The Merry Wives of Windsor

Sir John Falstaff has long captivated audiences, to the point that many spectators “have regarded [him] as the ‘hero’ of the play” (Shakespeare’s The Merry Wives of Windsor, 17). Narratively, however, he functions less as hero than as the play’s comic antagonist: a swaggering engine of disruption whose appetites set the town in motion and whose defeat clarifies its values. 

Falstaff carries into Windsor the same traits that animate him in the Henry IV plays: voracious appetite, exuberant wit, and a gift for self-justifying rhetoric. What changes is the arena. Instead of taverns and battlefields, he faces the tightly managed world of household economies and neighborhood reputation. His plot (to seduce two wives for access to their husbands’ money) frames him as an opportunist trying to parasitize the middle-class order. That predatory entitlement makes him the natural opponent of Mistress Ford and Mistress Page, who occupy the managerial domestic role of the middle-class wife.

As an antagonist, Falstaff also mirrors and magnifies male folly. His scheming amplifies Ford’s jealousy, drawing the husband into public self-exposure and eventual apology. In that sense, Falstaff becomes the town’s necessary adversary: His presence catalyzes civic cooperation among wives, husbands, parsons, and doctors, turning private anxieties into communal theater.