SOURCE: "Falstaff the Fool," in Praisers of Folly: Erasmus, Rabelais, and Shakespeare, Harvard University Press, 1963, pp. 267-75.

In the following excerpt, Kaiser analyzes Falstaff's position as the "wise fool" of the Henriad.

"But Falstaff, unimitated, unimitable Falstaff, how shall I describe thee?" The frustration of Samuel Johnson's question has been shared by all who have ever tried to encompass the fat old fool. Embodying nothing less than nature itself, he is so enormous that, as Empson has said, "it is hard to get one's mind all round him."¹ Because he actually is, in a certain sense, "all the world," he contains within himself so much that one can never take account of it all, and most attempts to map out this globe of sinful continents have tended to display the partial and falsified perspective of medieval cartography. Yet the very nature of the fool is such that it...