Professor Harold Bloom will not rank among the great epigrammatists of history. His new book on Shakespeare book is prolix, untidy, repetitive, and bloated by self-indulgence.[1] Yet its central proposition is stated (admittedly, not until page 493) with beautiful simplicity: Shakespeare “is what we know because we are what he knew.” Only Chaucer, Bloom maintains, preceded Shakespeare in the creation of a convincing inner self for his characters and Shakespeare surpassed Chaucer. In giving us Iago, Hamlet, Shylock, and a host of others, Shakespeare made us aware of human possibilities to such an extent that our conception of human nature was thereby enlarged. We cannot conceive our world without his terms of reference.

So stated, the argument has a certain plausibility. Shakespeare is undoubtedly able to create as if from within, to interiorize with utter authenticity, more varieties of human behavior than any other writer—so much so that we can scarcely believe that the same person could have imagined all his characters. But he was not a nineteenth-century novelist, and Bloom, like his hero Bradley before him, distorts the plays by importing inappropriate expectations. Characterization is only one aspect of the dramatist’s art. Arguably, it was one Shakespeare learnt comparatively slowly; other, more purely theatrical, skills seem to have come easily to him, prompted by the background presence of Marlowe, Lyly, and Kyd.

For all his theater-going, Bloom is oddly innocent about drama. He has no time for Kyd, whose Spanish Tragedy he tetchily dismisses (“a dreadful play, hideously written and silly,” a “squalid melodrama”). His Marlowe is a cartoon demon whom Shakespeare had to exorcise. He has no feel for dramatic conventions or for the theatrical milieu in which Renaissance dramatists worked. “No critical method,” he asserts, “that works equally well for Thomas Middleton or John Fletcher and for Shakespeare is going to illuminate Shakespeare for us.” This moves Shakespeare safely into a position of high Romantic isolation from which Bloom can admire him. He presents himself as an unrepentant aesthete, “Bloom Brontosaurus Bardolater,” “a gnostic sect of one,” “a hopeless Romantic (my critical enemies would say, a sentimentalist).” Not only his enemies might argue that sentimentality makes for bad criticism. “To reject Falstaff,” Bloom booms, “is to reject Shakespeare.” Yet it was Shakespeare who arranged the rejection, for reasons Bloom states elsewhere: “Falstaff, the ultimate anarchist, is as dangerous as he is fascinating, both life-enhancing and potentially destructive.” (He is tellingly outraged by the “imposter” Falstaff of The Merry Wives of Windsor, who is markedly unsentimentalized.)

The book covers the entire canon, a relatively rare critical undertaking these days, but it frequently sacrifices depth to breadth. Moreover, one doesn’t have to be a theorist, only to have a bit of common sense, to find Bloom’s character-centered approach unbalanced. A dramatist to whom character was all would write monologues—as, in a way, Bloom does here. As he insists that Falstaff and Hamlet are the summit of Shakespeare’s power of characterization, one realizes that he sees himself as both, sometimes a daring old tease, sometimes a melancholic wrapping his inky cloak around him. Could Shakespeare, one wonders, have created Harold Bloom?

Admittedly, there are fine things, if one has the stamina to find them. The discussion of A Midsummer Night’s Dream sends the Bestiality School of criticism packing; the suggestions that Richard II is “an extended metaphysical lyric” and that Thersites in Troilus and Cressida is a sufferer who hates his own clarity of vision open up intriguing perspectives; and the psychology of Iago is piercingly grasped here: “Othello was everything to Iago, because war was everything; passed over, Iago is nothing, and in warring against Othello, his war is against ontology.” Iago, an “artist of himself” (Hegel’s phrase), is the ancestor of Dostoyevsky’s nihilists and Nietzsche’s “ascetics of the spirit”; an actor-playwright, half-scripting, half-improvising his own Tragedy of Othello, he is the photographic negative of his creator, undone by Emilia only because he failed to reckon with the possibility that anyone could love something or someone more than they loved themselves. Bloom, with startling insight, presents Othello as a hero out of Hemingway, with “precisely Hemingway’s blend of masculine posturing and barely concealed fear of impotence.”

But all roads lead to Falstaff and Hamlet. Despite the caveats noted above, Bloom writes magnificently about Falstaff, and he is quite right to oppose the puritan critics who try to cram that vast bulk into a pigeonhole labeled “Misrule.” His emphasis on Falstaff’s intelligence is a welcome antidote to Bakhtinian rumblings about the Belly. On Hamlet he is more shaky, assuming too much about the lost pre-Shakespearean play on the subject, of which we know only that it was acted before 1589, contained a ghost crying “Hamlet, Revenge!,” and was later mocked for its fustian style. Anxious to deny the traditional ascription to Kyd, Bloom gives it to Shakespeare on no evidence whatever. Hamlet is, he tells us, “Shakespeare’s ideal son,” named to recall his own son Hamnet, who died in 1596. Never mind that the hero’s name in the ancient source is Amleth, or that Hamnet Shakespeare was named after his godfather, a Stratford baker; never mind either that the casting of Shakespeare as the Ghost, so touchingly convenient for Bloom, is an eighteenth-century tradition, not a known fact. As the surrogate son of such a father, Hamlet has to be “the most intelligent character in all of literature,” “the most aware and knowing figure ever conceived.”

