large controversial opinionated disputatious fotu isms defender of the aesthetic and cognitive standards in the profession maintainer of canonical standards for the study and appreciation of L literature original inimitable intractable the King Kong of criticism full of Zumba hardly the mildest of men as claims to be Harold boom has dominated literary criticism for our time there is no one like him as one critic says bloom bloom he takes up the room he's known all the world from Maine to cartoon I'll end with a line and a half from Shakespeare as seems appropriate why man he doth bestride the narrow world like a Colossus please join me in welcoming as a culminating leing lecture in Shakespeare at Yale Carol Bloom hinr kind of remarked that there is a God and his name is Aristophanes I revise that to there is no God but God and his name is William Shakespeare Samuel Johnson told us that the essence of poetry is invention following that Sublime critic I called an endless book I'm sorry about Shakespeare the invention of the human 14 years later I'm still ched for confusing The Bard with Thomas Alva Edison following Johnson my Trope suggested that Shakespeare the essential poetic dramatist had revealed to us much that always had been there but had not been available before he discerned it his recognition of the human was an act of literary knowledge a mode concerning which we still comprehend rather a little Falstaff Hamlet and Cleopatra are transactions in knowledge so are you and I the ancient Greek word for word logos in its root means a gathering together the Hebrew davar for word a word that is also an act and a thing derives from a root meaning to thrust forward something that previously was held well back in the self when I listen to fall staff or to Hamlet I hear that bringing forward what we learn from Shakespeare's most vital men and women is the knowledge they incarnate this is not the knowledge of the philosophers or of the mystics or even the knowledge of Homer or Dante it is unique to Shakespeare though montain and cantes his greatest contemporaries are closer to it than anyone else before or since the self-awareness of f staff Hamlet Iago and Cleopatra is the San quality that renders them endless to meditation ours and their own if their vitalism is elusory why then so is yours and mine for we are their descendants much of our self-consciousness had its Inception in their selfawareness what we cannot catch up to is the amazing tempo of their words thoughts acts that pronatural quickness emanates from their playfulness ludic intensity renders the purposes of playing purposeless confronting us with mtic energies we scarcely apprehend let alone absorb reread the tragedy of Hamlet Prince of Denmark and Center upon the Thousand lines from act 2 scene 2 through act 3 scene 2 a quarter of the play in its uncut composite length what you confront in that whirly gig of Wonders only rarely is it the imitation of an action or any other aspect of theatrical illusion plays within plays soliloquies theatrical gossip lectures on acting crowd upon you until you do begin to feel that Hamlet somehow is an actual person intruding into a dress rehearsal for an Unwritten drama that scarcely could be shaved saage really even if it were achieved pendello bre Samuel Becket whoever you will could not match this Kaleidoscope of a theater of mind so capacious we still cannot Encompass it Hamlet palpably is an experimental thinker rather more than he is Shakespeare's thought experiment his seven soliloquies break the process of the discursive in ways that prompted nii's apathe that for which we can find words is something already dead in our hearts there's always a kind of contempt in the act of speaking I can think of nothing more alien to the magnificence of John fallstaff who excels even Prince hamlet in starting fresh meanings rather than repeating old ones false sta finds Avalanches of words for what lives fiercely in his heart and always he glories in the act of speaking few others in all of imaginative literature speak so superbly Alou Hast damnable iteration and art indeed able to corrupt the saint thou Hast done much harm upon me how God forgive thee for it before I knew thee how I knew nothing and now am I if a man should speak truly little better than one of the wicked I must give over this life and I will give it over by the Lord and I do not I a villain I'll be damned for never King's son in Christendom before I knew Thee I knew nothing addressed by the fat Knight to the prince is unanswerable and sublimely outrageous sometimes I Muse that the two oldest persons in Shakespeare are Le and F staff who have in common only their age which at 81 iar happily resembling in temperment F staff and not the tragic monarch knowing fall staff is more than entertainment