Bradley assumes that Shakespeare meant to steadily weaken Falstaff's appeal but failed: 'In the Falstaff scenes overshot his mark. He finds that Falstaff's lies about the men in buckram and killing Hotspur are, like so many of his statements, symptomatic of his refusal to take anything seriously, and he develops Morgann's evidence that Falstaff is not a coward. Bradley describes Falstaff as 'the humorist of genius' who 'makes himself out more ludicrous than he is, in order that he and others may laugh' (68). Bradley notes that the Prince's rejection of Falstaff in Part Twois consistent with his characterization in Part One, and that the moment is well prepared for, but, he argues, it is troubling nevertheless because the rejection scene elicits a kind of resentment towards Henry that could not have been Shakespeare's intention. Bradley's essay, 'The Rejection of Falstaff,' first published in 1902. Bernard Shaw, writing at the end of the nineteenth century held a similar view, seeing Hal as 'consciously and deliberately treacherous' in Henry IV, Part One, and Falstaff as 'the most human person in the play' (albeit 'a besotted and disgusting old wretch') (119).ДЎ1Concern about the Prince's treatment of Falstaff reached a climax in A.C. Like Nicholas Rowe, Hazlitt felt that 'we could never forgive the Prince's treatment of Falstaff' and that 'whatever terror the French in those days might have of Henry V, yet, to the readers of poetry at present, Falstaff is the better man of the two' (356). In 1817 William Hazlitt claimed that Falstaff was one of the greatest comic characters ever invented, stressing his 'exaggeration of his own vices,' (354) his 'masterly presence of mind' and the indulgence he elicits as both an actor and as someone whose age 'gives a melancholy retrospective tinge to the character' (355). Stoll were still constructing detailed refutations of Morgann's essay. 10Accounting for Falstaff in the nineteenth and twentieth centuriesД®ighteenth-century responses to the two parts of Henry IV initiated debate about the figure of Falstaff that continued into the nineteenth century and beyond.

Falstaff quotes henry iv part 1