An Invisible Woman in the Canon:

Tracing Alys’ Influence in Shakespeare Through Harold Bloom

Abstract

Harold Bloom (1930- ) is one of the most eminent critics of English Literature. He has authored more than twenty books and edited about hundred volumes on Literary Criticism. Bloom’s magnum opus is The Western Canon (1994), which is a survey of select literary works of the Europe and America, published in the past six hundred years. These works can be considered to be components of a canon, based on which the Western literary tradition can be evaluated. These twenty- six works can be necessarily considered to be yard stick to evaluate the literary achievements of other authors. In other words, The Western Canon proposes an aesthetic based evaluation system. This book is classified into four major sections namely “On the Canon”, “The Aristocratic Age”, “The Democratic Age” and “The Chaotic Age”. The sections are further sub-divided into twenty-three chapters. The most important chapter in this book is the second chapter entitled, “Shakespeare, Centre of the Canon”. As the title of this chapter suggests, this chapter focuses on placing Shakespeare in the centre of the Western literary world. While doing so, Bloom has highlighted various important, hither to unexplored aspects of Shakespeare’s literary world. One among those aspects is the echoes of Alys, Bath’s wife in Shakespeare’s characterization of Falstaff. This paper attempts to explore this aspect proposed by Bloom in detail.