Nor did I share Pequigney’s obvious preference for Henry V over the Henry IV plays.
When I took a course in the history plays with Pequigney and we moved from the Henry IV plays to Henry V, I openly expressed my disappointment in Prince Hal for having so easily, and cruelly, tossed his old pal aside in response, Pequigney made clear his disappointment in me, explaining that Henry V was, indeed, the perfect king, and that, in order to step fully into that role, had to jettison Falstaff in the coldest, most definitive way possible. “I think of this as the Falstaffiad,” writes Bloom, “rather than the Henriad, as scholars tend to call it.” For Bloom, who has been teaching at Yale since 1955 and who is considered by many to be the most distinguished living literary critic (he’s 87), Falstaff is not just “the glory of the Henry IV plays” but (his italics) “ the grandest personality in all of Shakespeare.” This isn’t the first time Bloom has placed Falstaff front and center: in his 1998 book on Shakespeare, Bloom named Falstaff and Hamlet as the Bard’s two key characters.Īnd here I used to think that, if we were to exalt any of the Henry plays, it was supposed to be Henry V, in which the former Prince Hal-having inherited the throne from his father, put behind him his dissolute days of drinking, whoring, and carousing, kicked his elderly, corpulent sidekick Falstaff to the curb, and instantly, magically metamorphosed into the perfect king-brilliantly leads his army on a successful conquest of France, pausing only to deliver the immortal lines beginning “Once more into the breach, dear friends” and the equally famous St. “No play of Shakespeare’s,” wrote Mark Van Doren (the mentor, by the way, of another professor of mine, the late, great Louis Simpson) in his 1939 book Shakespeare, “is better than ‘Henry IV.’” Then there’s Harold Bloom, who, in the opening pages of his short, charming new book Falstaff: Give Me Life, writes that he has “come to believe that if we are to represent Shakespeare by only one play, it ought to be the complete Henry IV, to which I would add Mistress Quickly’s description of the death of Falstaff in act 2, scene 3 of Henry V.”įor Bloom, what puts Henry IV on top is not the starring role, Prince Hal, but the supporting character Sir John Falstaff. For a long time I assumed that these were bizarre favorites. Though I loved Shakespeare in college, I thought there must be something wrong with me, because my favorite among his plays wasn’t Hamlet or Lear-it was Henry IV, Part One, closely followed by Henry IV, Part Two.
Levin, a stuffy but solid University of Chicago formalist who made a side career out of attacking feminist and New Historicist criticism (and who publicly dismissed Kott’s work as a heap of rubbish) and Joseph Pequigney, whose Such Is My Love (1985) is perhaps the definitive argument for the case that some of the sonnets are homoerotic. I’m no expert on Shakespeare, but as a student I took classes with three of the biggies-Jan Kott, a Stalinist Pole whose Shakespeare Our Contemporary (1964) is largely responsible for the now widespread (and usually unfortunate) practice of staging Shakespeare in modern dress Richard L. Mihály Zichy: Falstaff with a Tankard of Wine and a Pipe, 1873.