Parolles, Bertram’s friend in Shakespeare’s All’s Well That Ends Well, has often eclipsed Bertram in productions of the play and become the male centre of it, much as Falstaff overshadows Prince Hal in Henry IV Parts 1 and 2. Indeed, Parolles as a character has been likened to Falstaff by […]
Viola is the heroine of Twelfth Night, and along with Olivia, the play’s centre. However, whereas Olivia is more of a passive character (characters fall in love with her, and pursue her), Viola is active throughout: the catalyst who drives the plot on. This is even true in the one […]
Polonius is a fool and a windbag. But he’s also a schemer and an important member of the royal court of Elsinore. In these two sentences, we have the key to the character of Polonius in Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Like Hamlet with his feigned madness (and his very real mental and […]
For Harold Bloom in Shakespeare: The Invention Of The Human, the Bastard, Faulconbridge, is one of Shakespeare’s first truly ‘Shakespearean’ characters, because with this character Shakespeare was not trying to emulate Christopher Marlowe’s rhetoric from Tamburlaine but drawing on ‘nature’ and reality for inspiration. As a result, Faulconbridge is the […]
Apemantus, a key character from Shakespeare’s Timon of Athens, is a philosopher and a cynic. He dislikes Athenians (branding them all ‘knaves’, with no exceptions), and seems to be consumed by hate. But is this a fair assessment of Apemantus’ character, and his role in the play? Or is there […]