Review of Bloom
Harold Bloom: Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human
Los Angeles Times, Nov. 1998
Even those happy few English speakers who have Shakespeare in their blood are disposed to doubt that he is also in their genes. He may have helped to condition some of us, but we know that words spoken on a stage or printed in a book aren't said by real people. If you cut them, these people don't bleed. Hamlet, Falstaff and the rest are no doubt larger than life but that means they're not alive. Yet this sense - that every English speaker is, so to speak, genetically indebted to Shakespeare - is exactly Harold Bloom's proposition in his enormous new work, "Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human." Bloom, "the preeminent literary critic of our time," as his publisher calls him, writes that Shakespeare "not only invented the English language but used it to create human nature." And indeed Bloom actively argues just such amazing assumptions, play by play, preaching powerfully throughout 746 pages on excerpted texts totaling some 6,000 lines.
Dissenters may protest that the resulting annotated anthology is just a catalogue deraisonné. But it's far better than that. Indeed, its perusal resembles reading Shakespeare by flashes of insight, which are often dazzling. We revisit the plays of Shakespeare's apprenticeship, Hamlet's astounding transcendence of the play, Richard II's anticipation of the mad Danish prince's nihilism, Falstaff's comic genius and more. Bloom clearly has all the dramatis personae at his fingertips and examines them as real people.
Bloom's brilliant readings disclose fascinating interrelations between the plays, such as, for instance, that the duplicitous spirit of "Othello's" satanic villain Iago also bedevils the problem play "Measure for Measure." With Iago's equivocating maliciousness in mind, Bloom calls the play a "simultaneous invocation and evasion of Christian belief and Christian morals." (Helen Vendler has thrown fresh light on that same dark dichotomy between supreme and sublime beauty of utterance and denial of orthodox Christianity in her recent analysis of the "Sonnets.") But there is something more at work here. If what Bloom says is correct, that Shakespeare has shaped our language and contributed significantly to our mythology (he is even a better psychologist than Freud), then such evasions and dichotomies are to be taken as signs of the playwright's own personality; in creating human nature, Shakespeare reveals himself.
Bloom's ploy may well prove popular. It extends Shakespearean studies to cover such perennial topics as God and sex. Before long, the poet's own beliefs and practices will be laid bare. Biographical criticism, once frowned upon as hopelessly old-fashioned, will again be allowed. This was sometimes a paradox, but now the time gives it proof--for example, in the availability today of "Edward III" (now published in the Riverside Shakespeare, the New Cambridge series and my own edition for Yale), a play in which a secretary is hired to write sonnets for the king as Shakespeare did for the Earl of Southampton. Bloom excludes that play even though it contains deep and compelling analogies with "Measure for Measure" and the "Sonnets" in parallel passages about the abuse of sex and power and the inevitability of death.
Most of the world's population, however, won't be relying on their reading for their experience of such topics. Taking literature literally is like a playgoer leaping up onto the stage to defend a threatened heroine, thus turning the canon into a western. In this book, however, even the sublime and triumphant King Henry V is a cynical monster, while the central figure of "The Merry Wives of Windsor" is a rank impostor or false Falstaff. Indeed, whole plays are denounced. Thus "I Henry VI" is a botch and "Titus Andronicus" mainly a sendup, while "The Two Gentlemen of Verona" travesties love and friendship alike and "The Merchant of Venice" is profoundly anti-Semitic.
Bloom's approach avowedly derives from 19th century character analysis, as exemplified by William Hazlitt and A. C. Bradley. That tradition was spiritedly attacked by L.C. Knights in his satirical essay "How Many Children Had Lady Macbeth?" (1933) and by C. S. Lewis in "Hamlet: The Prince or the Poem?" (1942). But Bloom's viewpoint, however remote and exalted it may seem, commands a vast vista that should be looked up to with respect. Like aerial photography, it reveals long-lost settlements that once teemed with rich life from which lessons can still be learned. It also identifies potentially fertile fields often left entirely untilled, such as Shakespeare's early start--including his authorship of the "Hamlet" play described by Thomas Nashe in 1589 and his possible involvement with the even earlier "Famous Victories of Henry the Fifth" attributed to an anonymous hand.
Bloom also notes Shakespeare's penchant for self-revision and his projection of his own personality into the "Sonnets." These contain a real-life hero (the Earl of Southampton) and heroine (the Dark Lady), and Bloom avers that both those characters appear to have been absorbed into the plays as aspects of Prince Hal or Rosaline, respectively. Further, the character of Berowne in "Love's Labour's Lost" is cleverly equated with the speaker of the "Sonnets" or, in ordinary parlance, Shakespeare himself. Very well; then that same triangle resounds as audibly in the dramatic as in the lyric mode. We can see that "Love's Labour's Lost" also embodies elements of Henry, Earl of Southampton, in the figure of Ferdinand, King of Navarre, along with the Dark Lady as Rosaline and Berowne himself as Shakespeare. Can it be mere coincidence that causes the king to begin that early play with talk of hunting after fame, which combines two of the young Earl's best-known pursuits? The king, again just like the Earl, is the center of a sonneteering circle; and he cites ideas and phrases (such as a three-year term or "devouring time") found in Shakespeare's "Sonnets."
