Falstaff can be lewd, funny, careless of others, a bad creditor, an unreliable friend, and in the end, devastatingly reckless in his presumption of loyalty from the new king.Īward-winning author and esteemed professor Harold Bloom examines Falstaff with the deepest compassion and sympathy and also with unerring wisdom. He is companion to Prince Hal (the future Henry V), who loves him, goads him, teases him, indulges his vast appetites, and commits all sorts of mischief with him - some innocent, some cruel.
Bloom's enthusiasms seemed to require, as logical corollary or.Falstaff is both a comic and tragic central protagonist in Shakespeare's three Henry plays: Henry IV Henry IV, Part One and Henry IV, Part Two and Henry V. Up with Falstaff, so down with Prince Hal. He was an unembarrassed elitist, but his incessant rhetoric of this poet over that, who's in and who's out, betrayed a certain moral crudeness.īloom's obsession with exclusion and ranking dominated even his readings of Shakespeare. Weighted to the Romantics and littered with gnostic jargon, Bloom's account of the Canon otherwise resembled all traditional lineups of Dead White Men ("livelier than you are, whoever you are").
He purported to instruct us How To Read and Why (2000), but in fact he merely shouted at us what to read.īloom discussed twenty-six central writers in The Western Canon, though an additional eight hundred-plus appear in four much-derided appendices. In fact, Bloom taught us far less about Shakespeare than could many a quieter critic. "The indispensable critic on the indispensable writer," blurbed the New York Review of Books. Vacuous claims such as that Shakespeare "invented us," that Falstaff and Hamlet "contain us," are meaningless enough the first time as eternal refrains and governing themes of a book, they are inexcusable. Vatic, vehement, and gestural, his pop-criticism did a better job of performing Bloom's enthusiasms than of educating his readers. What's worse is that he was also a lazy teacher. In his final phase, Bloom flattered the middlebrow public, with its conviction that "literature matters." His detractors say that in his popular criticism he was a shoddy scholar, which is true.
He was also the font of many rehashings, anthologies, and edited collections. By insisting that some books were undying, he vainly hoped to defy his own mortality.īloom played many roles in his career: insightful Romanticist in The Visionary Company (1961), coiner of a catchy but spurious idea in The Anxiety of Influence (1973), Delphic theorist allied with the Yale School of Deconstruction, failed fantasy novelist in The Flight to Lucifer (1979), and humanist popularizer in The Western Canon (1994) and Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human (1998). He was reviled for this by many, but perhaps he should have been pitied. Bloom championed the Western Canon against its critics, insisting that the so-called Dead White Males were in fact immortals.
The Sterling Professor of Humanities at Yale, he wrote best sellers, appeared on talk shows, and collected honorary doctorates like lint. Harold Bloom, who died in October at age eighty-nine, was The Last Great American Literary Critic.