the roots of twentieth-century rejections of the Windsor Falstaff there remains an emotional attachment to the “man” of Henry IV; but the critics typically attempt greater objectivity than did the Romantics. They account for the difference they perceive between the two Falstaffs with textual explanations, analysis of the hypothetical psychological processes of the author, the circumstances of composition, or the use of certain stage traditions.

The first critic specifically to tie the dual portrait of Falstaff to the idea that one view comes from another, precedent play is J. M. Robertson. Of Dennis's praise of the Falstaff of The Merry Wives he says, “No one for a hundred years past, it is to be hoped, has acquiesced in that estimate, if anyone ever did.” Robertson himself considers The Merry Wives Q the earliest of the Falstaff plays and supposes F to have been a revision by Shakespeare and someone else. The evolution, he says, was not “from” Henry IV but “to” Henry IV. Because he believes the revised play to be partly by Shakespeare, Robertson denies that the Falstaff of The Merry Wives is “devoid of wit” but still concludes that there is not in him “a true re-embodiment of the old knight.”⁴⁶ The theory of “continuous revision” of an old play set forth in 1919 by Alfred W. Polland and J. Dover Wilson also builds largely on the “inconsistency” of Falstaff. They reject what they call the “Joseph Surface” character of the man in The Merry Wives: “The trick of blowing up Joseph Surface to look like the bladder Falstaff had succeeded once; it went on succeeding; it continues to succeed unto this day. Yet can we wonder that the victim of this impersonification died of a heart ‘fracted and corroborate’ in Henry V?”⁴⁷ Arthur Quiller-Couch, in his comments in the Cambridge Shakespeare, edited with Wilson, keeps a foot in each camp of modern criticism. He accepts the Pollard-Wilson hypothesis of “some scattered twenty lines or so that was never written for [Falstaff] but belonged to the Joseph Surface amorist of the original,” adding that the “excision of these … would remove the fly from the ointment.” He maintains nonetheless that this Falstaff is “the genuine man,” for it is “rubbish” to say that “the Falstaff who played confederate in the Gadshill business and ‘receiver’ at least in the affairs of Master Shallow's venison and Mistress Bridget's fan, was incapable of amorous double-dealing with Mistress Page and Mistress Ford as a means of gilding his pockets and refurbishing his ragged and clamorous retinue” (p. 27). And again: “the Falstaff of The Merry Wives is the Falstaff of King Henry IV; his wit functions in the familiar way and his speech has all the wonted accent.”⁴⁸

Dover Wilson himself, when he comes to write The Fortunes of Falstaff, writes a cogent critique of the romanticizers of Falstaff, who have made him like a god in modern mythology chiefly because it is so “exhilarating to contemplate a being free of all the conventions, codes and moral ties that control us as members of human society.” To see him so, however, is to misread Henry IV, says Wilson, and is to fail to appreciate its emphasis on order. Shaping the views of such men as Bradley is a “special form of myopia,” he feels, growing from the influence of the “republicanism of Hazlitt” and the “sentimentality of Maurice Morgann.” In Wilson's view the trouble with the study of “latent motives” is that they usually come from the critic. Thus Falstaff provided the Victorians with an outlet for their own repressions. Bradley was drawn to what he himself was not, whereas Dr. Johnson, feeling himself all too much like the character, had seen more clearly the dangers of the “will to corrupt” combined with the “power to please.” Johnson was therefore unaware of any problem in the rejection of Falstaff, but Bradley was disturbed by it. Wilson's clearsightedness about the apotheosizing of the Henry IV Falstaff does not, however, increase his kindness toward the man of the comedy. He continues to maintain that though the two have the same body they are not the same, and thus justifies the exclusion of The Merry Wives from consideration in his book.⁴⁹

Thomas M. Parrott, too, finds inconsistency in Falstaff, though he admits it is “practically nonexistent to the auditor in the theater.” Like Wilson, he attributes the inconsistency to hasty adaptation of an old play.⁵⁰

