![]() Bloom said of Falstaff that he was the “grandest character in all of Shakespeare,” which was saying something since the critic also maintained that Shakespeare, more than just being a great (or the greatest) of writers, had actually invented what it means to be human. Speaking of Sir John Falstaff, who drank, thieved, embellished, and joked across both Henry IV Part 1 and Part II, the proprietor of the Boar’s Head Inn assures us “Nay, sure, he’s not in hell! He’s in Arthur’s bosom, if ever man went to Arthur’s bosom.” Mistress Quickly recounts that, as Falstaff approached the end of his life, “His nose was as sharp as a pen, and he talked of green fields.”Īn appropriate image and metaphor, the sharp pen, for America’s most famous literary scholar Harold Bloom was welcomed into Arthur’s bosom this week at the age of 89 in New Haven, Connecticut a man who, in his erudite yet disheveled, avuncular yet cutting, radical yet deeply conservative, way had always configured himself as the Falstaff of criticism. ![]() In the second act of William Shakespeare’s Henry V, the bawdy barmaid Mistress Quickly delivers a eulogy for one of the playwright’s most immediate, modern, and visceral of characters. ![]()
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