Characters of Shakespear's Plays Merry Wives of Windsor". The bulk of Hazlitt's commentary on the two history plays is devoted to Falstaff, whom he considers to be "perhaps the most substantial comic character ever invented". Falstaff had been of interest to Shakespearean commentators for years. Forty years earlier, a full-length book had appeared, "An Essay on the Dramatic Character of Sir John Falstaff" (1777), by Maurice Morgann, often taken as the beginning of that school of Shakespearean criticism which considers the characters of Shakespeare's plays as though they were real people. Hazlitt, who seems to have had little acquaintance with Morgann's work, is careful
Giuseppe Verdi of Duncan, the forms transcend the 'Code Rossini' and propel the drama in a compelling fashion. Verdi was to comment in 1868 that Rossini and his followers missed "the golden thread that binds all the parts together and, rather than a set of numbers without coherence, makes an opera." "Tinta" was for Verdi this "golden thread", an essential unifying factor in his works. The writer David Kimbell states that in "Luisa Miller" and "Stiffelio" (the earliest operas of this period) there appears to be a "growing freedom in the large scale structure...and an acute attention to fine detail." Others echo