Career
Appears in Shakespeare's Henry IV, Part 1, Henry IV, Part 2, and The Merry Wives of Windsor. In the first two of these plays he is presented as the fat and jovial boon companion of the Prince of Wales, sharing in his escapades, serving as the butt of his practical jokes, outdoing him in eating, drinking, wit, and ribaldry, and taking part, after a fashion, in his military campaigns. In The Merry Wives of Windsor, which, according to a plausible tradition, was written at the command of Queen Elizabeth, Falstaff is presented as a lover, and the ludicrous situations into which he is thrown by his amorous endeavors form the burden of the plot. In Henry V Falstaff does not appear, but his death is vividly described in Act II, Scene 3, in a passage containing one of the most famous textual reconstructions in Shakespearean scholarship, "'a babbled of green fields."
Falstaff's behavior is unlike the prince's in many important respects: he lies, cheats, and steals; he abuses outrageously the privileges that he enjoys as a recruiting officer; he disposes of the soldier's ideal of honor in a remarkable flight of rationalizing; and his conduct on the field of battle is far from courageous. It is evident, however, that even his greatest lapses from virtue proceed from exuberant self-expression and a search for amusement rather than from wickedness; Prince Hal appears in a somewhat unfavorable light when, upon inheriting his father's throne at the end of Henry IV, Part 2, and in accordance with a preconceived design, he dismisses Falstaff from favor with a stern admonition to mend his ways.
The name originally given to the knight by Shakespeare was not "Sir John Falstaff," but "Sir John Oldcastle," the name of a Lollard martyr whose career figures prominently in the old play used by Shakespeare as a source, The Famous Victories of Henry V. There is good authority for the ancient tradition that Shakespeare changed the name in deference to the objections of surviving members of Oldcastle's family. Traces of the Oldcastle name remain in the earliest texts of the two Henry IV plays, most interestingly in the epilogue to Henry IV, Part 2, in which it is expressly stated that "Oldcastle died a martyr, and this is not the man." The name that Shakespeare substituted may be a corruption of the name of Sir John Fastolf, a knight who is represented in Henry VI, Part 1 (Act III, Sc. 2; Act IV, Sc. 1) as playing a cowardly part in Talbot's campaigns in France.