With much the same ardor as the Romantic and Victorian rejectors of The Merry Wives, Agnes Mackenzie, O. J. Campbell, and M. R. Ridley express their outrage, either implicitly or explicitly espousing the theory of the modified old play. Mackenzie protests that this Falstaff is not the man: “I will swear to it that the true Falstaff never scuttled feebly from an intrigue in the disguise of last week's washing. He would have faced it out, and ended by getting the lady's husband to ask him to dinner, and to put his best port out at that.” Campbell agrees: “The mind that always moved in gay triumph many paces ahead of those who tried to dupe it has here become the slowest and heaviest in the play. Instead of being the hero and manipulator of the farce, he has become its victim. Everything about him, except his tun of flesh, has suffered a humiliating metamorphosis.” Ridley, in his introductory commentary to the New Temple Shakespeare, similarly declares that the Falstaff of this play evokes “exasperated bewilderment” and speaks in “the familiar idiom at the most inopportune and inappropriate moments.” Most readers, he suggests, would like to leave out these passages and laugh “at a dupe … masquerading under an alias to which nothing but a royal command entitles him.” He adds that if “we were watching just a fat disreputable knight being discomfited as he deserved we should enjoy ourselves.” But the Queen wanted Falstaff. “And so Shakespeare put the authentic label on the bottle though the contents are the merest moonshine.”⁵¹

William Green, though not so strong as Campbell in his disappointment in Falstaff, follows the latter's contention that The Merry Wives was constructed on the basis of a conventional Italian comedy with a pedant-scholar protagonist. He concludes that the Falstaff of The Merry Wives is completely debased by Shakespeare himself. Placing the composition of The Merry Wives after that of Henry IV, Part II, he thinks the promise at the end of the latter was only a “pathetic hope” and concludes that the Windsor comedy represented a “final sentence” on Falstaff, after which the author “had no choice but to send him to Arthur's bosom.” Like Green, J. M. Nosworthy assumes the revision of an old play, hypothesizing an English original rather than an Italian one. He does not, however, deal with the Falstaff problem in particular.⁵²

Two of the most interesting modern rejectors of the Windsor Falstaff are John Middleton Murry and H. B. Charlton, both of whom turn from exploration of the psychology of the character to analysis of the creative functioning of the author. In 1928 Murry declares of Shakespeare, “not what happens to, but what happens in him, is the subject of our care.” Maintaining with Romantic fervor the reality of Falstaff, he says, “Falstaff is far more than a name: he is a character, he is the embodiment of a vision of life. … [but] we can see that he is not a whole, and that there is a problem. … Falstaff is completely alive in Henry IV, Part I: he is far less alive in Part II; he is something altogether different in The Merry Wives; and in Henry V he is dead.” Murry explains the special quality of The Merry Wives by supposing that it was written to order and based on an earlier play. Underlying the decline of Falstaff after the brilliance of his first appearance, there is also the inability of genius to repeat itself. In the vein adopted later by Charlton and Green, Murry argues that Shakespeare himself was “cloyed with too much fat meat,” and that he hastened as soon as possible to kill off the offending cause of his surfeit.⁵³

Following a similar line of thought, H. B. Charlton contends that the author's excitement in the character has simply run out in The Merry Wives. His suggestion “neither requires nor presupposes a conscious purpose in Shakespeare's reason.” He guesses that Shakespeare thought at first that he had found a perfect comic hero in Falstaff:

With such a spirit, such a mind, such intuitions, and such an outlook on life, he appeared to bear within his own nature a complete guarantee of survival and of mastery of circumstance, the pledge of the perfect comic hero. But somehow or other, when the intoxication of creating him is momentarily quieter, hesitancies begin to obtrude and the processes of creation are different. The clogging becomes stronger. Falstaff must be cast off as he is cast off at the end of the second Henry IV. But a pathetic hope persists, and is spoken in the Epilogue; it may still be possible to save Sir John. … But before the play with Katherine in it is written, the issue is settled. Falstaff is irrevocably discredited, fit for nothing more but Windsor forest.