though precisely that was Shakespeare's first Grand Triumph with his audience hudur says of FAL staff and his irregular humorists that they daed the world aside and bid it pass you know actually my dears I'm going to transfer myself at this point to the table hutber says a false stuff and his irregular humorous that they daff the world aside that is say bitter asde we too should thrust the most he fix Scholars aside and let them pass so as properly to apprehend saan and learn to know what he knows which is what he is his absolute sense of being vola is the Socrates of e and he teaches us to be in the difficulty of what it is to be his best student The Ungrateful Prince how absorbs the lesson and intends to hang the instructor or in any case see him cut down upon the field of battle as life itself Principle as as well as particle H staff declines to be slain he will waste away and he will die of a broken heart but that scarcely diminishes his ontological self he teaches all things in himself wit exuberance Defiance of time but above everything else the sheer Joy of being of being a human being more even than chos is the wife of baath the wonderful pan urge of Ral Sancho Panza he manifests the blessing the great Hebrew blessing which I've always translated as more life long ago I wearied of being told that Hamlet and F staff are men made out of words in more than 80 years of countless friendships and alas enmities I've encountered no one Among Us half so real or so intelligent as The Prince and Sir John if to be a Shakespeare scholar entails the denying or evading his creation of character and of human personality then I'm pleased to be merely a reader literary knowledge is not a shadow of our failure to know one another but the larger form of what that relation yet might be darkest strains reverberate when we realize we are uncertain our self- knowledge equals that of fala and of Hamlet which can cause distress since their catastrophes come precisely from their greatest human gifts years ago in London I lunched a number of times with Owen Barfield wonderful profound student of poetic thought I remember our final meeting when Owen asked me Harold does it not cause you shagrin when you reflect that your emotions originally were Shakespeare's thoughts pondering this I replied we had become his characters reflection also of course Ralph Waldo Emerson's when he he observed that Shakespeare had composed the text of Modern Life wienstein strongly dissented he ironized that Shakespeare was too English and much more creator of language than of thought or of character David Yume would have agreed with wienstein but I prefer Hegel with his very fine perception that F staff and Hamlet Iago and Cleopatra are free artists of themselves Shakespeare endows them with the capacity to recreate their souls each of them his or her own Demi urge the fiercest of Demi urges this once would have been the house in which to utter the Great Name Yahweh who with Jesus and Hamlet makes up a Triad of the West major literary characters inaugurates the particular metaphor of being that Shakespeare evades and subverts in his most vitalizing characters in Exodus 3 yahwah calls his reluctant Prophet Moses so as to send that slow of speech Shepherd the Hebrew is obscure it could mean either that Moses stutters or that he stammers I suspect he's a stammerer so as to send that slow of speech Shepherd down to Egypt to lead the supposedly chosen people back to Canan extraordinary text which I quote from King James and Moses said unto God God behold when I come unto the children of Israel and shall say unto them the god of your fathers has sent me unto you and they shall say to me what is his name what shall I say unto them and God said unto Moses I am that I am and he said thus shalt thou say unto the children of Israel I am have sent me unto you the Geneva Bible inaugurated this interesting mistake of I am that I am the great Protestant Mar William tindel the greatest of the English Bible translators watch much closer to the Hebrew Aya Asha Aya and having Yahweh say I will be what I will be as I read the Hebrew it means I bring into being what I bring into being puning outrageously on his own permanently mysterious name Yahweh States the myth of presence I will be present whenever and wherever I choose to be present which of course implies he will be absent whenever he chooses to be I recall saying in some book or other of yahwah I don't like him I don't trust him I wish he would go away but he won't Shakespeare's own dialectic is a holy secularized shuttle of what I suppose you might call the real presence and the real absence teaching Shakespeare you teach presence a teaching that enacts a reading of his ellipses that is to say no other writer has been anywhere near so skilled of the