⁴⁶ It is perhaps possible that the trick is even more complex, and that the content of Falstaff’s speech, rather than the fact of his speech, shows that the play is still underway. In this reading, the audience first assumes that the play is over; then with Falstaff’s speaking, they assume he is giving an epilogue; then they realize that the character has risen; and finally realize that the character has faked his death. Mariko Ichikawa notes how epilogues provide a transition for ‘onstage corpses to return to the actual bodies of the actors’. However, the epilogues she discusses are all delivered by characters still alive at the end of the play. See ‘What to Do with a Corpse? Physical Reality and the Fictional World in the Shakespearean Theatre’, Theatre Research International 29 (2004), 211.

⁴⁷ See Chester 18.154–85, N-Town 35.73–88, Towneley 26.230–350, and Christus Redivivus III. i.148–51, in the following editions: Lumiansky and Mills, eds, Chester Mystery Cycle; Stephen Spector, ed., The N-Town Play, vol. 1, EETS ss 11 (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1991); Martin Stevens and A. C. Cawley, eds, The Towneley Plays, vol. 2, EETS ss 14 (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Pres, 1994); Nicholas Grimald, Christus Redivivus, in The Life and Poems of Nicholas Grimald, ed. L. R. Merrill, Yale Studies in English 69 (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press; London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1925).

⁴⁸ No quarto or folio stage direction calls for the removal of Blount’s body. Arden 3 editor David Scott Kastan inserts a direction for Falstaff to ‘Exit with Blount’s body’ after Falstaff’s comments on his ‘grinning honor’ (5.3.60), though he acknowledges in a note that Blount’s body could remain onstage until the end of the scene; see Kastan’s edition of King Henry IV, Part 1, (London: Thompson Learning, 2002). For several visual representations of Christ rising amidst unconscious soldiers, see M. D. Anderson, Drama and Imagery in English Medieval Churches (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1963), plates 2b, 9a and 9b.