SOURCE: Roberts, Jeanne Addison. “The Windsor Falstaff.” Papers on Language and Literature 9, no. 2 (spring 1973): 202-30.

In the following essay, Roberts surveys the critical assessment of the character of Falstaff, focusing on the treatment of the character by neoclassicists, Romantics, and Romantic Victorians. In particular, Roberts discusses critical concern over the discrepancies between the character of Falstaff in The Merry Wives of Windsor and the Falstaff character from the Henry IV plays.

The history of critical reactions to the Falstaff of Shakespeare's The Merry Wives of Windsor recapitulates the history of Shakespeare criticism as a whole. The development has been complicated by the idiosyncrasies of individual critics and by uncertainty as to the date, occasion, and textual peculiarities of the play; but as in other Shakespeare criticism, one may clearly perceive the shaping patterns of Neoclassical, Romantic, Victorian, and Modern critical premises and attitudes of mind behind individual judgments...