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Why DID Shakespeare Create Falstaff?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

Albert H. Tolman
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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

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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.