 Welles said , " the film was not intended as a lament for Falstaff , but for the death of Merrie England . Merrie England as a conception , a myth which has been very real to the English @-@ speaking world , and is to some extent expressed in other countries of the Medieval epoch : the age of chivalry , of simplicity , of Maytime and all that . It is more than Falstaff who is dying . It 's the old England dying and betrayed . " Many film theorists and Welles biographers have written about the recurrent theme of the " Lost Eden " in Welles 's work and of characters who are nostalgic for an idealized past , which Welles called " the central theme in Western culture . " Welles told Peter Bogdanovich that " even if the good old days never existed , the fact that we can conceive of such a world is , in fact , an affirmation of the human spirit . " Film scholar <unk> Houston argued that this nostalgia made Welles 's depiction of Falstaff infantile and called his performance a " [ p ] <unk> baby ... an eating , sucking , foetus @-@ like creature . " Welles also called Falstaff " the greatest conception of a good man , the most completely good man , in all of drama " , and said that " the closer I thought I was getting to Falstaff the less funny he seemed to me . When I played him before in the theater , he seemed more witty than comical . And in bringing him to the screen , I found him only occasionally , and only deliberately , a clown . " 