This culmination, concludes Charlton, was worse than Prince Hal's “murder” of his friend: it was “in Shakespeare, the crime worse than parricide—the slaughter of one's own offspring.”⁵⁴

One of the many modern critics who attempt to explain Falstaff in terms of comic tradition is E. M. W. Tillyard. One might expect that such an approach would lead him, as it has others, to an acceptance of the Falstaff at Windsor as one dimension of the comic creation; and indeed Tillyard comes very close to this position. In 1958 he describes the Falstaff of the Henry plays as a compelling picture of “the belly protesting against the soul.” The attitude of the critic toward Falstaff's rejection depends, according to Tillyard, on the relation of head and heart. He agrees with Wilson that Shakespeare's contemporaries would have seen that he stood for disorder and must be defeated. In The Merry Wives, however, Tillyard finds Falstaff no longer a sympathetic picaresque adventurer; there is no reason he should be, since the “idea of Falstaff as a creation to which he must at all costs be loyal” would have been foreign to Shakespeare, the “sacrosanctity of Falstaff” being a “late development, hardly begun in Dryden's day.” In spite of coming so close to acceptance, Tillyard ends by concluding with Wilson and the other rejectors that the Falstaff of The Merry Wives is a different man and that the few touches of the old character merely confuse the issue.⁵⁵

In contrast to the large group of twentieth-century rejectors of the Falstaff of The Merry Wives, there is another equally large group of critics who have accepted this Falstaff as a comic device, part of a comic tradition, or as a victim of circumstance. The common denominator of this group is their effort to resist what they consider the Romantic fallacy of treating Falstaff like a real human being. Certainly the great impetus to this line of thought was provided by E. E. Stoll. Stoll's basic premises grew out of strenuous objections to efforts to go beyond what is clearly shown in the plays, in analyzing character. In 1914 he saw Falstaff as a representative of the old comic type of the boastful soldier, insisting that there is no intentional deception or ambiguity, and that as represented in the plays, Falstaff is obviously a coward. Stoll says that Morgann “cannot read score” and accuses him of “unaesthetic kindliness” toward Falstaff. Asserting that Morgann has preferred the “latent and obscure” to the “prominent and obvious,” Stoll concludes that he would deserve little critical notice if he had not been so widely followed.⁵⁶ If Falstaff is indeed not a man but a cluster of literary conventions utilized for dramatic purposes, the whole question of whether or not he is a consistent character becomes almost meaningless. Stoll does feel, however, that the aspect seen in The Merry Wives is not inconsistent with the convention and contends that “the figure of the braggart captain … would have been incomplete if he had not appeared as the suitor gulled.”⁵⁷ In 1929, G. B. Bradby joins Stoll in pointing out that a strange feature of recent Shakespeare criticism has been the “apotheosis of Falstaff”: The Merry Wives stands “horribly in the way,” and the solution of many has been to “ignore it, forget it, scrap it.” Like Stoll, Bradby declares that there is no indication that Shakespeare was consciously degrading Falstaff or that Falstaff should be thought of as having any independent existence. He is only what Shakespeare made him, says Bradby, and no more.⁵⁸ In a similarly moderate vein, J. W. Mackail reminds us that Shakespeare's characters are “but shadows” and that this is “sufficient answer to the higher critics who have deplored … the degradation of Falstaff” in The Merry Wives.

