Sir John Falstaff Research Articles

Nobby, or Metamorphosis

Abstract Andrew Schelling recalls and discusses a college course, “World Poetry,” which Norman O. Brown taught at University of California, Santa Cruz, in 1974. The turbulent politics and weird, harrowing culture changes of North America set a context. Brown's class met weekly in a remote meadow ringed by second-growth redwoods. Brown developed his interest in the “law of metamorphosis,” which he thought poetry captures, and put his attention on how the human body changes, producing text as sound or performance. Using two anthologies compiled by Jerome Rothenberg, Brown drew students into a poetry that was physical, raw, multilingual, and perhaps a scriptural base for the era's counterculture. Schelling portrays Brown as a quixotic figure, Sir John Falstaff among scholars. A quick sketch of the “Santa Cruz ecosystem” brings into the mix Gregory Bateson, whose thoughts on evolution paralleled Brown's on poetry, and Jan Willis, veteran civil rights activist and scholar of Sanskrit.

John Falstaff și dimensiunea carnavalescă a vieții

The struggle between Carnival and Lent, with its symbols – the tavern and the church –, forms the substance of the humor in Shakespeare’s plays written before 1599. This humor is more than a simple comic tool, it is a vision of life, in which the carnivalesque with the vernacular language full of originality, with its laughter devoid of irony and annihilation of the human being, wipes away the veil of delusion and confronts the characters with their own flaws and illusions. In the position of commentator of the deviations of the main characters, we find the fool who mediates between the stage fiction and the audience’s reality, through his semi-detached position, like Sir John Falstaff in “Henry IV“.

Sir John Falstaff & the Merry Wives of Windsor

Sir John Falstaff & the Merry Wives of Windsor

Each Is Me

Each Is Me Pamela Royston Macfie (bio) 1 For more than a year, as I pursue my daily life, two razor-sharp yet ghostly performances from the American Shakespeare Center’s 2019 season flare in my imagination. When I try to remember an early morning dream, I see, over and over again, the woman who foils a flame-faced predator with nothing but her wit. As I fix my morning tea, I see the girl who shivers at her teacher’s touch. The friend who cozens secrets she will not keep appears as I open my office door or hurry to a meeting. Each of these specters is a character in a play by Shakespeare or Amy E. Witting. Each is me. 2 These performances — of Shakespeare’s The Merry Wives of Windsor and Witting’s Anne Page Hates Fun — were the inaugural offerings [End Page 581] in the ASC’s “Shakespeare’s New Contemporaries” initiative, which proposes, over the next twenty years, to debut thirty-eight new (and previously unproduced) plays that engage Shakespeare’s thirty-eight in conversation. In 2018, the company invited playwrights to submit work that might respond to and interrogate The Merry Wives of Windsor. Witting won that year’s competition and its $25,000 prize, and the ASC brought her to Staunton, Virginia in January 2019, when her play was rehearsed in their Blackfriars Playhouse (the world’s only re-creation of Shakespeare’s indoor theatre), and again in mid-February, when Anne Page, in repertory with Merry Wives, kicked off the company’s three-month Renaissance season. That February, I traveled to Staunton determined to see how Witting might turn a new lens on one of Shakespeare’s less frequently performed plays. I also wanted to gauge how a contemporary playwright would take advantage of the early modern theatre practices that define the Blackfriars and the ASC: universal lighting, double and triple casting (within a relatively small troupe of players), and the inclusion of audience members on the stage, where they become part of the action. My experience exceeded this focus. Together, the plays riveted me not to Shakespeare’s past but my own. 3 On February 14, I watched The Merry Wives of Windsor, the play Shakespeare is reputed to have written at the request of Queen Elizabeth, who wanted to see fat Sir John Falstaff (whom she had enjoyed in Henry IV, Part 1) caught in love’s throes. Merry Wives tracks Falstaff ‘s desperate attempts to seduce two married women in the town of Windsor. The next night, I attended Anne Page Hates [End Page 582] Fun, whose action unfolds in Windsor, New Hampshire. Though Witting includes a large-bellied wit-cracker among her townspeople, she does not ascribe to him anything resembling lecherous misconduct. She concentrates, instead, on the hidden life of a woman named Anne Page, who cannot trust any man because she has been molested by her high school English teacher. Initially, Shakespeare’s rough comedy seemed an odd foil to Witting’s bittersweet play, which is haunted by loss. I realized, however, in the middle of my second night in the playhouse, that both plays explore the power (and threat) of community where sexual aberration is concerned. Shakespeare’s wives, who determine they must publicly humiliate the seamy seducer who would corrupt their bodies and reputations, demonstrate what a community may gain in scourging a predatory male. Witting’s Anne Page, who determines she must hide her victimization from even her closest friends, makes us consider what a predator’s exposure may cost his victim. As I write the above paragraph, I consider Anne’s silence with the coolness of recollection’s tranquility. As I sat in the audience that night, I was anything but calm. 4 Witting borrows her heroine’s name from one of Merry Wives’s relatively minor characters. Shakespeare’s Anne is the daughter of one of the wives Falstaff endeavors to bed. Though she is modest in speech, she is the object of vociferous debate among three suitors, who compete for her hand in marriage, as well as between her parents, who favor different (and utterly inappropriate) foppish contenders. Witting...

