SOURCE: Hall, Jonathan. “The Evacuations of Falstaff (The Merry Wives of Windsor).” In Shakespeare and Carnival, edited by Ronald Knowles, pp. 123-51. Houndsmills, Great Britain: Macmillan, 1998.

In the following essay, Hall examines the language of The Merry Wives of Windsor and views the play “as a successor to 2 Henry IV.”

Counterfeit? I lie, I am no counterfeit. To die is to be a counterfeit, or he is but the counterfeit of a man who hath not the life of a man. But to counterfeit dying when a man thereby liveth is to be no counterfeit, but the true and perfect image of life indeed.

(Falstaff)¹

Laughter is essentially not an external but an interior form of truth; it cannot be transformed into seriousness without destroying and distorting the very contents of the truth which it unveils. Laughter liberates not only from external censorship but first of all from...