Falstaff (opera) to think of "Falstaff" as a work that has a certain Englishness. In fact the opera is no more English than "Aida" is Egyptian. Boito and Verdi between them transformed the fat knight into one of the archetypes of "opera buffa"." Verdi himself, however, felt that the Falstaff of the opera is not a conventional Italian "buffo" character, but portrays Shakespeare's fuller, more ambiguous Falstaff of the "Henry IV" plays: "My Falstaff is not merely the hero of "The Merry Wives of Windsor", who is simply a buffoon, and allows himself to be tricked by the women, but also the
Shakespearean comedy Shakespearean comedy In the First Folio, the plays of William Shakespeare were grouped into three categories: comedies, histories, and tragedies, though today many scholars recognize a fourth category, romance, to describe the specific types of comedies that appear as Shakespeare's later works. There are ten plays by Shakespeare which are consistently understood as being comedies by name and genre. More ambiguously, there are 17 of Shakespeare's plays which may or may not be called comedies, depending on the source of analysis or commentary, depending on whether the so-called problem plays of Shakespeare are counted, and well and the romance-plays of