Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-ndw9j Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-09T05:44:24.240Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Why DID Shakespeare Create Falstaff?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

Albert H. Tolman
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

We cannot help thinking of certain characters in Shakespeare as real beings. We wonder what this person did before the play opened, and after it closed. What was the girlhood of Portia? Why had Othello never suspected the baseness of lago? What was the fate of Shylock after the scene in court? Of what sort was the married life of Beatrice and Benedick? Such questions are insistent and compelling, irrelevant though they are.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 34 , Issue 1 , 1919 , pp. 1 - 13
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1919

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 Misses Porter and Clarke, Poet-Lore, vol. xi, p. 98.

2 New Variorum edition of Much Ado, pp. xxxi, xxxiii.

3 Vol. ii, p. 540, Duffield & Co.

4 Article on Morgann, Dictionary of National Biography.

5 “The Rejection of Falstaff,” Oxford Lectures on Poetry, Macmillan, 1909, pp. 264 ff.

6 Professor E. E. Stoll, “Falstaff,” in Modern Philology, October, 1914, p. 86.

7 In “Falstaff,” contributed to Augustine Birrell's Obiter Dicta, First Series.