I sometimes wonder how much Shakespeare really intended Falstaff. One imagines it all starting with a ‘note to self: how about comic fat character to give the groundlings a laugh?’, and then Falstaff turns up, marches in, and takes over the place. I first met this larger-than-life character at a fairly young age and found him very entertaining but a bit confusing. I could not help comparing him with English literature’s other great subversive antihero, William Brown, who like Falstaff had a band of faithful acolytes, a fine line in rhetorical self-justification and a sturdy disdain for the values and conventions of his time. I’m afraid that morally the comparison did Falsaff no favours. William might have had his faults, but he was essentially honourable, and you wouldn’t have caught him going round stabbing corpses and trying to take the credit for killing them. Still, I felt keenly the increasing pathos of the old rogue’s rejection by the cold-hearted Prince Hal, and was glad that Shakespeare, a third of the way through ‘Henry IV Part 2’, at least gave him a fine sendoff, in a scene that manages to be both funny – the Hostess trying to reassure the dying Knight that he need not to be thinking about God just yet – and yet do justice to the mystery and solemnity of death.

ACT II SCENE III

London. Before a tavern.

Enter PISTOL, Hostess, NYM, BARDOLPH, and Boy

PISTOL

Boy, bristle thy courage up; for Falstaff he is dead,
And we must yearn therefore.

BARDOLPH

Would I were with him, wheresome’er he is, either in heaven or in hell!

HOSTESS

Nay, sure, he’s not in hell: he’s in Arthur’s bosom, if ever man went to Arthur’s bosom. A’ made a finer end and went away an it had been any christom child; a’ parted even just between twelve and one, even at the turning o’ the tide: for after I saw him fumble with the sheets and play with flowers and smile upon his fingers’ ends, I knew there was but one way; for his nose was as sharp as a pen, and a’ babbled of green fields. ‘How now, sir John!’ quoth I ‘what, man! be o’ good cheer.’ So a’ cried out ‘God, God, God!’ three or four times. Now I, to comfort him, bid him a’ should not think of God; I hoped there was no need to trouble himself with any such thoughts yet. So a’ bade me lay more clothes on his feet: I put my hand into the bed and felt them, and they were as cold as any stone; then I felt to his knees, and they were as cold as any stone, and so upward and upward, and all was as cold as any stone.

William Shakespeare