audience may find that the once-lovable figure of the first play fails to garner their sympathy in the second play and perhaps even fails at sparking the same level of merriment and hilarity that he did so readily in the first play. Although the change is gradual and often barely discernible and although the character still contains traits of the Jester, the miles gloriosus, and the Lord of Misrule, Shakespeare has posited Falstaff into a new primary role, into a new comic character type: the Impostor.
As noted above, Frye suggests that the miles gloriosus is a subtype of the Impostor: he rages, he threats, he is the angry father who relies more on words than deeds. Falstaff as Impostor clearly fits this definition. Also as noted above, the Impostor is a comic figure of long-standing dramatic convention, appearing in Classical comedy and reappearing frequently on the Renaissance stage. Shakespeare himself has often relied on the Impostor type with such characters as Don Armado in Love’s Labor’s Lost and Malvolio in Twelfth Night. Of course, the Impostor also appears in the works of other notable playwrights. In Ben Jonson’s Volpone (as described above), the character of Volpone, the fox, is quite clearly of this type. And perhaps one may stretch the definition of Impostor to an extreme example in tragedy. The figure of Faustus in Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus regresses from a tragic figure to a cardboard comic type although he is hardly a figure of great humor.