To Nell and Back: Revisiting Mistress Quickly

Although Sir John Falstaff has historically inspired an abundance of critical considerations commensurate with his girth, his straightwoman, Mistress Quickly, has received relatively scant attention. She was popular enough, however, for Shakespeare to include her in no fewer than four plays, and in fact, of all the characters invented for 1 Henry IV, only Bardolph can equal this feat.

“Could Not All this Flesh Keep in a Little Life?” George IV, Falstaff, and Hal

ABSTRACTThis paper compares the varying cultural treatments of three famously fat individuals: the Prince Regent, the actor-manager Stephen Kemble, and Daniel Lambert, who was known simply for his weight. It also examines how the Romantics appropriated Shakespeare’s beloved “whoreson round man,” Sir John Falstaff, to express their hopes and fears for the Prince Regent’s reign as George IV. In political cartoons and criticism of the period, the Prince Regent incarnated both Prince Hal and Falstaff. Other literary texts, such as the anonymous 1808 novel, The Royal Legend, treat Shakespeare’s Falstaff plays, medieval history, and Romantic realpolitik as contiguous with each other and interchangeable. Contributing to the growing academic and literary field of “fat studies,” I bring insights from fat studies to bear on Romantic lives, writing, visual culture, and medicine.

Beyond Falstaff in 'Die lustigen Weiber von Windsor': Otto Nicolai's Revolutionary 'Wives'

This article explores how Otto Nicolai and Salomon Hermann von Mosenthal’s Die lustigen Weiber von Windsor (Berlin, 1849) might contribute to an alternative reception history of Shakespeare’s The Merry Wives of Windsor, in which the play’s unusual features—in particular the central role it gives to female agency, family life, and the natural world—are positively valued. These unusual aspects have long been overshadowed in critical approaches to both the play and its operatic adaptations by their focus on the character of Sir John Falstaff, particularly in the wake of Verdi’s Falstaff. However, this article demonstrates that Die lustigen Weiber, by placing its women firmly at its heart, reveals an engagement with those issues which literary criticism has only lately addressed. This article also suggests that approaching the opera in its 1849 post-revolutionary historical context reveals nuanced resonances both with Shakespeare’s play and the opera’s own moment of production, particularly in the opera’s storyline of assertive bourgeois women resisting an abusive aristocrat, culminating in a bourgeois-led reconciliation of the classes. The opera thus reveals the radical potential in Shakespeare’s comedy.

Teaching and Learning Guide for: Reading Early Modern Food

Teaching and Learning Guide for: Reading Early Modern Food

By Whatever Name

This paper explores the significance of naming and the role of editing practices of Shakespeare's plays: Is it Imogen or Innogen, Falstaff or Oldcastle? By looking into how editors of Shakespeare have approached these and other naming problems we will investigate what has influenced their approaches and choices, what the implications of their choices might be and what we may learn from their ways of thinking about textual editing, be it defective or successful. This paper therefore deals with editing practices in general and, more specifically, with the actual significance of naming: is Henry IV featuring Sir John Oldcastle a wholly different play from Henry IV featuring Sir John Falstaff?

