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. 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?

Falstaff, excessive, loving, outrageous, overblown, but true, stands against Hal’s counterfeit. 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. Falstaff is on the side of life; messy, silly, unplanned, all for love, life.

Shakespeare was a showman, and his Henry plays played to English jingoism and mythmaking. They look as if they’re about nation building, kingship and pride in warfare. But Falstaff is the comic counterpoint to all that posturing.

In a wonderfully comic scene, cited at length by Bloom, Falstaff will play dead like a circus dog in order to avoid being killed in Hal’s war.

Falstaff: “To die is to be a counterfeit, for he is but the counterfeit of a man who hath not the life of a man. But to counterfeit dying when a man thereby liveth is to be no counterfeit but the true and perfect image of life indeed.”

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In other words — what exactly is worth dying for?

Bloom frankly accepts that he is an old man losing his friends to death. He knows he doesn’t have much time left himself. His interest is in how we expand the time we have — old or not. Falstaff, himself cartoonishly expanded on the outside, is also a human Tardis, much bigger inside than out, a kingdom got not by usurpation or bloodshed, but by pressing his being so close to life that he becomes the imprint of it.