Harold Bloom, as recently as 1998, refers to the character of Falstaff in The Merry Wives of Windsor as "psuedo-Falstaff" and criticizes the play by commenting that Shakespeare struggles with "false energy" because he is "uncomfortable with what he is doing and wishes to get over it as rapidly as possible" (315). Such criticism of the Windsor Falstaff is hardly new. In fact, as early as 1817 William Hazlitt also found great fault with the character and described him as "merely a designing, bare-faced knave, and an unsuccessful one" (15). The comments by Hazlitt and others in the early 19th century sparked a critical debate that has lasted for centuries. Some more recent critics thought that debate had come to an end by the middle of the 20th century: "Not since 1940 have there been any cries of outrage at a favorite hero degraded" (Roberts 108). Yet Bloom himself is clearly outraged by both the Windsor Falstaff and the comedy itself, and the debate is far from settled.
If one is to accept the comments made by Hazlitt or Bloom, one is, in essence, then accepting the idea that Shakespeare somehow became something far less than a master playwright during the time of his composing The Merry Wives of Windsor or, perhaps, that Shakespeare did not even know how to handle his own comic creation when that creation was transferred from the tableau of an