Understanding Shakespeare: The Merry Wives of Windsor by Robert A. Albano - HTML preview

the literary historian, as Bernard Spivack has shown, this mocking of our expectations places him in the tradition of the deceptive Vice of the morality plays or the tricky Ambidexter of a Cambises. But in 1 Henry IV, Falstaff seems more triumphant: the Chaplinesque clown who, by his ability to play many parts, triumphs even over death, as (in the final battle) he feigns a death-and-rebirth. In 2 Henry IV, Falstaff resists, but succumbs to, the preordained role pointed out by Philip Williams and C. L. Barber. He becomes the slain god, the Lord of Misrule who must be banished to restore health to the land. Hal is absorbed into the role of the hero-king, while Falstaff is engulfed by a mythic significance that demands his rejection and death.

"Miss Caroline Spurgeon noted some years ago that the Falstaff of 1 Henry IV uses many images from books and the Bible, while the Falstaff of 2 Henry IV speaks in grotesque, rough, course similes drawn from body functions and appetites. We can add that Falstaff One uses a very distinctive figure of speech, the enthymeme: "If I travel but four foot by the squire further afoot, I shall break my wind." "If the rascal have not given me medicines to make me love him, I'll be hanged. "And 'twere not as good a deed as drink to turn true man and to leave these rogues, I am the veriest varlet that ever chewed with a tooth." (These all occur within ten lines in 1 Henry IV, suggesting the frequency of the figure.) Falstaff Two almost entirely lacks this figure of speech; instead he has become something of a monologist. He takes in a character, then turns him into a satirical