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First printed in Great britain in 1976 and long awaited by American supporters of Nye's Mrs. Shakespeare: The Complete Works and The Overdue Mr. Shakespeare, this unabashedly bawdy and outrageously raunchy success of the Hawthornden Prize and Guardian Fiction Prize is a takeoff on such basic literary erotica as Fielding's Tom Jones and Cleland's Fanny Hill. The novel unfolds as the true-life memoirs of 1 of the Immortal Bard's most memorable heroes, the feckless soldier of fortune Falstaff, aka Sir John Fastolf, based mostly upon a real-life knight reputed to be cowardly. Dictated to various household secretaries as he's nearing fatality, at get older 81, Falstaff's fictional memoir opens with the luxurious claim that he was conceived under a fig tree planted on the phallus of the legendary physique of the giant of Cerne carved into the chalk hillside near Cerne Abbas in Dorset. Now an octogenarian, the old rooster gleefully crows about how big is his own member and a intimate dalliance along with his 15-year-old niece. Graphically chronicling seven ages of debauchery, Nye revisits Shakespeare's Henry IV, Part I depiction of Falstaff as the daddy physique for young Prince Hal (soon to become Henry V), who publicly rejects him together with his rather reprehensible companions when fickle Hal assumes the throne following his father's fatality (Henry IV, Part 2). Purporting to create background 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 reserve on Falstaff as a bittersweet metaphor for the foibles of everyman.