John Drinkwater insists, without revealing whether he is considering a character or a convention, that Shakespeare took Falstaff to Windsor “without any loss of comic mastery.” Specifically rejecting Pollard and Wilson and other adherents of the theory of divided character, David White says in 1942 that though this Falstaff has not the brilliance of Henry IV's, we should avoid the other extreme of thinking him a dolt. He is “hardly a Euphuistic, sentimental Joseph Surface.” George Saintsbury admits a decline in this Falstaff but attributes it to circumstances: “Men are generally decadent, and frequently defeated, when dealing with women in such circumstances: and Falstaff's overthrow does not make him fall very hard after all.” And in his edition of Shakespeare's Works, George Lyman Kittredge refers to the Windsor Falstaff as “wildly comic,” seeming uneasy only about the problem of dating the play.⁵⁹

Like Stoll, Arthur Sewell argues for a certain critical distance in analyzing character and proposes a position which combines the emphasis on dramatic action with some of Charles Lamb's concern for the actor. Since Falstaff depends on an audience for his existence, Sewell suggests that Shakespeare identified with the actor and kept detached from the thought of a real man. It was a mistake, he says, ever to ask whether Falstaff was a coward, since the audience becomes infected with the character's own feeling that the question of cowardice is perhaps not an important one. The character is conceived independently of psychological motivation, and the only necessary consistency is aesthetic. There is emphasis on Falstaff's feeling only at the time of his rejection [by Hal]; and this scene, says Sewell, is “prose sediment in the poetry.”⁶⁰

Attributing the shift in attitude toward Falstaff to a shift in values beginning in the 1770s, Robert W. Langbaum notes in 1957 that Falstaff would naturally appeal to a liberal humanitarian such as Morgann. To the Romantic critics the character becomes heroic because of his very excesses, which cause failure but also insure distinction, and also because he possesses what were for them the prime virtues—sincerity and “existential courage.”⁶¹ Although Langbaum does not discuss The Merry Wives, I infer that he would find the Romantic reaction against this Falstaff a product of the Romantic shift in values.

In his Anatomy of Criticism (Princeton, 1957) Northrop Frye suggests an association of Falstaff in Henry IV, Part II with one of the functionaries of comedy, the pharmakos or scapegoat. Later in the same work he relates Falstaff in The Merry Wives to the mythic celebration of the cycle of seasons.⁶² Both interpretations serve to emphasize the functions rather than the personalities of comedy. The scapegoat associations are further developed by J. A. Bryant in a paper delivered at the Modern Language Association meeting in New York on 29 December 1970.

Reflecting the attitude of many modern critics, Allan H. Gilbert in 1959 again objects to such “character critics” as Bradley. He notes that for these critics Falstaff has became a man who lived in the flesh and whose rejection could cause the reader “a good deal of pain and some resentment.” He finds the notion that “an author is not to do more than one sort of thing is one of the most extraordinary of critical assumptions.” He attributes Falstaff's inconsistencies to the nature of the dramas in which he is seen. In contrast to the histories, he says, The Merry Wives is pure comedy without a serious plot; the Falstaff scenes occupy two-thirds of The Merry Wives as opposed to about half in Henry IV. The latter has comic incidents but not a comic plot, and it is not necessary that Falstaff be consistent. He is both a wit and a butt of jokes, but in The Merry Wives the plot requires that Falstaff be deceived and that his “immoral attempt to get money” be defeated. “He must be the butt. Yet he has a little incidental opportunity to play the wit.”

Clearly Gilbert still feels that difficulty will remain for at least some of his readers, and he offers another suggestion, based on his belief in the early date of The Merry Wives. He suggests that if The Merry Wives was the earliest of the three plays and what we see is development rather than degradation, then “even a Falstaffian of Bradley's school can look upon the immature Falstaff without indignation.” He adds that “we may even be allowed to think that parts of the first sketch were never surpassed.”⁶³

A modification of the Romantic view of Shakespeare's characters as people seems to be presented by Alfred Harbage, who finds them not so complex as life but considerably more complicated than most characters in fiction. He is different from the Romantics in that he examines not only the inner motivations of the characters but also the calculated artistic effects on the audience. Falstaff he views as a “moral paradox,” a wrongdoer, but one whose crimes have no ill effects which we can see: “Vice walking on earth is a terrible thing, but vice dancing in air is a delightful novelty. We are freed from the burdens of fear and disapproval. We fondle the viper and stroke the wolf. We laugh. It is Shakespeare's intention.”⁶⁴ Harbage does not discuss the question of whether any distinction should be made between The Merry Wives and Henry IV, but his analysis of Falstaff shows no acknowledgement of any discrepancy.

