George Stephen Kemble was a successful English theatre manager, actor, and writer, and a member of the famous Kemble family. He was described as "the best Sir John Falstaff which the British stage ever saw" though he also played title roles in Hamlet and King Lear among others. He published plays, poetry and non-fiction.
Stephen Kemble as Falstaff by James Heath
Kemble by John Raphael Smith, National Portrait Gallery
Stephen Kemble
Royal Theatre, Newcastle
Sir John Falstaff is a fictional character who appears in three plays by William Shakespeare and is eulogised in a fourth. His significance as a fully developed character is primarily formed in the plays Henry IV, Part 1 and Part 2, where he is a companion to Prince Hal, the future King Henry V of England. Falstaff is also featured as the buffoonish suitor of two married women in The Merry Wives of Windsor. Though primarily a comic figure, Falstaff embodies a depth common to Shakespeare's major characters. A fat, vain, and boastful knight, he spends most of his time drinking at the Boar's Head Inn with petty criminals, living on stolen or borrowed money. Falstaff leads the apparently wayward Prince Hal into trouble, and is ultimately repudiated after Hal becomes king.
Adolf Schrödter: Falstaff and his page
Mistress Page and Falstaff in The Merry Wives of Windsor, staged by Pacific Repertory Theatre in 1999
1829 watercolor by Johann Heinrich Ramberg of Act II, Scene iv: Falstaff enacts the part of the king
Falstaff with Doll Tearsheet in the Boar's Head tavern, illustration to Act 2, Scene 4 of the play by Eduard von Grützner