Falstaff
A Novel
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- USD 12.99
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- USD 12.99
Descripción editorial
Winner of the Hawthornden Prize and the Guardian Fiction Prize
The most beloved comic figure in English literature decides that history hasn’t done him justice—it’s time for him to tell the whole unbuttoned story, his way. Irascible and still lecherous at eighty-one, Falstaff spins out these outrageously bawdy memoirs as an antidote to legend, and in the process manages to recreate his own. This splendidly written novel is a feast, opening wide the look and feel of another age and bringing Shakespeare’s Falstaff to life in a totally new way. Like Jack Falstaff himself, it’s sprawling, vivid, oversized—big as life. We return in an instant to an England that was ribald, violent, superstitious, coursing with high spirits and a fresh sense of national purpose. We see what history and the Bard of Avon overlooked or avoided: what really happened that celebrated night at the windmill when Falstaff and Justice Shallow heard the chimes at midnight; who really killed Hotspur; how many men fell at the Battle of Agincourt; what actually transpired at the coronation of Henry V ("Harry the Prig"); and just what it was that made the wives of Windsor so very merry.
Falstaff "tells all" about Prince Hal, John of Gaunt ("that maniac"), Pistol, Bardolph, Doll Tearsheet, and Jane Nightwork. At the same time, his racy narrative offers us a tapestry of the Middle Ages: the Black Death and May Day; an expedition to Ireland and a pilgrimage to the Holy Land; nights at the Boar’s Head; the splendor of London Bridge; and hundreds of other sights and sounds and people zestfully recalled between scabrous opinions and irreverent meditations—in sum, the very flavor of a great age. The voice is unmistakably Falstaff’s and his great drama swaggers, laughs, and shouts across every page.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
First published in England in 1976 and long awaited by American fans of Nye's Mrs. Shakespeare: The Complete Works and The Late Mr. Shakespeare, this unabashedly bawdy and outrageously raunchy winner of the Hawthornden Prize and Guardian Fiction Prize is a takeoff on such classic literary erotica as Fielding's Tom Jonesand Cleland's Fanny Hill. The novel unfolds as the true-life memoirs of one of the Immortal Bard's most memorable characters, the feckless soldier of fortune Falstaff, aka Sir John Fastolf, based upon a real-life knight reputed to be cowardly. Dictated to various household secretaries as he is nearing death at age 81, Falstaff's fictional memoir opens with the extravagant claim that he was conceived under a fig tree planted on the phallus of the legendary figure of the giant of Cerne carved into the chalk hillside near Cerne Abbas in Dorset. Now an octogenarian, the old rooster gleefully crows about the size of his own member and a sexual dalliance with his 15-year-old niece. Graphically chronicling seven decades of debauchery, Nye revisits Shakespeare's Henry IV, Part I depiction of Falstaff as the father figure for young Prince Hal (soon to become Henry V), who publicly rejects him along with his rather reprehensible companions when fickle Hal assumes the throne following his father's death (Henry IV, Part 2). Purporting to set history aright, the narrative offers a Walter Mittyesque version of the infamous rogue's exploits in the boudoir and battlefield. Annotated with snide naysaying asides from his stepson, this delightfully raucous, slyly insightful fable gently closes the book on Falstaff as a bittersweet metaphor for the foibles of everyman.