New York Times Review Shakespeare the Invention of the Human
Past JAMES SHAPIRO
sk most scholars what accounts for Shakespeare'due south enduring appeal and they'll credit a number of factors besides his remarkable artistic gifts. Shakespeare was born in the right identify and fourth dimension: his genius flourished in the richly collaborative earth of the Elizabethan theater, and his dyer's manus was steeped in the social and spiritual contradictions of an age poised betwixt the medieval and the modern. While his rival Ben Jonson praised Shakespeare equally a writer ''non of an age, but for all time,'' it wasn't until the 18th century that Shakespeare'due south admirers promoted him equally England'south unrivaled national poet.
Such explanations are heretical to the noted critic Harold Bloom, a self-confessed Bardolator for whom any try to sympathize Shakespeare historically distracts from the simple fact of Shakespeare's unsurpassed, universal genius. Bloom takes equally a given that ''The Complete Works of William Shakespeare'' is a secular scripture from which we derive much of our language, our psychology and our mythology. He is interested in illuminating why this is then, and his bold argument in ''Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human'' is that Shakespeare remains so popular and his most memorable characters experience so real because through them Shakespeare invented something that hadn't existed before. Bloom defines this as ''personality,'' inwardness, what it ways to be human. In so doing, Blossom adds, Shakespeare invented us as well.
If Shakespeare's drama is secular scripture, Bloom offers himself equally its high priest. In trying to substantiate his ideas about Shakespeare's originality Bloom faces the problem confronting any proselytizer: when your object of adoration is beyond comprehension, how practice you go about persuading others to believe? His solution is to steer between praise and attack (celebrating Shakespeare'southward originality and savaging pretty much everything and everyone else, peculiarly those simulated prophets the feminists and cultural historians).
Bloom cares lilliputian for plot, genre or activity. And you'd hardly know afterwards finishing this book that Shakespeare was interested in history, politics, police, religion or a host of other concerns that have fatigued generations of readers to his work. Only characters matter -- and not all characters, simply those who seem to Blossom uncannily real, similar Hamlet, Falstaff, Rosalind, Iago, Edmund and Cleopatra, who ''have homo nature to some of its limits, without violating those limits'' and through whom ''new modes of consciousness come into being.'' Hotspur, Puck, Kent and Ariel may exist terrific parts, but they are passed over in relative silence by a critical sensibility restlessly drawn to the presiding consciousness of a play.
 James Estrin/ The New York Times |
| Harold Bloom |
You lot don't have to eat Bloom's argument whole, however, to value his local insights. The virtually exhilarating observations -- and the best capacity are littered with them -- take the quality of aphorisms. Even lifted out of context their incisiveness and rightness hogtie assent: ''Who, before Iago, in literature or in life, perfected the arts of disinformation, disorientation and derangement?''; ''To exist in love, and yet to come across and experience the absurdity of it, one needs to go to schoolhouse with Rosalind''; ''Shakespeare'south plays are the wheel of all our lives, and teach united states whether we are fools of time, or of dear, or of fortune, or of our parents, or of ourselves.'' His nuanced readings of ''The Merchant of Venice,'' ''Henry Iv,'' ''Village'' and ''Antony and Cleopatra'' are specially strong.
As much as Shakespeare has invented us, critics reinvent him, and in their own prototype. Bloom is no exception. The qualities of mind and spirit that he clearly values -- the capacity to exist self-dramatizing, witty, charismatic, ironic and skeptical -- turn out to be shared by the characters he considers most real. While few readers volition disagree with Flower's choice of Village as ane of Shakespeare'south two greatest creations, many may be puzzled by the other: Falstaff, ''the mortal god'' of Bloom's imaginings. I doubtable that at that place's more than than a picayune projection going on hither, in one case nosotros larn that both are aging, charismatic, brilliant teachers, masters of language who are ''turned confronting all historicisms.'' Once this identification is established, the subsequent ane, betwixt Falstaff and Shakespeare's intellect and values, makes a lot more sense.
Focusing so exclusively on the creation of a handful of characters as the key to Shakespeare's greatness -- commencement with ''Male monarch John'' and ending 12 years after with ''Antony and Cleopatra'' -- puts Bloom in the difficult position of deciding what to do with the many plays that come up earlier and after. Early comedies, histories and tragedies get dismissed equally relative failures or faintly praised for anticipating the fully realized personalities that are to follow. Blossom is even more difficult pressed when dealing with the plays written in Shakespeare's maturity, in which inwardness is largely abandoned. With ''Coriolanus'' he asks: ''Had Shakespeare exhausted of the labor of reinventing the human?'' In ''Cymbeline,'' his Shakespeare is ''alienated from his own art'' and resorts to self-parody. Past ''Henry VIII,'' Shakespeare ''undoes most of what he had invented.'' Bloom never pauses to consider obvious alternatives to his Procrustean theory. Perhaps Shakespeare came to recognize the limits of character and inwardness and sought by other means -- through wonder, improbabilities and larger patterns of death and regeneration -- to render human experience more fully.
''Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human'' is unfortunately marred past a compulsion to denigrate. The least deserving victims are Shakespeare'southward fellow playwrights, who must be squashed in order to portray Shakespeare as author of himself (just Chaucer and Marlowe are recognized as influences). Lyric poets like Blake and Shelley, subjects of earlier, authoritative books by Blossom, are far better suited to his Romantic notions of autonomous genius than is a collaborative dramatist similar Shakespeare. The lengths that Bloom will go to insulate Shakespeare from contaminating influence are often cool. George Wilkins, who may take had a hand in ''Pericles,'' is described as a ''lowlife hack.'' Poor Thomas Kyd, whose enormously popular ''Castilian Tragedy'' is unjustly rejected equally ''hideously written and silly,'' is stripped of his generally recognized authorship of an early and lost ''Hamlet'' (Flower insists that Shakespeare must have written the earlier ''Hamlet'' as well). John Webster, George Chapman, Thomas Middleton and Ben Jonson are all written off as second-raters. Bloom sees himself as i of the bang-up defenders of the Western tradition, just he provides plenty of ammunition for revisionists eager to eliminate these major figures from the canon and the classroom.
In his youth Bloom was ''profoundly affected'' past seeing Ralph Richardson play Falstaff, a haunting functioning that ''a half century later was the starting point for this book,'' but he would deny a like transformative experience to today's young theatergoers, suggesting that ''we might be ameliorate off with public readings of Shakespeare.'' Here again the villain is history, since performances of Shakespeare's plays -- from the staging of ''Richard Two'' on the eve of Essex's rebellion to the latest Off Broadway product -- are ever rooted in the hither and now. Preferring to wrest Shakespeare out of time, Bloom falls dorsum on the fantasy that Shakespeare (fewer than half of whose plays were printed in his lifetime) preferred readers to playgoers anyway, since he ''wrote besides to exist read, by a more than select group.'' While Bloom is right to have to task some of the more feeble productions he has seen in America, were he more familiar with the work of younger British directors he does non mention -- Deborah Warner's ''Titus Andronicus'' and Sam Mendes's ''Troilus and Cressida'' are obvious examples -- his estimation of contemporary productions and of these plays themselves would surely be college.
Had Blossom, one of the most gifted of gimmicky critics, stuck to the plays and characters that he deeply understands, this volume would have been a third every bit long and far more compelling.
James Shapiro is the author of ''Rival Playwrights: Marlowe, Jonson, Shakespeare'' and ''Shakespeare and the Jews.''
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