This is Sir John Falstaff, in Shakepeare’s “Henry IV, part I,” mincing no words as he berates young Prince Hal for, basically, calling him fat. Falstaff gives it right back, in effect calling the prince a scrawny, dried-up scrap of jerky.

Even though the language is archaic, the vocabulary outside our everyday discourse, we understand it to be insulting. Falstaff was many things, but he was not passive aggressive.

Yes, he was many things, many of them far worse than being passive aggressive. I am not fat-shaming Falstaff here. I leave that to The Bard. I’m referring to Falstaff’s penchant for braggadocio, lying, bullying and highway robbery, as well as leading the future king astray with his debauched lifestyle.

Leaving aside his out-dated jargon, which I’m sure he could easily modernize, Falstaff would fit right into our present day political scene here in the United States.

As I have mentioned before in this column, I think passive aggression has been given a bum rap. There are times when a person is not in a position to be self-assertive. There are times when a person simply cannot take the risk of open rebellion. At these times, the choices are passive aggression, active aggression and being nice. Active aggression is worse, and far more dangerous, than passive, and being nice is not always possible.

To be fair, though, passive aggressive behavior can be very irritating.

I’m talking here about snide remarks, when you are the obvious target. You can tell that a person is snidely remarking about you, but when you go to deny the implied accusation, the person smiles a snide little passive aggressive smile and says “Don’t be so defensive.”

Another irritating passive aggressive ploy is to come right out and assault you with some criticism, generally a true one, and then act as if you are being too sensitive when you react, pretending that the criticism was meant as a joke. “Just kidding!” this person (often a close friend or family member) will say.

Sometimes the jibe will be on social media, passive-aggressively disguised with a cute emoji and/or an abbreviation such as LOL or LMAO.

While, as mentioned, less dangerous than active aggression, passive aggression can have deleterious effects, especially on children. A friend of mine, for example, says she hates cleaning floors. Like me, she has a special aversion to vacuuming. I theorize that our vacuum-cleaner phobia is the direct result of being traumatized by our mothers’ angry slam vacuuming many years ago.

When I was a child back in the ’50s, women and girls were pretty much the only people who wielded vacuum cleaners, except for janitors, who at least got paid for it. Women were simply expected to vacuum, which naturally caused considerable resentment. What are one’s choices in a situation in which a woman, normally so sweet, begins to feel — not to put too fine a point on it — well, a little upset? This resentment, I believe, found expression in the passive-aggressive practice of slam vacuuming.

I don’t hold this against my mother; I myself have practiced the slam method of vacuuming. Hostile vacuuming, with its loud noise, reckless bashing of walls and furniture, and self-righteous implication “SOMEONE has to do the cleaning around here!” comes in just behind slamming doors and banging cupboard doors.

Cupboard doors! That’s another thing that takes me back to my childhood. It seems I was always banging my head on cupboard doors in the kitchen. I’m not not sure how I managed to do that. Probably I was climbing on the counters in search of hidden sweets.

However that may be, I remember being infuriated by the pain and taking it out on the offending cupboard door by punching it, thereby hurting my knuckles.

What confounds me is that I still occasionally bang my head on an open cupboard door while I’m cooking.

I don’t believe that cupboard doors have made any technological advances over the decades, and they can’t sneak up, so how they continue to carry out these attacks is beyond me.

Now that it’s spring, the snow is melting and we’ll soon be gardening and quoting Shakespeare again.

Othello: “O thou weed, who art so lovely fair, and smell’st so sweet that the senses ache at thee, would thou hadst ne’er been born!”

Desdemona: “Alas, what ignorant sin have I committed?”

Have a good week.