art of leaving things out though everything in the tragical history of Hamlet Prince of Denmark is questioned and questionable as we will see the darker enigmas are unmentioned and I always wonder why Shakespeare Scholars don't attend to these things when did the erotic relation ship between Claudius and Gertrude begin who is Hamlet's phallic father the warrior king or his shuffling brother more than any other Shakespearean protagonist Hamlet does not mean what he says or say what he means if we suspect that Claudius may be his father can Hamlet more intelligent than we all suspect less why does he return from the sea that Elenor where every first thought must be his impending death in a drama uniquely and openly aware of its audience we are compelled to complicity with Hamlet who pragmatically is an agent of death unlike F staff always to be sublimely praised because FAL staff is life's ambassador to us Hamlet speaks 1500 lines of what in composite editions is a play of 4,000 lines much Shakespeare's longest when not on stage Hamlet's absence is a presence as there can be no other Focus the drama is his passion and his mystery as the gospel of Mark was that of Jesus except that Hamlet is unfathered as James Joyce first suggested a play that takes as its burden the meaning of self-consciousness May hint that inner Freedom can be attained only when the protagonist can separate his genius for expanding consciousness from his own dangerous passion for sheia theatricality for staff apotheosis of self-presence enhances his freedom by playing out the play both Hamlet and Falstaff are great improvisers if finally I go with f staff it is because he goes into bottle with a bottle of sherry in his holster for swearing A Mir pistol dodging the bottle when the outraged Prince how throws it at him the subl FAL staff States a zestful truth I like not such grinning honor as s Walter hath give me life which if I can save so if not honor comes unlooked for and there's an end I've heard Shakespeare's Scholars say to me face to face that they actually prefer Hots Spurs doomsday is near die all die merrily and yet Hotspur Delights us because highp spiritedly he loves his life on his own terms Hamlet has no love for life no love for himself no love indeed for anyone else be it ailia or Horatio as for the Absurd pseudo forian readings of the play When the dying ger cries out oh my dear Hamlet his response will be wretched Queen ad do we do not receive falstaff's dying words in mistress quy's wonderful Cockney Pros elery for him and Henry V but she vividly presents the scene the great vitalist is a little child again playing with flowers smiling at his fingertips and singing the 23rd psalm pure presence hardly could be more enhanced Shakespeare wisely avoided a final utterance from the undying FAL staff how I would wince if he departed murmuring the rest is silence so capacious is Shakespeare's effect upon us that we have no secular similitudes to be offered as Alternatives the strongest of his protagonists constitute a facticity an entire world that contains us how can you or I achieve perspective upon a primordial poem of mankind that issued incredibly from a single creative mind we are inside Shakespeare's imaginings and therefore we scramble to see him with any lens is not his own I no longer go to suffer the play staged because I am too old to sustain yet more exasperation at high concept directors who assume they can think Beyond him what results are caricatures travesties noise I cannot delude myself that I am more intelligent than Hamlet or F staff here is the most famous Soliloquy in the language the Black Prince's ontological meditation staled by repetition only if you do not strive to think through it with Hamlet let us think it through together while forgiving my now broken old voice and indeed it is cracked and broken like false STS ignore the punctuation which is not Shakespeare's anyway and be aware that hamlets assertions always Verge upon being questions as I say I cannot read this as the great s John Gil good could recite it I can read it only as an interpreter to be or not to be that is the question whether is nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of Outrageous Fortune or to take arms against a sea of troubles and by opposing end them to die to sleep S no more and by asleep to say we end the heartache and the Thousand natural shocks that flesh is here to is's a consummation devoutly to be wished to die to sleep to sleep the chance to dream I there's the rub for in that sleep of death What Dreams May Come when we have shuffled off this Mortal coil must give us pause there's the respect that makes Calamity of so long life for who would bear the whips and scorns of time the oppresses wrong the proud man's conly the pangs of disprized love the