Falstaff — Shakespeare’s Greatest Comic Character

2026-06-02

Sir John Falstaff is fat, old, drunk, broke, and a shameless liar. He is also the funniest character Shakespeare ever wrote, and possibly the most fully human.

He first appears in Henry IV Part 1 alongside the young Prince Hal, son of the reigning king. They drink together, rob travellers, and swap insults at the Boar's Head Tavern in Eastcheap. Falstaff is not just a comic sidekick. He is a man who has thought carefully about honour, courage, and respectability, and concluded that none of them is worth dying for.

His Wit, Not His Weight

The traditional image of Falstaff reduces him to a fat joke. Prince Hal calls him "this bed-presser, this horseback-breaker, this huge hill of flesh." Falstaff fires straight back: "Away, you starveling, you elf-skin, you dried neat's tongue..." The insults go in both directions. That is the relationship.

What makes Falstaff extraordinary is his self-awareness. He knows exactly what he is. When he delivers his famous speech on honour in Act 5, Scene 1 of Henry IV Part 1, the conclusion is blunt: "Can honour set to a leg? No. Or an arm? No... What is honour? A word." He is not being cowardly. He is making an argument. The argument is that honour is a story men tell themselves to justify dying, and he does not believe it.

He is also, in his way, honest. He is dishonest about almost everything practical (money, his behaviour in battle, the number of men who attacked him), but direct about his own appetites and priorities in a way that more respectable characters never manage.

Prince Hal and the Problem

The friendship between Falstaff and Prince Hal is the emotional centre of the two Henry IV plays. Hal makes clear in Act 1, Scene 2 of Part 1 that he is using his time in Eastcheap deliberately, planning to reform publicly later so his transformation looks more impressive. He is manipulating Falstaff from the start.

Falstaff seems to understand this on some level. He keeps hoping otherwise. The whole of Part 2 is Falstaff riding toward London after hearing that his old companion has been crowned Henry V, certain of a warm welcome.

He is wrong.

The Rejection

Henry IV Part 2, Act 5, Scene 5. The new king processes through the street after his coronation. Falstaff breaks through the crowd: "God save thy grace, King Hal, my royal Hal!" Henry V, his voice suddenly formal, responds: "I know thee not, old man."

It is one of Shakespeare's cruellest moments. Henry goes further, describing Falstaff as "the tutor and the feeder of my riots," instructing him to reform, and banishing him from the court. Falstaff, for once, has nothing to say.

The scene is uncomfortable partly because Hal is not wrong. He cannot be king and keep Falstaff close. But that does not make the rejection easy to watch.

After Henry IV

Falstaff appears in Henry V only as a reported death. Mistress Quickly describes him dying in Act 2, Scene 3: "his nose was as sharp as a pen, and 'a babbled of green fields." He is gone by Act 3.

He returns in a different form in The Merry Wives of Windsor, a comedy about Falstaff's failed attempts to seduce two married women for their money. The play is lighter than the histories, more farcical. A tradition first recorded by John Dennis in 1702 claims Queen Elizabeth I enjoyed Falstaff so much in the history plays that she commanded Shakespeare to write a comedy showing him in love, and that Shakespeare completed it in fourteen days. No document from the time confirms this.

After Shakespeare

Two major composers wrote pieces centred on Falstaff. Giuseppe Verdi's opera Falstaff, his final opera, premiered at La Scala in Milan on 9 February 1893, when Verdi was 79 years old. The libretto by Arrigo Boito draws on both Henry IV and The Merry Wives of Windsor. Its final fugue, "Tutto nel mondo è burla," which translates as "all the world is a joke," reads like an epilogue to everything Falstaff stands for.

Edward Elgar composed his Falstaff symphonic study, Op. 68, a purely orchestral work tracing the character through the history plays. It premiered in Leeds on 1 October 1913, conducted by Elgar himself. Elgar considered it his finest orchestral piece.

Both Verdi and Elgar treated Falstaff as a serious subject, not a punchline.

Read more about him on the Henry IV Part 1 character page: Falstaff and explore Henry IV Part 2.