John Falstaff

• 1. Introduction

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  Sir John Falstaff arrives on stage fat, drunk, and deeply in debt, and somehow the audience loves him anyway. He is a fictional knight who appears in three plays by William Shakespeare, and whose death is mourned in a fourth. His core story plays out in the Henry IV plays, where he is the boozing, scheming companion of Prince Hal, the future King Henry V of England. But the questions Falstaff raises go well beyond the tavern. Why does a prince who is destined for greatness keep company with a petty criminal? What happens to loyalty when power changes hands? And how does a character who spends most of his time drinking at the Boar's Head Inn with thieves come to be called, by Orson Welles himself, Shakespeare's greatest creation? The word 'Falstaffian' has entered the English language as a shorthand for corpulence, jollity, and debauchery. That alone is a remarkable legacy for a man who never existed.

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• 2. The Prince and the Knight

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  Prince Hal has lost his standing at court and taken to spending his days in taverns with low companions. He is an object of scorn to the nobility, and his worthiness to succeed his father is genuinely in doubt. At his side in this dissolute life is Falstaff, fat, old, drunk, and corrupt, but possessed of a charisma and a zest for life that captivates the young prince.

  Hal likes Falstaff but makes no pretence of being like him. He enjoys insulting his dissolute friend and making sport of him. In one episode, Hal and his companion Poins pretend to join a highway robbery organised by Falstaff, then attack the robbers in disguise and steal back the loot, after which Hal returns it to its owner. It is a prank at Falstaff's expense, and Falstaff responds by concocting an elaborate lie about bravely fighting off a dozen assailants.

  Falstaff has, as the play puts it, 'misused the King's press damnably', taking bribes from able-bodied men to avoid military service and pocketing the wages of soldiers he recruited who were killed in battle. He calls these men 'food for powder'. At the Battle of Shrewsbury, he feigns death to avoid being attacked by Douglas, and when Hal defeats Hotspur nearby and leaves both bodies on the field, Falstaff revives, stabs Hotspur's corpse in the thigh, and claims the credit for the kill. Hal knows the truth but says nothing.

  Afterward, Falstaff announces that he wants to amend his life and 'live cleanly as a nobleman should do'. It is a line nobody in the audience believes, and that is entirely the point.

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• 3. Age and Reckoning

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  Henry IV, Part 2 opens with Falstaff followed by a small page that Prince Hal has assigned him as a joke. A page is a mark of rank, and giving one to Falstaff is a mockery of rank itself. Falstaff sends the boy to ask a doctor about his urine analysis; the page reports back, cryptically, that the urine is healthier than the patient.

  In this play, the two friends meet only twice and very briefly. Falstaff's story and Hal's story run almost entirely in parallel, never quite touching. The tone is elegiac. Falstaff's age and closeness to death mirrors the condition of the increasingly sick King Henry himself.

  Falstaff delivers one of his most celebrated lines in this play: 'I am not only witty in myself, but the cause that wit is in other men.' He chases the Lord Chief Justice through a comic exchange, feigning deafness to avoid him, then pretending to mistake him for someone else, then turning every question about a recent robbery into a discussion of the King's illness, and finally asking the Chief Justice for a thousand pounds to fund a military expedition. The request is denied.

  He goes to the country to raise forces and encounters an old school friend, Justice Shallow, with whom he reminisces about their youthful follies. From Shallow he also accepts bribes from two conscripts, Mouldy and Bullcalf, to excuse them from service. It is the same corruption he practised in Part 1, only the setting is now rural, and there is something sadder about it.

  When news arrives via Pistol that Hal is now King, Falstaff rushes to London in expectation of great rewards. The new King Henry V turns him away. Hal says he has changed and can no longer associate with such people. The London lowlifes who expected a paradise under Hal's rule are purged and imprisoned instead.

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• 4. The Death Scene in Henry V

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  Falstaff never appears on stage in Henry V. His death is instead described in Act 2, Scene 3, and the words belong entirely to Mistress Quickly, who kept the Boar's Head Inn. Her eulogy is one of the most famous passages in all of Shakespeare, and it works in part because of what it does not say.

  She tells Falstaff's followers that he is not in hell but in 'Arthur's bosom' - a malapropism for Abraham's bosom, the biblical resting place of the righteous. She describes him fumbling with the sheets, playing with flowers, and smiling at his fingers. She says his nose was 'as sharp as a pen' and that he talked of green fields. She asks for more clothes to be put on his feet, and when she reaches down to feel them, they are 'as cold as any stone'. The cold works up through his knees and upward until all is cold.

  The death is never shown. The audience hears it through the voice of a woman who loved him and who, in comforting him, told him not to think of God because there was no need yet. It is one of the few moments in the Falstaff plays where comedy fully gives way to something else.

  Many stage and film adaptations have felt it necessary to show Falstaff in Henry V to illuminate the king's character, even though Shakespeare gave him no lines and left no stage direction for his appearance. Laurence Olivier's 1944 version and Kenneth Branagh's 1989 film both drew additional scenes from the Henry IV plays to do this.