laws delay the insolence of office and the spurns that patient Merit of the Unworthy takes when he himself might his qutis make with a bear botkin who would fos bear Grunt and sweat under a weary life but that the dread of something after death the Undiscovered Country from who born no traveler returns puzzles the will and makes us rather bear those ills we have than Li to others that we know not of thus conscience does make cowards of us all and thus the native Hue of resolution is sickled all with the pale cast of thought and Enterprises of great pitch and moment with this regard the occurrence turn arai and lose the name of action this absolutely is not at all what it purports to be it is not a Ry contemplating self-slaughter since Hamlet greatest divir again does not mean what he says or say what he means a psychic double dealer he Broods on the abscess of being as his own mode of Consciousness that sea of troubles will be transmuted by Milton into the great phrase a universe of death that the heroic Satan must explore on route to the new world of Eden Hamlet Western Hero Of Consciousness and not of conscience now invents what the Roman what to call the power of the poet's Mind Over All outward forces soldiers of de's Cosmos night death the mother and the Sea wal Whitman's four-fold metaphor for his unknowable soul soul will undo being and endc conscience which at once is awareness and what James Joyce called agonite of inwit Hamlet gives presence or being two choices only suffer like like a stoic or else outrageously take arms against the ocean whose heightening pitch must consume Us in its currents since our opposition cannot hope to quell them the consummation however devoutly desired must conclude in consum mum EST the final words from the cross of being but why does the prince so beautifully call death the Undiscovered Country from whose born no traveler Returns the ghost of King Hamlet brutal and malevolence has returned and once again Hamlet does not mean what he says what shall we know of whatever it is that truly he means the puzzled will must be the center of this fresh creation of meaning this new birth of poetic knowledge for it is the will in Shakespeare that overhears itself and proceeds to will change will Shakespeare plays on his name in the sonnets and he Rings changes yet more profound upon it in the tragical history of Hamlet will in shakespare is desire and the Consciousness that is one of the pits terrifyingly says desire is death how can the will overhere itself the will to change confronts at last the final form of change death that distinctly is not the falstaffian will which goes on unsettling what passes for Shakespeare's Scholars even as it exasperates their hero the brutal and conniving Prince how who becomes Henry V what better time to just and Del than in the senseless Butchery on battlefields Hamlet Jess and Del's in the graveyard but beneath the he will not say how much he loved uck if only because he really has never loved anyone else himself included where are we to find the meanings of hamlets words FAL sta is how meaning gets started while Hamlet is How It Ends by ulating the will I do not suggest that Shakespeare takes sides between the two because his capaciousness en wombs them both you and I are Shakespeare's objects we are the children of his will his perspectivism is so dumbfounding that we cannot know whether or why we ourselves must choose do we care whether fresh meaning can get started in or for ourselves I'm a bad sleep when I find myself asking myself that four or five times a night Shakespeare's influence on Shakespeare drove him to an augmenting elliptical style of thought and rhetoric falstaff's sister Cleopatra George Bernard Shaw pioneered in despising them both but fortunately no one has followed him in that regard but then sha once actually wrote when I consider the mind of William Shakespeare and compare it to my own I can only feel pity for him F staff sister Cleopatra meets her match not on the noble ruin of antthony but in the clown de's Emissary who carries in his basket the pretty worm of nylas that kills and pains not and again my wretched voice can't Encompass this but I need it the clown undoubtedly played by the great later clown and fall played the fall in Lear and festy on 12th night and so on um Robert Armen look you the worm is not to be trusted but in the keeping of wise people for indeed there is no goodness in the worm Cleopatra take thou no care it shall be heated very good give it nothing I pray you for it is not worth the feeding and Cleopatra will it eat me I love that clown you must not think I am so simple but I know the Devil Himself will not eat a woman I know that a woman is a dish for the gods if the devil dress her not but truly these same whome Devils do the gods