Are not these same themes and voices also heard in other trios, such as Valentine, Silvia and Proteus in "The Two Gentlemen of Verona" and Bertram, Helena and Lafew in "All's Well That Ends Well"? After all, Bloom himself makes analogous suggestions. He speculates, for example, that the pompously obsessive Malvolio in "Twelfth Night" is a portrait of Ben Jonson, that the seductively evil Edmund in "King Lear" is a likeness of Christopher Marlowe. Here is the prospectus of a new, or at least neglected, school of thought, which could profitably provide helpful instruction.
On any assessment, this book offers solid grounds on which to build a necessary and long overdue accommodation between character and poetry--two aspects of Shakespeare that if not identical are often inseparable. Take, for example, Richard in "Richard II." This play is well-defined here as a "lyrical history"; its central character, though a bad king, is a good poet. Of course he profits from having Shakespeare as his speech writer. But he is also fortunate in finding a commentator who sensitively detects the possible influence of John Donne. Bloom deprecates his own apercu as "most unlikely." What Bloom doesn't know is that the Shakespeare family's 1597 Bill of Complaint about the earlier expropriation of their land was addressed to the law lord Sir Thomas Egerton - to whom Donne was appointed chief secretary in this same year. Indeed, the two writers may well have collaborated, though there is, tragically, no trace now of the book advertised in 1600 as "Amours by J.D., with certain other sonnets by W.S."
In the same context of "Richard II," Bloom points out that in 1601, the Earl of Southampton strove to promote the Essex rebellion against Elizabeth by arranging a special performance of this play about a deposed and assassinated tyrant. The assertion that Shakespeare "could not refuse" carries the plain implication that he was not without complicity in that plot. Again, who else has noted that Richard's repeated comparisons between himself and Jesus Christ, though "unnerving, are technically not blasphemous" because both are God's anointed? Further, the face that Richard sees in his glass reflects the features of Helen in "Dr. Faustus," a parody that tells the audience that Shakespeare is at last emancipated from Marlowe. In other words, the character of Richard indeed includes both poet and poetry. But once admit that admixture and the case is conceded. Whether Shakespeare's characters are alive or not , there is no doubt that he himself was, and modern scholarship must now see him not only as a characterizing dramatist but also as a poet who started early, grew and developed and wrote from his own experience about his own life and times.
The "Sonnets" have often been held to contain conclusive evidence on such scores. They are not considered in detail here; but Bloom has set the scene for an equally magisterial sequel. It will have to improve, though, on his present standard of accuracy. Too often, his abstract flights of fancy fail to get off the ground, or at least look uncommonly hazardous, because there are so many gaping potholes in the runways of concrete fact on which he relies. Thus he dates the early "Hamlet" as "1587 or 1588," "circa 1587-'89," "1588 (I suspect)," "1588 or so" and so forth. And how can the unfamiliar First Quarto text, a first draft of "Hamlet" that Shakespeare later revised into its familiar version, rationally remain entirely unmentioned? Again, it defies Dryden, Jonson and common sense to suppose that "Richard III" (published in 1597) was written earlier than "Titus Andronicus" (published in 1594), while the rejection of "Titus" on that baseless assumption is merely perverse. Similarly, the Lord Chamberlain's Men are not recorded as having played "The Taming of the Shrew" in 1594, or ever; this is just a mistake. Nor is there any sound reason to suppose that George Wilkins, a playwright and villain of the time, wrote the least syllable of "Pericles," let alone the bulk of its first two acts. And so on, ad nauseam, in dozens of examples, including misprints.
Bloom relies too heavily on others who are often unworthy of his confidence in any sense. An egregious example is his reliance on the scholarship of Peter Alexander, who is revealingly called "the late," although he died 30 years ago. He is congratulated a dozen times just for interpreting a 1589 allusion to "Hamlet" as referring to an early play by the young Shakespeare. But Alexander was more likely the last than the first reader to draw this obvious inference. Mostly he was less lucky. Thus he is best remembered for his "memorial reconstruction" fantasies, which have misled an entire generation of older Shakespeareans. This book typifies the Alexandrian conquest, as witness its supine acceptance of "1590-1" for "3 Henry VI," a text unknown in print or performance until 1623. This is what happens when an author invokes unsupported authority, whether his own or another's. Fact should come first, followed by economical inference. But Bloom fails to pay even lip service to Occam's razor.
Let no one doubt, however, that Bloom possesses, in rich measure, many of the qualities he rightly hails as Shakespearean intelligence of a high order: creative gifts, communicative immediacy, passionate concern. Unfortunately he also shares Shakespeare's famous indifference to historical dates and data. Only poets can plead poetic license; so even the world's leading critic can be misleading.