**This post is Part 3 of an ongoing series in which I’ll be reading various Shakespeare plays, along with the Harold Bloom commentary from his book Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human, and providing my thoughts/reactions.**

The Performance:

I was once again impressed by the quality of the performances available on Digital Theatre. I watched the Royal Shakespeare Company’s 2014 production of both parts, and having continuity of cast between the two parts proved instrumental in streamlining my understanding of the play.

Much more will be said about Falstaff as a character below, but as an actor, Antony Sher stole the show, as any good Falstaff ought to do. His performance was eloquent, mischievous, and terribly endearing. I am incredibly thankful that I did not simply read this play–no Falstaff of the mind could ever live up to such a well-rendered Falstaff of the flesh.

I am, however, only now starting to understand some of the opportunities and limitations of watching recordings of live performances. The most salient example for me was the closeup shot of Falstaff’s (Sher) face in the poignant final scene of Part II, when the newly-crowned Henry V publicly rejects him.

Sher nails the look of crestfallen disbelief hidden one inch behind the ever-present mask of exuberance on Falstaff’s face; but I found myself wondering, “Am I supposed to see this expression this close? Isn’t this… cheating, in a way?” My friend Nathan, who is more expert in theater by far than I, also pointed out that the closeness of that shot also robs us of our view of the other characters, however briefly.

Quibbles about framing aside, it was a fantastic performance. Honorable mention, behind Sher, goes to Jennifer Kirby for her portrayal of Lady Percy–equally moving in both parts. She brought a pathos and life to a character that, for me, refused to jump off the page in the written text.

The Play:

I wouldn’t consider myself a history buff, even of English history, so in some sense the fact that this play kept me engaged across two parts (and nearly 6 hours of performance) is a great victory in itself. Perhaps the play’s greatest strength is also its greatest weakness, which is that it makes the history seem… irrelevant? If not irrelevant, it is certainly not the star of the show.

The star of the show is, of course, Sir John Falstaff, a usurpation reminiscent of Beatrice and Benedick in Much Ado About Nothing, in which a nominally minor character manages to win the hearts of viewers and critics alike. Falstaff’s relationship with the young Prince Hal (soon to be Henry V) is the primary friction of the play.

On one hand, Falstaff’s actions show us clearly that he is a drunkard, a braggart, and a professional thief, making him scandalous company for the Prince of Wales. On the other hand, Falstaff’s words show us–just as clearly–that he is enlightened, powerful, and self-assured in a way that all of the “royal” characters in the play fail to be. This contradiction forces an ambivalence from Hal, the audience, and likely Shakespeare himself about Falstaff’s true nature.

The central question in the play is whether Falstaff is callously and flagrantly seeking to live “above” the rule of law, or if (forgive the obvious Nietzsche reference) he is simply living “beyond” it. For example, when Falstaff decries the idea of honor, that most princely of all virtues by asking:

Can honour set a leg? No. Or an arm? No. Or take away the grief of a wound? No. Honour hath no skill in surgery then? No. What is honour? A word. What is in that word honour? Air. A trim reckoning! […] Therefore I’ll none of it. – Henry IV, Part I, Act V, Scene 1

we are left with a question of our own: is Falstaff a coward, justifying his cowardice through pompous speech and philosophical slight of hand; or is he a free and radical thinker, the only one suited to see through the chivalric values of the era to expose the raging civil war for the folly that it is? Here Bloom is quite insightful:

Falstaff need not concern himself with teaching virtue, because the struggle between the usurper Henry IV and the rebels has no possible relation to ethics or to morality. Falstaff jests of the rebels that “they offend only the virtuous,” who clearly are not to be found in the England of Henry IV. – Bloom, 275

My only knock on the play itself (hinted above) is that most of the other characters and their accompanying plots failed to elicit an emotional response from me. Maybe if I had read Richard II, I’d be more invested in the father-son relationship of Henry IV and Hal. Maybe if I had more historical context, I’d see Hotspur as the villain he should be, or as the misunderstood vigilante he sees in himself. But without this context, I’m in a unique position to judge the play as a self-contained work of art, and as such it failed on some of the more “structural” dimensions of the play.

However, this is no more to say that the play is a failure than to say that Much Ado is a failure because I didn’t fall in love with Hero–these things become happily (rather than disappointingly) irrelevant when the play is so generous in other areas. I would read/watch a play entirely about Falstaff, with no historical scaffolding on which to pin his narrative arc. Oh, you say, there is such a play? The Merry Wives of Windsor? I’m sorry, but you are not speaking of the same Falstaff that I had in mind.

The Bloom:

No play is haunted by the pale specter of Bloom (excepting perhaps Hamlet) to the same degree as Henry IV. Bloom’s admiration of Falstaff is absolute, dogmatic, and rapacious. One gets the sense that the motivation for Bloom’s entire corpus of Shakespeare scholarship may be the singular end of advocation on behalf of his beloved Sir John.

In his book, we catch Bloom in a historical moment where this advocacy is on the defensive, and much of the essay is dedicated to deriding and debasing the “grotesque” (Bloom, 272) critics who insist on Falstaff as anything less than being (along with Hamlet):

[…] the most comprehensive consciousness in all of literature, larger than those of the biblical J Writer’s Yahweh, of the Gospel of Mark’s Jesus, of Dante the Pilgrim and Chaucer the Pilgrim, of Don Quixote and Esther Summerson, of Proust’s narrator and Leopold Bloom. – Bloom, 4

N.B., dear reader, that Bloom throws out this hot take on page FOUR of his 700+ page book. The question immediately brought to mind is the obvious one: could this be true?

No, it couldn’t be. Or, at least, it isn’t.

Even from the perspective of 2025, Falstaff is a revolutionary and captivating character. I do see him as an absurd hero and a supra-moralist, a character that believes in and affirms life over all else, who is willing to revisit his prior convictions and recalibrate his thinking openly and deftly. Besides that, he is one of the wittiest and most skillful orators in literary history. This record should earn him a hallowed spot in literary history, to be sure.

But a more comprehensive consciousness than Jesus? Nobody but the Beatles is bigger than Jesus, a fact Bloom might have noted in the 1960s had he been watching The Ed Sullivan Show instead of giving lectures at Yale.

So while I believe Bloom is correct in his reasons for admiring Falstaff, he seems too enamored of them to even articulate them. The result is a (long) essay that is circular, raving, and almost unreadable. For elevating my awareness of Falstaff, I owe Bloom a debt of gratitude; but for teaching me how to appreciate him, I’ve had to look elsewhere, mostly to the words of the hero himself.

Perhaps Bloom should have done the same. After all, it is sufficient to say:

Banish plump Jack, and banish all the world – Henry IV, Part 1, Act II, Scene 4

Recommended reading/viewing for English history fans, lovers of wit, and believers in life alike.

Rating: 8/10