great harm and their women for in every 10 that they make the Devils more five Cleopatra well get thee gone farewell clown yes for sooth I wish you Joy of the worm even in Shakespeare there is nothing else quite like Cleopatra's sudden return to childhood fantasy I hear a little girl and not the old Serpent of the now in would eat me the clown Charmed by her as we all have to be conceals in his populist misogyny our genuine distress and indeed his own so magnificent a woman should slay herself except for false staff and Hamlet no other death and Shakespeare divests us of so much life is so large a withdrawal of being tragedy in Shakespeare turns upon a loss in being that threatens to empty us of meaning we gain knowledge at the expense of life and the hazards of nihilism Shakespeare in my experience is the height of literary knowledge but what is the fate of such knowledge nothing is got for nothing the price of Love increases with aging because more of those you loved are now among the dead than among the living to know fewer people without the finer tone of knowledge which is after all human love is a poverty that redefines imaginative need Divinity for almost all of us no matter how we try to deceive ourselves and others is an affair only of Silent Shadow and of dreams I study shakespere with great diligence hoping to continue acquaintance with the everliving his women and his men what is it I know when my knowledge of them augments or at least remains constant Shakespeare's own invented word for the identity of any man or woman is the self-same that's all one word a deep Paradox since he is much the most metaphorical of all writers Beyond even aent perhaps montain comes closest but Montaine presents only the one magnificent identity himself notoriously will Shakespeare has virtually no identity whether in the sonets or in the plays Hamet has a dozen identities and scores of modulations within him there are more roles in him than there are great actors to perform such immense intricacies what EV literary knowledge is it begins and ends with Shakespeare except that there is no end to Shakespeare I once believe poetic knowledge could be regarded as figurative thinking but now that only seems to me one more evasion nii defined the motive for metaphor as our desire to be different the desire to be elsewhere but I think literary knowledge is a larger response to desire and now longing for a larger self seeking father Shores the Jesus of Mark's gospel says he does not know who he is and he keeps asking his thickheaded disciples but who do people say I am Hamlet the secular Christ as unamuno thought donkey Hood to be like Cante sorrowful Knight knows exactly who he is and who he's going to be if he chooses our sense of who we are and of what we might be owes everything to Shakespeare hisus is old and new descent from that but there is no history only biography and biography from Johnson and Boswell on is a Shakespearean mode literary knowledge is in the first place knowledge of literature and after that something else for want of another term I Nam this added realm Shakespearean Consciousness that vaulting Bridges the gap between Hamlet's ever growing inwardness and outward show a pageant at once celebration and lit we are at a festival of knowledge since Hamlet knows more than we know still we lament has not divulging more and we wonder if we resemble those poor players Rosen crans and Gilden Stern rather than Hamlet many of us should winse when the prince tries Gilden Stern and again by now my voice is completely gone I can only read this interpretively why look you now how unworthy a thing you make of me you would play upon me you would seem to know my stops you would pluck out the heart of my mystery you would sell me from my lowest note to the top of my compass and there is much music excellent voice in this little organ yet cannot you make it speak so blood do you think I am easier to be played on than a pipe call me what instruments you will though you fret me you cannot play a upon me Hamlet like Shakespeare composes a drama rehearsing the mode of drama he writes I know that's so insan a sentence I will read it again slowly I worked it over but I didn't find any way of putting it more simply Hamlet like Shakespeare composes a drama rehearsing the mode of drama he writes bewilderingly brilliant this propels us into a kind of imaginal knowledge which there are simply no ground rules stage playing is reinvented before our eyes startling our ears as it is in those wonderful Tavern skits improvised by F staff and Prince how literary knowledge perhaps can entirely be regarded as one more play within a play daunting out pry or awareness how can each of us cast off the shadow of self while continuing the expansion of our own Consciousness at 81 I no