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“What is honour? a word. What is in that word honour? what is that honour? air. A trim reckoning! Who hath it? he that died o' Wednesday. Doth he feel it? no. Doth he hear it? no.”
― William Shakespeare, King Henry IV, Part 1

“A thought expressed is a falsehood." In poetry what is not said and yet gleams through the beauty of the symbol, works more powerfully on the heart than that which is expressed in words. Symbolism makes the very style, the very artistic substance of poetry inspired, transparent, illuminated throughout like the delicate walls of an alabaster amphora in which a flame is ignited.

Characters can also serve as symbols. Sancho Panza and Faust, Don Quixote and Hamlet, Don Juan and Falstaff, according to the words of Goethe, are "schwankende Gestalten."

Apparitions which haunt mankind, sometimes repeatedly from age to age, accompany mankind from generation to generation. It is impossible to communicate in any words whatsoever the idea of such symbolic characters, for words only define and restrict thought, but symbols express the unrestricted aspect of truth.

Moreover we cannot be satisfied with a vulgar, photographic exactness of experimental photoqraphv. We demand and have premonition of, according to the allusions of Flaubert, Maupassant, Turgenev, Ibsen, new and as yet undisclosed worlds of impressionability. This thirst for the unexperienced, in pursuit of elusive nuances, of the dark and unconscious in our sensibility, is the characteristic feature of the coming ideal poetry. Earlier Baudelaire and Edgar Allan Poe said that the beautiful must somewhat amaze, must seem unexpected and extraordinary. French critics more or less successfully named this feature - impressionism.

Such are the three major elements of the new art: a mystical content, symbols, and the expansion of artistic impressionability.

No positivistic conclusions, no utilitarian computation, but only a creative faith in something infinite and immortal can ignite the soul of man, create heroes, martyrs and prophets... People have need of faith, they need inspiration, they crave a holy madness in their heroes and martyrs.

("On The Reasons For The Decline And On The New Tendencies In Contemporary Literature")”
― Dmitry Merezhkovsky, Silver Age of Russian Culture

“Hal, if I tell thee a lie, spit in my face, call me horse.”
― William Shakespeare, King Henry IV, Part 1

“How now, my sweet creature of bombast! How long is't ago, Jack, since thou saw'st thien own knee?”
― William Shakespeare, King Henry IV, Part 1

“Marry, then, sweet wag, when thou art king, let not us that are squires of the night’s body be called thieves of the day’s beauty. Let us be Diana’s foresters, gentlemen of the shade, minions of the moon, and let men say we be men of good government, being governed, as the sea is, by our noble and chaste mistress the moon, under whose countenance we steal.”
― William Shakespeare, King Henry IV, Part 1

“Shakespeare will not allow Falstaff to die upon stage. We see and hear the deaths of Hamlet, Cleopatra, Antony, Othello, and Lear. Iago is led away to die silently under torture. Macbeth dies offstage but he goes down fighting. Falstaff dies singing the Twenty-third Psalm, smiling upon his fingertips, playing with flowers, and crying aloud to God three or four times. That sounds more like pain than prayer.
We do not want Sir John Falstaff to die. And of course he does not. He is life itself.”
― Harold Bloom, Falstaff: Give Me Life

“O monstrous! eleven buckram men grown out of two!”
― William Shakespeare, King Henry IV, Part 1

“I’ll be no longer guilty of this sin; this sanguine coward, this bed-presser, this horseback-breaker, this huge hill of flesh,â€�”
― William Shakespeare, King Henry IV, Part 1

“If it really was Queen Elizabeth who demanded to see Falstaff in a comedy, then she showed herself a very perceptive critic. But even in The Merry Wives of Windsor, Falstaff has not and could not have found his true home because Shakespeare was only a poet. For that he was to wait nearly two hundred years till Verdi wrote his last opera. Falstaff is not the only case of a character whose true home is the world of music; others are Tristan, Isolde and Don Giovanni.”
― W.H. Auden, The Dyer's Hand and Other Essays

“Nernst was a great admirer of Shakespeare, and it is said that in a conference concerned with naming units after appropriate persons, he proposed that the unit of rate of liquid flow should be called the falstaff.”
― J.R. Partington

“But Hamlet is death's ambassador while Falstaff is the embassy of life.”
― Harold Bloom, Falstaff: Give Me Life

“If it were possible for a metaphysician to be a golfer, he might perhaps occasionally notice that his ball, instead of moving forward in a vertical plane (like the generality of projectiles, such as brickbats and cricket balls), skewed away gradually to the right. If he did notice it, his methods would naturally lead him to content himself with his caddies's remark-'ye heeled that yin,' or 'Ye jist sliced it.' ... But a scientific man is not to be put off with such flimsy verbiage as that. He must know more. What is 'Heeling', what is 'slicing', and why would either operation (if it could be thoroughly carried out) send a ball as if to cover point, thence to long slip, and finally behind back-stop? These, as Falstaff said, are 'questions to be asked.”
― Peter Guthrie Tait

“The Great Carouser by Stewart Stafford

The Great Carouser approaches,
His belly as stacked cheddar rolls,
Used as a springboard for lust,
And a battering ram for tavern doors.

Shrieks of terror and welcome,
Greet his arrival with ale demands,
Tankards clank and merriment begins,
Lewd ditties and jokes by the bar.

Balancing acts on tables,
With tongues held hostage,
By braggadocio squatters,
In an intoxicated stranglehold.

Slurred speech and equilibrium loss,
Signal festivities end for the gang,
Staggering out into the starlit street,
Partners on each arm for shady exertions.

Then waking as if mauled by a bear,
A quick drink and a greasy feast initiated,
For the strange girls snoring in his bed,
The Great Carouser has struck again.

© Stewart Stafford, 2022. All rights reserved.”
― Stewart Stafford

“For most roles the playmaker has to hunt words to put in their mouths. With Falstaff I run alongside him, scratching what he says in my table-book.”
― Justin Scott, The Sister Queens