The most extensive recent discussion of The Merry Wives is that by H. J. Oliver in his new Arden edition of the play. His moderate consideration of the “problems” of Falstaff lines him up clearly with the critics who find the various manifestations of the character explained by the exigencies of the stage and the demands of comic structure. Quoting Gilbert with approval, Oliver points out that the indignities suffered by Falstaff in The Merry Wives have some precedents in his frequent discomfitures even in Henry IV, Part I And most important of all, he finds that “if the Falstaff of The Merry Wives shares one quality above all others with the Falstaff of Henry IV, that quality is, surely, the idiom.”⁶⁵

Very tentatively, then, one might suggest that the strongest motion of modern criticism is away from the Romantic rejection of the Windsor Falstaff. Not since 1940 have there been any cries of outrage at a favorite hero degraded, although the theory of remnants of an old play have persisted in Dover Wilson, Green, Nosworthy, and apparently in Tillyard.

Interestingly enough, modern directors of the play have continued to find new aspects of relevance in the Windsor Falstaff in addition to enduring comic qualities. Terry Hands is quoted in the program of the 1968 Royal Shakespeare Theatre production as seeing in The Merry Wives a struggle between the English middle class and the man from court, an interpretation which depends necessarily on the identity of the two Falstaffs. He says of this play that “Falstaff, whose life has been spent on the fringes of the court, comes into contact with this other class and fails to understand it. Taken in by the forthright humour of the merry wives themselves, he cannot see that they possess not only intelligence but virtue. The play, therefore, has a central conflict between two different levels of society.” Very trendily, Michael Kahn, in preparation for his 1971 production of the play for the Stratford, Connecticut Shakespeare Festival, noted overtones of Women's Liberation in the activities of the wives—a dimension that provides new bases for sympathy or antagonism toward the Windsor Falstaff.⁶⁶

What can one possibly conclude from the bewildering scope and variety of criticism of this endlessly intriguing cluster of verbal symbols? A few points seem sufficiently clear to be worth noting. Perhaps the clearest (and most deflating) revelation of a review such as the present one is of the extent to which individual critics are prisoners of their ages and their presuppositions. Admittedly I have oversimplified in tracing critical history; but, nonetheless, the options of a critic in any one age seem extraordinarily limited. There is essentially only one position for Neoclassical and Romantic critics, respectively; there are only two sharply definable attitudes in each of the Victorian and Modern periods. Only a small handful of critics stand out as really original: Morgann, Lamb, Hazlitt, Robertson, Pollard and Wilson, and Stoll; and in each case there is the suspicion that in the very excess of their originality each of them is in some absolute sense “wrong.” Morgann and Hazlitt surely exaggerate the sanctity of Falstaff. Lamb's desire to remove Shakespeare from the stage is counsel of despair and discounts his own insistence on the importance of actors. Robertson's textual theories have been taken seriously by almost no one; and Pollard and Wilson's theory of the revision of an old play, though ingenious, has not proved very fruitful. Stoll probably carries to absurd extremes the disallowing of the sense of a man behind the character.

Being wrong does not prevent these men from being exciting and influential, however. Indeed one learns in studying the criticism that, as important in it as the description, analysis, and evaluation of the play, is the use of the character and the play by critics to discover and describe themselves and their ages. This is a critical function not to be discounted. By analyzing their reactions to Falstaff, critics have discovered their own values and in formulating them have usually spoken for their own or upcoming audiences. One of the great gifts of a “classic” is that it provides a continuing standard, if not for agreement, at least for testing and comparison.