longer read to aage Lon us early in life I thought we read so many books because we could not know enough people that seems absolutely wrong now not even montine or Shakespeare santes or PR suffice when we Pine for an absent friend or mourn the dead without the presence of another highly valued being the self's shadow occludes any heightening of awareness still we must take our condition as given Solitude to some degree augments with aging you begin to write as I'm now speaking in the style of old age more surprisingly I think the solitary reader drifts into a new mode of reading in which the momentous world of Shakespeare refigures one's prior sense of spatial relation in regard to Shakespearean personality and characters you go from containing fala Hamlet Cleopatra to being contained by them as though they were the echo chamber your spirit inhabited in the atmosphere of solitude the spirit Withers gloriously a sorrow I associate with the stency of Nichi sarra crying out but do I bid you be either plant or Phantom Shak spiran knowledge cancels that clo in fiction false stuff is as much Quicksilver Spirit as sagging flesh Hamlet the apotheosis of Mind theatricality lamented his salid solid or solid flesh will not will to Thor dissolve itself into Dawn moistur Rings Orson wells in a letter sublimely suggested that Hamlet sensibly reached and then stayed in England rejecting Elenor slaughter house and happily grew old and fat aging into SN fala the Mercurial Orson thinking his way figuratively into conversations with Falstaff and his Splendid film chimus at midnight gave us the only portrait of the giant wit that could approach Rafe Richardson's definitive stage enactment which I saw at 16 and hold fast by 2third of a century later I return to the ultimate question what is Shakespearean knowledge Johan Batista Deo whose poets were hom Virgil and rigorously de apologized uh I tripped over that a Dante with the theology removed grounded all knowing and the true poets who repopulated the Earth with giant forms by the vioni and test Shakespeare is the truest poet the knowledge Shakespeare gives us is not language Contra vien Stein but diction the choice of words all the Shakespearean gifts cognitive figurative inventive of personalities depend upon his total Supremacy IND diction Ariel's songs in the Tempest are illustrative those are pearls that were his eyes nothing of him that doth fade but does suffer a change into something rich and strange the litany rings on pearls were eyes and then on nothing fade suffer sea change to culminate magnificently with the rich and strange that are undesignated diction opens to the realm of the will to change the lesson of the master inevitability of phrasing is an agon a struggle in which only Dante among all Western poets Rivals Shakespeare after Dante the Italian literary language had to be his initially highly personal Tuscan originated by kavak kante but then greatly surpassed in the Comedia after Shakespeare English literary language gradually unfolds into something holy his in what ways intimate ever early candid self-reflective do Hamlet F staff Cleopatra render us a strange newness in meaning repetition mere repetition consigns meaning to the rubbish Heap only this thought of fresh meaning hurts us enough to be memorable Walt Whitman fought against memory in his leaves until Hospital service among the dead and dying broke him until then Walt was a Mythic Cosmos a kind of hermetic ploma the fullness of powers that granted a fls the Divine man who inhabits Song of Myself there is a fullness of being in FAL staff and in Cleopatra and a ruining of such being in Hamlet Who would wear out any Cosmos whatsoever unlike Cleopatra and Fala Hamlet gives us the illusion that he EX neither in space nor in time it is as though his astonished inwardness represents a reality that has priority over every temporal and spatial division of human existence I never quite agree with two very gifted late friends Anthony nle and Francis Yates in their linkage of Shakespeare to the Hermetic fantasies of Robert flood and Dr John D and yet Hamlet illuminates the Hermetic image of the Divine man falling outwards and downwards into our Abyss much more fully than any esoteric tradition can hope to clarify the black prince what is foundational for the Hermetic Corpus is only another unpacking of the Heart with words words for Hamlet so capacious is Shakespeare's project that religious speculations however heterodox cannot infold to mind finally self- purified a theatric ISM the mind of Hamlet what then is the scope of literary knowledge of Hamlet Falla Cleopatra stand at the very center of it Hamlet a kaleidoscope whirls his Wonder wounded Heroes into a cosmological quest absurdly too momentous for the rotten CT of Elenor fall staff regaled with