The Persons of the Play: Falstaff and the Thickening of Dramatic Character

Abstract This essay examines early modern commercial drama’s capacity to make people public—that is, to introduce to large crowds of people vividly embodied representations of individuals both real and fictional, actual and virtual. My focus is on Falstaff, who occupies a peculiar place in early modern mediascapes and, crucially, in theories of character from the eighteenth century on. Falstaff is, like all sixteenth- and seventeenth-century dramatic characters, an intermedial creature fashioned out of written and printed texts and embodied performance. But he is also exceptional in his multiplicity. Even his name is doubled (Falstaff and Oldcastle). I ask, What happens to persons when they are “characterized” onstage? What are the limits, and possibilities, of being made into (as the playwright-turned-antitheatricalist Stephen Gosson puts it) “a by worde”? How might such work help scholars rethink associations between “roundness” and “liveness” in their assumptions about how character is produced and felt to matter?