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Morgann has himself told us in his Preface all that we know about the composition of his Essay on the Dramatic Character of Sir John Falstaff. The result of a challenge arising out of a friendly conversation, it was written “in a very short time” in 1774, and then laid aside and almost forgotten. But for the advice of friends it would probably have remained in manuscript, and been destroyed, like his other critical works, at his death. On their suggestion he revised and enlarged it, as hastily as he had written it; and it appeared anonymously in the spring of 1777. The original purpose of the Essay is indicated by the motto on the title-page: “I am not John of Gaunt your grandfather, but yet no Coward, Hal”; but as Morgann wrote he passed from Falstaff to the greater theme of Falstaff's creator. He was persuaded to publish his Essay because, though it dealt nominally with one character, its main subject was the art of Shakespeare. For the same reason it finds a place in this volume.

In 1744 Corbyn Morris had briefly analysed the character of Falstaff in his Essay towards fixing the true standards of Wit, Humour, Raillery, Satire, and Ridicule; Mrs. Montagu had expressed the common opinion of his cowardice in her Essay on the Writings and Genius of Shakespeare; the Biographia Britannica had declared him to be Shakespeare's masterpiece; while his popularity had [pg lxiii] led Kenrick to produce in 1766 Falstaff's Wedding as a sequel to the second part of Henry IV.; but Morgann's Essay is the first detailed examination of his character. He was afterwards the subject of papers by Cumberland in the Observer (1785, No. 73), and by Henry Mackenzie in the Lounger (1786, Nos. 68, 69), and in 1789 he was described by Richardson in an essay which reproduced Morgann's title. None of these later works have the interest attaching to James White's Falstaff's Letters (1796).

The Essay on Falstaff was republished, with a short biographical preface, in 1820, and a third and last edition came out in 1825. What is apparently the first detailed criticism of it occurs in the London Review for February, 1820.