Hunter, Robert G. “Shakespeare's Comic Sense as It Strikes Us Today: Falstaff and the Protestant Ethic.” In Shakespeare: Pattern of Excelling Nature, edited by David Bevington and Jay L. Halio, pp. 125-32. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1978.

In the following essay, originally presented in 1976, Hunter views Falstaff as the antithesis of the Protestant ethic.

If there are such things as antibodies (and I am told that there are), then let there be such things as antiembodiments and let Falstaff be one. Let him also be an embodiment (there is plenty of room), for Falstaff embodies a large part of my subject, Shakespeare's comic sense. Simultaneously he antiembodies the Protestant ethic. What he is, it is not. What it is, he is not. Did Shakespeare's comic sense serve the body politic by generating Falstaff in an attempt to immunize comparatively Merrie England against those foreign organisms, the Puritan Saints...