HOLOFERNES

a dogmatic schoolmaster in Shakespeare's Love's Labour's Lost. Strictly a comic character, Holofernes is verbose, conceited, and quick to dismiss those he perceives as intellectually inferior. His self-description in Act IV is particularly humorous: This is a gift that I have, simple, simplea foolish extravagant spirit, full of forms, figures, shapes, objects, ideas, apprehensions, motions, revolutions. These are begot in the ventricle of memory, nourished in the womb of pia mater, and delivered upon the mellowing of occasion. But the gift is good in those in whom it is acute, and I am thankful for it.