It would be reassuring if a study of the progressive criticism of this Falstaff revealed the outlines of some definitive picture, but this end is achievable only in the most limited way. The text of the play does exist, but its genesis has not been finally determined; and the text itself is ambiguous. An inevitable dimension of the real play is obviously its dramatic presentation, and this dimension by its very nature is always changing. In addition, every critic who speaks or writes contributes in some small way to the picture of the “true” Falstaff. For all these responders Falstaff is both a man and not a man. Even the most detached of eighteenth- and twentieth-century critics must have accepted the fact that the series of linguistic symbols which constitute the “character” are to some degree representative of a man or at least of man. And even the most personal of Romantic critics must have kept some clear recognition of a difference between a series of symbols and actuality. In a very real sense Falstaff has “become his admirers” and, of course, his detractors. To modify Frederick Pottle's dictum about poetry, the “whole Falstaff” is for the modern audience their own reactions, plus all its actors and directors, “plus all the other criticism the character has evoked.”⁶⁷

The most important critical constant which emerges is the continuing fascination of the series of linguistic symbols known as Falstaff. Clearly for the most diverse groups of critics it has been richly evocative and has brought meaningful patterns into widely differing contexts. Part of Falstaff's “greatness,” like Hamlet's, seems to lie in the ability of concrete images to attract and assimilate projections of a great variety of feelings from audiences. If the character is indeed a mirror held up to nature, it is clearly a mirror which can be seen over a very wide range and in many different lights. If the character is rather a lamp, it is a lamp which has illuminated different areas at different times, casting a brighter light for some than for others, and frequently leaving details obscure. And whether mirror or lamp, or both, or neither, the series of symbols is to be cherished for its enduring value—a value which seems to owe something to concreteness and something to ambiguity.

Having said all this, I will admit that I myself draw some further conclusions. Falstaff, incomparable as he is, is part of a developing plan and not an end in himself. The Falstaff of The Merry Wives is a comic device used for an important purpose in a rather complex play.⁶⁸ The sequence of humiliations in this play is part of the progress of the three Falstaff plays, and in all of them the character is essentially the same man. The most important “problem” is why the Windsor Falstaff has been such a problem. My own view of the play is epitomized by Verdi's adaptation of it in his opera Falstaff, composed in 1890-92, which reveals a precociously modern obliviousness to any inconsistency in the title character.

Verdi maintains the comic brilliance of Falstaff without ever permitting the focus on the individual to throw out of balance the sense of the community. The librettist has drawn freely on Henry IV as well as The Merry Wives for lines which show Falstaff's wit, bravado, practicality, and essential self-centeredness. The man is a threat to the families in Windsor and the stability of society, but he is also an endlessly fertile source of amusement and delight. He never steals the whole show, however; and this is clearly due in large part to the music. We are told by Francis Toye that the composer was determined that all the parts “must be of equal importance.”⁶⁹ And it is notable that there is only one aria in the score.

As a result, Falstaff, although alternately—even simultaneously—outrageous and pathetic, is always part of the ensemble. He evokes sympathy in his downfall as an individual; but at the same time he arouses uneasiness as a threatening member of the community, and it is clear that he must be controlled. Even the process of controlling him turns out to be functional. In punishing him the group seems to release its own hostilities, variously directed, and to compose for itself a new harmony. This social reconciliation is brilliantly celebrated in the final fugue, which is all the more poignant because of Falstaff's important contribution to it.⁷⁰

No matter how clear to me this view of the importance of the play in itself and as part of a larger pattern is, however, I am forced by my own observations of the critical history to recognize that I, too, am a prisoner of my age and my presuppositions. My conclusions, therefore, are offered not as a definitive, but as one more small contribution to the ever-expanding cumulative portrait of the Windsor Falstaff.

Notes

1. I have used these terms rather loosely and sometimes overlappingly: Neoclassical has been stretched to include the period from Dryden through Schlegel; Romantic indicates a period beginning with Maurice Morgann in 1777 and ending rather arbitrarily with W. W. Lloyd in 1858; the Victorians here begin with John Heraud in 1865 and end with Sidney Lee in 1916; the Modern period incorporates critics from Stoll in 1914 to the present. When their comments are relevant I have included European critics in my discussion as well as English and American ones but, since the criticisms do not seem to be geographically determined, I have not made geographical differentiations.

