Question: James Heposki wrote his dissertation on Falstaff, which is also the name of a character created by whom?

Oskar Rescher (October 1, 1884 – March 26, 1972), aka Osman Reşer, was a prolific German-Turkish scholar in Arabic, Persian, and Turkish literature who specialized in pre-Islamic Arabic poetry and Ottoman studies.  In 1903 he began to study law in Munich but soon changed to Oriental languages.  After receiving his doctorate at Berlin in 1909 with a dissertation on the Arab grammarian Ibn Jinni he moved to Istanbul to work in the libraries there.  During World War I he served in the German Army as censor for Arabic prisoner of war correspondence.  After the war, he moved to Breslau and received his "Habilitation" and "venia legendi" (the right to hold lectures at a German university) from the University of Breslau.  In 1925 he began teaching as professor (without full chair) at Breslau, but in 1928 he took a long-term leave and returned to Turkey.  He left Breslau "for reasons that can no longer be determined but he evidently did so with resentment" (Berthold Spuler).  Rescher also relinquished his membership in the Deutsche Morgenländische Gesellschaft (DMG), the society of Oriental scholars in Germany.  In due course he acculturated to the Turkish locale, changing the spelling of his name, and converting to Islam.  For many years he was a staff member of the Islamic Institute of the University of Istanbul.  There he spent the rest of his life, producing numerous scholarly studies and translating many texts into German.  (He himself also wrote Oriental-style poetry in German.)  Apart from keeping close contact with his Turkish colleagues and with Helmut Ritter, who was between 1926 and 1949 a semi-official representative of the DMG in Istanbul, Rescher lived a solitary life in his Istanbul house overlooking the Bosphorus, accompanied by many cats. <SEP>  His significance as a fully developed character in Shakespeare 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. Sir John Falstaff is a fictional character who is mentioned in five plays by William Shakespeare and appears on stage in three of them.  A notable eulogy for Falstaff is presented in Act II, Scene III of "Henry V", where Falstaff does not appear as a character on stage, as enacted by Mistress Quickly in terms that some scholars have ascribed to Plato's description of the death of Socrates after drinking hemlock.  By comparison, in "The Merry Wives of Windsor", Falstaff is presented by Shakespeare as the buffoonish suitor of two married women. <SEP> Captain Isaac Biddlecomb is a fictional character created by maritime writer/novelist James L. Nelson.  He is a merchant captain whose smuggling occupation and later participation in the American Revolution has made him the pride of the American colonies.  After the first version of "By Force of Arms" was written, the author planned to change his name to Nathaniel, but decided that Isaac was too deeply engrained into his character.  Instead, he used that name for Biddlecomb's faithful boatswain, and later, for his own son. <SEP>  He earned his Masters and PhD in Music History from Harvard University, studying with David G. Hughes, John M. Ward, Oliver Strunk and Christoph Wolff, earning his doctorate in 1979 with a dissertation on Giuseppe Verdi's "Falstaff".  Since 1999 he has been Professor of Music at Yale University; earlier he taught at the University of Minnesota and at Oberlin College. James Arnold Hepokoski (born 1946) is an American musicologist.