These flagrant over-valuations, which ignore the elements of the adolescent in Hamlet, skew the whole chapter. Nor is it unique in containing wildly exaggerated statements. Elsewhere we hear that Titania’s initial exchanges with the translated Bottom are a “comic dialogue that even Shakespeare was never to surpass,” and that Shakespeare “never wrote better” than in his contributions to (wait for it) The Two Noble Kinsmen! The most revealing example, however, comes as an aside, when Bloom refers to Twelfth Night as “cheerfully secular, like almost all of Shakespeare.”

With this we confront a major disability in the critic; he has so little sense of Shakespeare as a religious writer that he can claim to discern “a pragmatic nihilism” behind the plays. Bloom seems to regard this as a virtue; he is even willing to call Falstaff a nihilist (“his version of Christianity”), and he must be the only critic ever to believe that Beatrice and Benedick are as well, and to think it any kind of compliment—but then, he believes that “all marriages seem in Shakespeare to be headed for disaster,” another breathtaking generalization, which makes the entire group of comedies not only pointless but cynical. Actually, for all his harping on Hamlet and Falstaff as bearers of the Yahwistic blessing, “exuberance of being,” for all his pseudomysticism and thrillingly solemn rhetoric, Bloom is in the end a rationalist. His “nihilism” is merely negative, just as when he acclaims “inwardness as a mode of freedom” as “Hamlet’s finest endowment” and adds that “wit becomes another name for that inwardness and that freedom, first in Falstaff, and then in Hamlet”; his “freedom” is an existentialist variety, and therefore a dead-end.

I find Bloom’s view of Shakespeare’s alleged secularism completely unconvincing. I could make sense of Shakespeare as a nihilist in a context like that provided by Henry Vaughan’s magnificent lines from “The Night”: “there is in God (some say)/ A deep, but dazzling darkness.” Yet that can be weirdly true of Bloom too, who often makes profound remarks apparently by accident. The suggestion that Hamlet is not only “neither a Protestant nor a Catholic work” but “neither Christian nor non-Christian” offers a more interesting approach than the standard mouthings about Montaignian skepticism. As for Macbeth, Bloom judges it “post-Christian,” “gnostic tragedy”; the extremism of his identification with Macbeth, which he assumes we share, at least emphasizes the desperate claustrophobia of the protagonist, his Cain-like existence beyond and outside the human, more than a moralizing reading could ever do.

On Measure for Measure, Bloom writes of “the dramatist’s simultaneous invocation and evasion of Christian belief and Christian morals”—a defensible comment which does not, of course, amount to saying that Shakespeare is a secular author—and confesses himself baffled as to “how the play, in its Christian allusiveness, can be regarded as other than blasphemous.” Perhaps that’s the point; the Duke’s attempt to play God involves him in some distinctly unappealing behavior, and Isabella’s silence when he proposes marriage is telling.

Bloom’s agnosticism is most limiting, predictably, when he comes to the romances. He grants to the recognition scene in Pericles a visionary intensity, but finds Cymbeline “nihilistic” (“That strain again! it had a dying fall”), observing that its pre-Christian setting means that “Christian attitudes toward immortality are irrelevant,” as though they could be so for Shakespeare or his audiences. The setting, like that of Lear, is a safeguard against prosecution for violating the statute which forbade overt discussion of theological matter onstage, as well as a pre-Brechtian alienation device. The descent of Jupiter in his car Bloom simply writes off as absurd buffoonery, while the (admittedly much finer) statue scene in The Winter’s Tale, with its unmistakable overtones of resurrection, makes him uncomfortable; it is “not one of the glories” of the play “but rather its principal puzzle.”

“How does the representation of cognition, in Shakespeare, differ from cognition itself?” wonders Bloom at one point. The answer is: we know it to be a representation. Coleridge’s important rider is too often ignored: “that willing suspension of disbelief for the moment which constitutes poetic faith.” Bloom’s commitment to Shakespeare is beyond dispute, but he lacks a necessary detachment, a wholeness, at key moments.

At the end of his book he winces away from Palamon’s hymn to Venus in The Two Noble Kinsmen, with its unsparing descriptions of the folly which love, “that from eleven to ninety reignest/ In mortal bosoms,” can visit upon mankind. Recognizing ourselves here, we must feel guilt and shame, says Bloom, but since “I am not exactly a moral critic, and my Bardolatry emanates from an aesthetic stance,” he quickly turns to “a more purely aesthetic appreciation of this superb speech.” However disarming this is, it is also disastrous. Shakespeare was not an aesthete, and such of his characters as try to be aesthetes themselves (Richard II or in a sense Iago) come off very badly. Shakespeare was a moral being, and he was not a Bardolater. (If he had been, he would have cared about the publication of his plays.) It is really inadequate of Bloom to keep taking refuge in an empty pose, which in his better moments he knows to be such. He is trapped in an image he has made of and for himself. Some “inventions of the human,” we are forced to conclude, are more successful than others.

Notes
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Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human, by Harold Bloom; Putnam, 800 pages, $35 Go back to the text.