2. Obviously “Falstaff” is a series of linguistic symbols on paper. For convenience I have referred to him throughout as if “he” were a man.

3. Essays, ed. W. P. Ker, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1926), 1:79.

4. Critical Works, 2 vols. (Baltimore, 1939), 1:279.

5. Ed. Works of Shakespeare (London, 1733), 1:17.

6. Ed. Works of Shakespeare (London, 1733), 1:306.

7. The Morality of Shakespeare's Drama Illustrated (London, 1775), p. 129.

8. An Essay on the Writings and Genius of Shakespeare (London, 1769), pp. 106-107.

9. The Observer 86 (Dublin): 244.

10. (London, 1785-86), nos. 68-69, pp. 273, 275-76.

11. An Essay Towards Fixing the True Standards of Wit, and Humour, Raillery, Satire, and Ridicule (London, 1744), p. 18.

12. Ed. Shakespeare's Plays (London, 1774), 3, sig. H2.

13. Dramatick Miscellanies (London, 1784), pp. 248-49.

14. Plays of Shakespeare, ed. with George Steevens (London, 1785), 1:311-12.

15. Lectures on Dramatic Art (London, 1846), pp. 427-28.

16. M. H. Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp (New York, 1958), p. 6.

17. Samuel Taylor Coleridge also fails to discuss this play. The absence of criticism of the work in the writings of two out of three of the great Romantic critics is surely a strong indication of a changed attitude to the play, especially as it is the only play of Shakespeare mentioned by name in Dryden's Essay of Dramatic Poesy.

18. Dramatic Essays, ed. Brander Matthews (London, 1891), p. 142.

19. Ed. The Dramatic Works of Shakespeare, 10 vols. (Chiswick, 1826), 1:183.

20. Ed. The Plays of Shakespeare, 5 vols. (London, 1835), 5:5.

21. Ed. Works of Shakespeare, 7 vols. (London), 2:146.

22. Ed. The Stratford Shakespeare, 20 vols. (London), 2:92.

23. Shakespeare's Characters (London), pp. 148-50.

24. The Complete Works, 21 vols. (London, 1930-34), 6:32; 4:350. Hazlitt is modifying Hamlet's words. See Hamlet, 5.1. 210-11, in Complete Works, ed. George L. Kittredge (Boston, 1936).

25. Essays and Marginalia, 2 vols. (London, 1951), 2:133.

26. “The Merry Wives of Windsor,” The New English Drama (London, 1818-20), pp. 1, 3.

27. The Dramatic Works of Shakespeare (Boston, 1836), p. 22.

28. Ed. Works of Shakespeare, 3 vols. (London, 1843), 1:77.

29. Ed. Works of Shakespeare, 11 vols. (Boston, 1851-59), 1:214-15.

30. Ed. Works of Shakespeare, 12 vols. (Boston, 1857-66), 2:197, 206.

31. Essays on the Life and Plays of Shakespeare (London), pp. 11-13.

32. (London, 1886), pp. 34, 35.

33. Shakespeare (Philadelphia, 1892), p. 13.

34. Shakespeare: A Critical Study of his Mind and Art (London, 1901), pp. 370-71.

35. A Study of Shakespeare (London, 1895), pp. 116-18.

36. Boas, Shakespeare and His Predecessors (London, 1896), p. 297; Brandes, Plays of Shakespeare, 40 vols. (London, 1904), 4:7.

