Quotes About Falstaff

The way Shakespeare wrote Fallstaff is with a heightened language and everything.

Falstaff sweats to deathAnd lards the lean earth as he walks along.

If anybody could have any doubt about the liveliness of Shakespeare, let them consider the character of Falstaff. When a man has created that without a capacity for laughter, then a blind man may succeed in describing colors. Intense animal spirits are the single sentiment (if they be a sentiment) of the entire character. If most men were to save up all the gaiety of their whole lives, it would come about to the gaiety of one speech in Falstaff.

The politician has no more use for pride than Falstaff had for honour.

Shakespeare will not allow Falstaff to die upon stage. We see and hear the deaths of Hamlet, Cleopatra, Antony, Othello, and Lear. Iago is led away to die silently under torture. Macbeth dies offstage but he goes down fighting. Falstaff dies singing the Twenty-third Psalm, smiling upon his fingertips, playing with flowers, and crying aloud to God three or four times. That sounds more like pain than prayer. We do not want Sir John Falstaff to die. And of course he does not. He is life itself.

But Hamlet is death's ambassador while Falstaff is the embassy of life.

En route to California I had a few drinks with an American executive for Falstaff Brewing Company who said he'd been a hobo from '37 to '39. He talked about a friend of his who had lost his legs beneath a freight train and died. He told me he knew something about farm labor contractors. Killers, he called them. And said it again, Killers.

Rotten luck," said Falstaff as I walked past. "There were the remains of a fine woman about Havisham.

If it really was Queen Elizabeth who demanded to see Falstaff in a comedy, then she showed herself a very perceptive critic. But even in The Merry Wives of Windsor , Falstaff has not and could not have found his true home because Shakespeare was only a poet. For that he was to wait nearly two hundred years till Verdi wrote his last opera. Falstaff is not the only case of a character whose true home is the world of music; others are Tristan, Isolde and Don Giovanni.