Your identity or your life

The Merry Wives of Windsor was the only Shakespeare play to deal exclusively with contemporary life in the Elizabethan era. Using the exploits of the central character, Sir John Falstaff, Shakespeare explored the themes of love and marriage, jealousy and revenge, and social class and wealth. Shakespeare also dealt with the concept of identity by creating characters that not only played themselves but also at times took on the roles and names of other characters. Two characters in the play, Mistress Page and Mistress Anne Page, her daughter, had similar names, and despite Falstaff’s unique appearance, self-described as being ‘‘in the waist two yards about’’, his name did not come easily to Mistress Page, hence his identity was at risk. ‘‘I cannot tell what the dickens his name is...’’ ‘‘I can never hit on’s name,’’ adds Mistress Page. The identity of patients coming to the operating room (OR) is also a central ‘‘theme’’ in anesthetic practice. Identity is composed of several different attributes. These include:

On the Unspoken Principles of Herzlian Diplomacy and their Contemporary Relevance

It tells one a good deal about the mood in which contemporary Israel contemplates its affairs well over half a century since its foundation that the man who really and truly started the Zionist bal...

Elgar's Invention of the Human: Falstaff, Opus 68

Falstaff, Elgar's tragic symphonic study, is at once program music, a minor piece of Shakespearean criticism, early modernist tonal and structural experiment, and a cynical musical commentary on humankind's "failings and sorrows." A satisfactory analysis of the work calls for a discussion of the program, the Shakespearean literary criticism that Elgar based his interpretation on and cited in his own published analysis of the work, and a structural analysis that can make sense both of a variety of generic implications (sonata, rondo, and multimovement deformations) as well as the complex associations between keys, motives, persons, and ideas in the work, together with its overall tonal structure. As this multilayered piece is examined from these different angles, Elgar's interpretation of the character of Sir John Falstaff (as presented by or inferable from Shakespeare) is revealed as an idiosyncratically gloomy view of human relationships and existential possibilities. It is also an intensely personal exploration of late-tonal musical language, its symbolic potential, its structural logic, and its relation to the musical tradition--Elgar's most complex, adventurous, and rewarding.

First Books: The Printed Word and Cultural Formation in Early Alabama

This case study in cultural mythmaking shows how antebellum created itself out of its own printed texts, from treatises on law and history to satire, poetry, and domestic novels. Early 19th-century was a society still in the making. Now Philip Beidler tells how the first books written and published in the state influenced the formation of Alabama's literary and political culture. As Beidler shows, virtually overnight early found itself in possession of the social, political, and economic conditions required to jump start a traditional literary culture in the old Anglo-European model: property-based class relationships, large concentrations of personal wealth, and professional and merchant classes of similar social, political, educational, and literary views.Beidler examines the work of well-known writers such as humorist Johnson J. Hooper and novelist Caroline Lee Hentz, and takes on other classic pieces like Albert J. Pickett's History of and Alexander Beaufort Meek's epic poem Red Eagle. Beidler also considers lesser-known works like Lewis B. Sewall's verse satire The Adventures of Sir John Falstaff the II, Henry Hitchcock's groundbreaking legal volume Alabama Justice of the Peace, and Octavia Walton Levert's Souvenirs of Travel. Most of these works were written by and for society's elite, and although many celebrate the establishment of an ordered way of life, they also preserve the biases of authors who refused to write about slavery yet continually focused on the extermination of Native Americans.First Books returns us to the world of early that these texts not only recorded but helped create. Written with flair and a strong individual voice, it will appeal not only to scholars of history and literature but also to anyone interested in the antebellum South.

Sir John Falstaff's taste for proverbs inHenry IV, part 1

Sir John Falstaff's taste for proverbs in<i>Henry IV, part 1</i>

The Ancestry of Sir John Falstaff

Journal Article The Ancestry of Sir John Falstaff Get access D. B. Landt D. B. Landt University of Chicago Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Shakespeare Quarterly, Volume 17, Issue 1, Winter 1966, Pages 69–76, https://doi.org/10.2307/2867606 Published: 01 January 1966

Sir John Falstaff

Journal Article Sir John Falstaff Get access W. A. Henderson W. A. Henderson Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Notes and Queries, Volume s8-V, Issue 116, 17 March 1894, Page 211, https://doi.org/10.1093/nq/s8-V.116.211a Published: 17 March 1894

Sir John Falstaff

Sir John Falstaff

Sir John Falstaff

Sir John Falstaff

Sir John Falstaff

Sir John Falstaff

Sir John Falstaff

Sir John Falstaff