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• 5. Humiliated in Windsor

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  In The Merry Wives of Windsor, Falstaff arrives in Windsor short on money. His solution is to court two wealthy married women, Mistress Ford and Mistress Page, and he sends them identical love letters carried by his servants Pistol and Nym. When the two men refuse, Falstaff sacks them, and in revenge they warn the husbands.

  The wives compare notes, discover the letters are nearly identical, and decide to play along with Falstaff not out of any interest in him as a suitor but for amusement and to punish his presumption. What follows is a sequence of humiliations. On his first visit to Mistress Ford, the wives stuff Falstaff into a basket of filthy, smelly laundry and have it tipped into the river. His pride recovers quickly. He convinces himself the wives are playing hard to get.

  On a second attempt he is dressed as Mistress Ford's maid's obese aunt, 'the fat woman of Brentford'. The jealous Master Ford, who has been spying on his wife by posing as a man named 'Master Brook' and paying Falstaff to pursue her, beats the disguised knight and throws him out of the house.

  The final trick takes place in Windsor Forest. Falstaff is told to dress as 'Herne, the Hunter' and meet the wives by an old oak tree. Local children dressed as fairies pinch and burn him before the assembled company reveals the joke. Falstaff takes it with unexpected grace, acknowledging it was what he deserved. Ford demands back the twenty pounds he paid Falstaff as 'Brook' and takes his horses as additional payment. Mistress Page invites Falstaff to join them all at the fireside: 'let us every one go home, and laugh this sport o'er by a country fire; Sir John and all.'

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• 6. The Name Behind the Knight

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  Shakespeare originally called the character John Oldcastle, after a real historical figure who died in 1417. Oldcastle was a knight from Herefordshire who became a Lollard, was executed for heresy and rebellion, and was venerated by many Protestants as a martyr. A descendant, Lord Cobham, complained, and Shakespeare was forced to change the name.

  The switch happened while Shakespeare was writing either The Merry Wives of Windsor or the second part of Henry IV. The first part of Henry IV was probably written and performed in 1596, and the name Oldcastle had almost certainly been approved by Edmund Tilney, the Master of the Revels. William Brooke, the 10th Baron Cobham, may have become aware of the offensive portrayal after a public performance, or perhaps while it was being prepared for a court performance; he was Lord Chamberlain at the time and as father-in-law to Robert Cecil had significant influence at court. The name Falstaff appears in the Henry IV, Part 1 quarto published in 1598. The epilogue to Part 2, published in 1600, states plainly: 'Oldcastle died a martyr, and this is not the man.'

  Shakespeare may have slipped in a quiet act of retaliation. In The Merry Wives of Windsor, the jealous, paranoid Master Ford uses the alias 'Brook' to spy on Falstaff, a possible reference to William Brooke himself.

  The replacement name almost certainly came from the medieval knight Sir John Fastolf, who fought against Joan of Arc at the Battle of Patay, a defeat for the English. Fastolf survived where others were killed or captured and was temporarily stripped of his knighthood, though the source notes there is no actual evidence of cowardice. He appears in Henry VI, Part 1 as an abject coward, and in the First Folio his name is spelled 'Falstaffe', the same spelling Shakespeare used for the comic knight.

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• 7. Lives Beyond the Stage

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  Leonard Digges, writing shortly after Shakespeare's death, described the character's pull on audiences directly: 'let but Falstaff come, Hal, Poins, the rest, you scarce shall have a room.' That power carried well past the Elizabethan stage.

  Composers returned to the character repeatedly. Antonio Salieri wrote a Falstaff opera in 1799 with a libretto by Carlo Prospero Defranceschi. Otto Nicolai's Die lustigen Weiber von Windsor followed in 1849. Giuseppe Verdi made Falstaff the subject of his last opera in 1893, with a libretto by Arrigo Boito. Ralph Vaughan Williams wrote Sir John in Love in 1929. Edward Elgar composed a 'symphonic study' in 1913 that depicts Falstaff's entire life. Gustav Holst wrote a short opera called At the Boar's Head in 1925, drawn from the Henry IV plays. Nearly all of these works focus on the Windsor material, though Elgar and Holst reached for the Henriad.

  Orson Welles, who played Falstaff in his 1965 film Chimes at Midnight, considered the character Shakespeare's greatest creation. The film compresses the two Henry IV plays into a single story while adding material from Richard II and Henry V. Film critic Vincent Canby wrote in 1975 that it 'may be the greatest Shakespearean film ever made, bar none.'

  Gus Van Sant's My Own Private Idaho retells the Henry IV story in the contemporary United States, with the character of Bob Pigeon standing in for Falstaff. In the scene that follows Bob's first appearance, the film's version of Hal is shown drinking from a bottle of Falstaff brand beer. The 2019 Netflix film The King takes a different approach: its Falstaff, played by Joel Edgerton, proposes the military tactics the English use at Agincourt, and dies in the battle.

  George Radford, an English lawyer, once sketched a speculative biography of Falstaff drawn entirely from clues inside the plays, concluding, among other things, that Falstaff was of Scandinavian descent and came from Norfolk. The character has attracted that kind of attention for centuries, and the popularity Digges described has never fully faded.

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