Festive Falstaff: of popularity, puritans and princes
This chapter focuses on Falstaff. In a famous scene, Falstaff is actually installed in a mock throne, playing the angry king to Hal's miscreant prince. In the ensuing exchanges, they swap different versions of Falstaff's character and attributes. The result is an association of Falstaff and his world with a variety of aspects of popular festivity and the ritualised order of the carnivalesque mode. Falstaff, however, sees himself as but old and merry. Throughout both plays, Falstaff continually claims to have been corrupted by the prince. Young and old, not so much a person as a principle of nature, Falstaff both personifies and transcends the life cycle, and thus defeats the puny efforts of quotidian logic and constraint to define or contain him.