Falstaff: Comedy and Falstaff’s Language Essay

Submitted By fashionqt12334
Words: 379
Pages: 2

It is clear Falstaff plays a key role in Henry IV. Falstaff’s vitality is a crucial to the play’s effects as Falstaff provides the audience with amusement, whilst providing the audience with some sort of wisdom. Falstaff appears in all the comic scenes and is a counterbalance to the plotting.

Humor is a dominant trait in Falstaff’s personality. For a contemporary audience this provides a release from the oppressiveness of everyday life. This is portrayed through Falstaff’s language as he uses puns, paradoxes and lists such as, “Let us be Diana’s foresters, gentlemen of the shade and minions of the moon”. It is clear that Falstaff is trying to amuse the audience with figurative language. On the other hand like many of Shakespeare’s clowns he is able to twist language and speak wisdom under the cover of a joke. Johnson describes how “Falstaff’s comic appeal simply functions as a warning against the kind of person most dangerous to ones moral health’; however this is untrue as Falstaff’s comic appeal allows the audience to relate to the play more and some of his jokes have underlying importance to them.

Falstaff is presented to be a lowborn character as he speaks in prose and never than verse. Similarly Falstaff provides a physical comedy to the audience, this is shown at Gads Hill robbery when he states “I made no more ado but took all their seven points in my target.” This suggests that Falstaff is more of a high spirit character compared to other characters such as