Falstaff and the Problems of Comedy

A review of the Goffmanesque strategies Falstaff employs to make light of his disadvantages is followed in this article by an examination of the way he has always provoked a conflict between moral disapproval and the urge to laugh. This is partly because of a division between the invulnerable ego attributed to him by Freud, and a tendency to depression: what Bloom has characterised as Falstaff’s vitalism and nihilism. Hard, though, for anyone who works in British universities not to forgo the disapproval when, at his rejection, Falstaff not only receives his just desserts but is also the helpless victim of a change of regime.