37. Andrew C. Bradley, Oxford Lectures on Poetry (London, 1909), pp. 248, 268, 273.

38. Life of Shakespeare (London, 1916), p. 247.

39. Ed. Works of Shakespeare, 16 vols. (London, 1853), 2:254.

40. Shakespeare, His Inner Life (London, 1865), pp. 243-44.

41. Shakespeare Commentaries (London, 1883), pp. 380-85.

42. Rosa L. Grindon, In Praise of Shakespeare's ‘Merry Wives of Windsor’ (Manchester, 1902), pp. 16, 37, 41.

43. The Merry Wives of Windsor (London, 1904), pp. 63-64.

44. The Merry Wives of Windsor, ed. with Helen A. Clarke (New York, 1909), pp. 11-16, 118.

45. Shakespeare on the Stage (New York, 1916), p. 390.

46. The Problem of ‘The Merry Wives of Windsor’ (London, 1917), pp. 7, 21.

47. “The Stolen and Surreptitious Shakespearian Texts,” Times Literary Supplement, 7 August 1919, p. 420.

48. “The Merry Wives of Windsor,” The Cambridge Shakespeare (Cambridge, 1919), pp. 24, 30, 24, respectively.

49. The Fortunes of Falstaff (Cambridge, 1943), pp. 6-14, 127-28, 4, 28, respectively.

50. Shakespearian Comedy (New York, 1949), pp. 260-61.

51. Mackenzie, The Women in Shakespeare's Plays (London, 1924), p. 108; Campbell, “The Italianate Background of ‘The Merry Wives of Windsor,’” Essays and Studies in English and Comparative Literature 8 (1932): 104, 113; Ridley, “Introduction,” New Temple Shakespeare (London, 1936), 1:74-75.

52. Green, Shakespeare's ‘Merry Wives of Windsor’ (Princeton, 1962), pp. 187-98; Nosworthy, Shakespeare's Occasional Plays (London, 1965), chaps. 7, 9.

53. “The Creation of Falstaff,” Discoveries (London, 1924), pp. 232, 236, 247, 250-53.

54. Shakespearian Comedy (London, 1949), pp. 196-97, 192, respectively.

55. “The Nature of Comedy and Shakespeare,” The English Association Presidential Address (July 1958), pp. 5-6, 9, 10-11.

56. “Falstaff,” Modern Philology 12 (1914): 66-67.

57. Shakespeare Studies (New York, 1960), pp. 455-56.

58. “Falstaff,” Short Studies in Shakespeare (London, 1929), pp. 53-54.

59. Mackail, The Approach to Shakespeare (Oxford, 1930), p. 59; Drinkwater, Shakespeare (London, 1933), p. 19; White, “The Text History of The Merry Wives of Windsor” (University of Iowa, unpublished dissertation, 1942), pp. 150-51; Saintsbury, Shakespeare (New York, 1934), p. 58; Works, ed. Kittredge (Boston, 1936), p. 63.

60. Character and Society in Shakespeare (Oxford, 1951), pp. 5, 13-14, 35-37.

61. “Character Versus Action in Shakespeare,” Shakespeare Quarterly 8 (1957); 63-66.

62. An Anatomy of Criticism (Princeton, N.J., 1957), pp. 45, 183.

63. The Principles and Practice of Criticism (Detroit, 1959), pp. 68-69, 75, 86-93.

64. As They Liked It (New York, 1947), pp. 78, 73-79.

65. The Merry Wives of Windsor, Arden Edition (London, 1971), 1:17-18.

66. “Address to the Company on the First Day of Rehearsal,” American Shakespeare Festival 1971, Directors Notes and Suggestions for Study, ed. Mary Hunter Wolf (Stratford, Conn., 1971), p. 4.

67. The Idiom of Poetry (Ithaca, N.Y., 1946), pp. 41-42.

68. See my forthcoming “The Merry Wives: Suitably Shallow but Neither Simple Nor Slender,” Shakespeare Studies 6 (1971).

69. Giuseppe Verdi (New York, 1946), p. 179.

70. For further discussion of these points, see my forthcoming articles: “Falstaff in Windsor Forest; Villain or Victim,” Shakespeare Quarterly; and “The Merry Wives as a Halloween Play,” Shakespeare Survey 25 (1971): 107-112.