Critical Edition of Two Modern Plays on the Dramatic Character of Sir John Falstaff:

by Bert Cardullo

This book focuses on a literary figure – Shakespeare’s Falstaff – who seems to have taken on a life independent of the plays in which he first Henry IV, Part One (ca. 1596), Henry IV, Part Two (ca. 1599), and The Merry Wives of Windsor (ca. 1597-1601). Since that time, Falstaff has appeared in numerous other plays, novels, poems, paintings, musical pieces, and films. The high points in Falstaff’s “career,” included in this collection, are by two major artistic figures from the 20th Fernand Crommelynck (1886-1970), whose The Knight of the Moon, or Sir John Falstaff is adapted from the two parts of Henry IV, with some additions from The Merry Wives of Windsor; and Orson Welles (1915-1985), whose play Chimes at Midnight (1960) prepared the way for his 1966 film by the same title and was itself preceded by another stage version by Welles, Five Kings (1938). Each of the two Falstaff plays in this volume is preceded by a preface, and the anthology as a whole is framed by an historical introduction and a comprehensive critical, as well as creative, bibliography. This book’s contribution to scholarship is not only its documentation of Falstaff’s characterological life and the influence of that life on subsequent art, but also the fact that it serves as a case study, of sorts, in the art of from drama to drama, even from drama to film.

380 pages, Paperback

Published January 1, 2006

About the author

Bert Cardullo is Professor of Media and Communication at the Izmir University of Economics in Turkey. His books include Playing to the Camera, An Idea of the Drama, and Screen Writings.