SOURCE: Kern, Edith. “Falstaff—A Trickster Figure.” Upstart Crow 5 (fall 1984): 135-42.

In the following essay, Kern compares Falstaff with the archetypal trickster figure.

Carl Jung defined the trickster figure as a “‘psychologem’, an archetypal psychic structure of extreme antiquity …, a faithful reflection of an absolutely undifferentiated human consciousness, corresponding to a psyche that hardly left the animal level.”¹ He did so in a commentary, made upon request, to a study of the North-American Trickster by the anthropologist, Paul Radin. Radin had discovered this figure “in clearly recognizable form among the simplest aboriginal tribes and among the complex (xxiii).” But he also recognized its analogues in the literatures of ancient Greece, China, Japan, and the Semitic world, adding that “many of the Trickster's traits are perpetuated in the figure of the medieval jester and have survived up to the present day in the Punch-and-Judy plays and in the clown...