In 1640, in a commendatory poem to Shakespeare's Poems, Leonard Digges noted that, while Ben Jonson's plays could no longer dependably attract an audience large enough to cover the costs of production, Shakespeare's play was still a certain hit: "let but Falstaff come, / Hall [i.e. Hal], Poines, the rest, you scarce shall have a room / All is so pester"d" [i.e. crowded] (Poems, sig. *4r). After the Restoration, Samuel Pepys saw the play acted five times between 1660, when the theatres re-opened, and 1668, the first time admittedly disappointed with the performance, his "expectation being too great" (Pepys, 1, 325). Today the play still produces great expectations of pleasure, which are usually fulfilled. It holds a secure place in the theatrical repertory, in high school and university curricula, and in the hearts of contemporary playgoers and readers. .
No doubt much of its continued popularity has resulted, as Digges suggested, from the comic action, and, in particular, from the character of Falstaff. There are more references to the fat knight through the end of the eighteenth century than to any.
other literary character, and, until the last half-century, discussions of Falstaff "the most substantial comic character that was ever invented", as Hazlitt said, presumably aware of the joke) dominated the criticism of the play. On stage, throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, 1 Henry IV was inevitably Falstaff's play, and virtually every great actor of those times took on the role, from Thomas Betterton to James Hackett, Charles Kemble to William Macready, and Samuel Phelps to Herbert Beerbohm Tree. At least one woman played the role: Lydia Webb in 1786. .
The twentieth century, however, rediscovered both on stage and in the study the fact that the play offers more than the remarkable (and oft-remarked) Falstaff. The irrepressible knight strains against but does not overwhelm the design of the play as it now appears on stage and in critical accounts.