Sherry sack and D teet challenges your perspectivism to moralist S John is a cowardly buffoon to you whoever you are he ought to be the true image of life itself Cleopatra to do eyes is an aged to those who can discern she personifies heroic Aros does Shakespeare care how you choose on not knowing that is the clue to literary knowledge and this most comprehensive of all knowers in part only we come to know what he knows Hamlet defies augury and again forgive my voice if it be it is not to come if it be not to come it will be now if it be not now yet it will come the Readiness is all willing to die is a shade only from willing death false staff will have none of it or of old age though he knows well enough that both soon will have him his great enemy the Lord chief justice chides him is not your voice broke your wind short and every part about you blasted with Antiquity to Which F staff who loves laughter even more than he loves himself or Prince how who loves laughter Above All Things FAL staff greatly replies I think sometimes this is my favorite moment and all of false stuff my Lord I was born about 3 of the clock in the afternoon with a white head and something a round belly for my voice I have lost it with hallowing and singing of anthems crying out Praises of yahwah is hardly the false stfi in mode though on his deathbed he will sing Psalms I know him better than I know Hamlet for who can identify with Hamlet all of us have known perhaps two or three women who in life could assume Cleopatra's garments give me my robe put on my crown I have Immortal longings in me what whatever else they may be the Triad of fall staff Hamlet Cleopatra are not among Shakespeare's Falls of time as so many of his protagonists have to become it is a scholarly commonplace that the Renaissance fiercely augmented the classical drive to transcend time with art outlasting arrows Elizabeth's Fable Chastity manipulated into political power became an image of temporal constancy always the same the great Queen resisted only the final form of change death literary knowledge however is of and in time and cannot exist without consciousness of temporality of it as the first instance of overt literary knowledge that I can recognize and Christopher Marlo more than Shakespeare seems closer to Avid in an obsessive anxiety that forcers a specifically literary knowledge The Tempest which in my own reading is a final overcoming of Kit Marlo deliberately dwarfing his doctor Fus is the farthest experience of literary knowledge available to us literary knowing is an event wherein our own acquaintance with the known is self-reflexive and that the illusion glares back at us when endlessly I reread and teach yet once more the tragedy of King Lear the know I gain primarily is what Only The Uncanny fool knows on that great stage of Falls we cry The Cry of the human as though we are the newborn but we fall into time theater and not into hamlets or fall staff's theater of Mind Le's full half a changling Child Half wise Beyond wisdom knows that he and all the others on that stage inhabit with the ancient gnostics regarded as a cosmological Abyss enduring Beyond a false creation ruined by its capricious rushing into being falling into time we abandon a better knowledge for empirical Caprices yet that is the best we can achieve unless the richest node of literary knowledge can be attained PR much the most Shakespearean writer of his own time recovered knowledge in the privileged moment that partly redeemed time Samuel Beckett meditating on prce from a joyan perspective reminds us of the link through John rusin to the high romantic spots of time secularized epiphanies the Will's revenge against time and times it was a failed Nan Quest brilliantly is isolated by PR as sexual jealousy restored to The Shakespearean intensity of oel and of Leones in the Winter's taale The prian Comedy of sexual jealousy plays against Shakespeare's darker view of it but both augmental understanding of literary knowledge in proce the jealous lover is an art historian searching for every Visual and temporal evidence of infidelity as Falls of time we are all of us agonized lovers fantasizing fictions of duration that if they are jealous enough become our own bad poems or stories if I had to choose one character only as a guide to literary knowledge it would of course be sjan Falstaff rather than Hamlet or Cleopatra Dante the pilgrim or Don keot prce narrator or Leopold Bloom for me the question what is literary knowledge is answered by F staff why he need not quest for lost time since he triumphantly has thrust time aside and bid it P he is not human All Too Human as academic moralists tiresomely repeat to me he is the true and perfect image of life itself turn him and turn him for everything is in him thank [Applause] you