But Falstaff is the comic counterpoint to all that posturing. They look as if they’re about nation building, kingship and pride in warfare. Shakespeare was a showman, and his Henry plays played to English jingoism and mythmaking. Falstaff is on the side of life messy, silly, unplanned, all for love, life. Prince Hal, morphing into Henry V, may be a great leader, but he dumps his friends, rewrites his past, and in carnage is a self-aggrandizing commander of the Death Star. But the dangerous, subversive question of the history plays - and in Bloom’s book, we’re reading both parts of “Henry IV” as well as “Henry V” - is, what is power worth?įalstaff, excessive, loving, outrageous, overblown, but true, stands against Hal’s counterfeit. Shakespeare’s message of madness is to be found in those characters who are anti-life - whether Angelo in “Measure for Measure,” or Lady Macbeth, or Leontes in “The Winter’s Tale.” In the late plays there is a cure for madness: Lear dies sane, Leontes repents. We meet him first in “Henry IV, Part 1,” already old, lusting at life, drinking pal of the young Prince Hal, who is calculatedly slumming it in London’s East End, like any rich kid running away from the family firm. He is part pagan - the Lord of Misrule on the loose in Eastcheap, and as such his time is short.
This nightwalker and whoremonger, a “muddy conger,” swinging at his old mistress Doll Tearsheet, a life-affirming liar whose truth is never to be a counterfeit.įalstaff is ancient energy thumping at volume through a temporary poundage of flesh. This whiskery swag-bellied omnivorous cornucopia of appetites, red-eyed, unbuttoned, sherry-soaked. Not that there is anything ethereal about Fat Jack. That was 75 years ago Bloom has been faithful ever since, and “Falstaff: Give Me Life” may be his last love letter to the shaping spirit of his imagination. Harold Bloom fell in love with Shakespeare’s Sir John Falstaff when, as a boy of 12, “I turned to him out of need, because I was lonely.”
FALSTAFF Give Me Life By Harold Bloom 158 pp.