Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human

Tony Daley, Novelist, Scripter, Poet, Short Story Writer Weighs In: The idea of art is to enrich, expand, and enlighten while performing that most difficult of functions, to entertain the audience.Harold Bloom, sprightly, cantankerous, and as rueful as he claimed was one of his finest protégé critics, Tom Disch, remains the effervescent, sallying knight. He could no more lay down the lance nor keep it from cracking against the bulwarks of ignorance, stupidity, and splintering the moon (to crib from Harry’s favorite, Shakespeare) than another of Bloom’s loved ones, Don Quixote, could abjure his paladin’s endeavors. Bloom, the perdurable cannon blasting at the canon for himself to gain the sort of canonization reserved for Dr. Johnson, understands, as did Oscar Wilde, that all “literary criticism” is founded on personal wealth of wisdom, grace, charity, pragmatism, and a sense of sublimity as regards aesthetics. Moreover, at the crux, is Harry the Harry always feting and following Falstaff, that supremely corpulent and cormorant individualist. One must therefore read into whatever Harry writes, the makings of informed opinion resting on specialized knowledge contained within an infinite individuality and apolitical virtuousness, for true virtue blooms only in the individual thing, not the seasoned collective. Bloom knows the same thing any honest member of the modern scholastic scene (so-called ACADEME), which is to say, that no such thing exists as “literary theory” for the facts of theoretical bases, functional experimentalism, and empirical inquiry. One cannot—at least not yet—so refine, reduce, observe, differentiate, classify, or demarcate a “work of art.” Art is not a lepidopterist’s pastime, aside from Nabokov. On some level, certainly, the “work” itself, as Gore Vidal called it, remains subject to a practical dispensing of analysis based on some fundamental, mechanistic, craft-oriented aspects of the “praxis” of “art.” However, at the sublimity of creation (cf. Longinus) one finds only a sort of sublimation of haggard, human reflexive perception, and, accompanying this, RECEPTIVITY to grace, beauty, and wisdom, otherwise one cannot begin to become aware of, or apprehend fully, the components that make for enduring “wisdom literature” of which actual verbal articulations remain only part of such a total body. Wisdom is something hard to come by, of course, and Harry B. knows it well enough. For most of today’s jejune “critics” and “teachers,” time will, in the Chinese fashion of impartial passage, not kindly accommodate mere nodes and iotas of fame, fortunes, and tenure within the historical record, which stretches both ways, like an infinitely bounding number line, into past and future. Whatever prompted Harry to write about the “anxiety of influence” at the beginning of his academic career, he seems to have shed such ideology of his own, or mediated it, realizing, perhaps, that playing such puny whore’s wars in the “groves of academy” lead to lacunae, never enlightenment, that enlightenment itself is antithetical to true wisdom. Shakespeare obviously knew, as did the redactors of Jesus’s words, that parables of common sense make the best teachers, that common sense if not reducible by “theoreticians” and their jargon, and that at its best, the arts—literature, music, and plastic arts—teach us by portrayal, mimesis, and example to transcend our arrogance. Humbled and abashed, in the face of art, we open our eyes and ears to revelation of the comic panoply of human existence. I am not hard to bring to weeping by means of art, but I must attribute my recent tears and shivering cascade of gooseflesh along my arms, while reading of Coriolanus’s declarations of humility and service to erstwhile noble foe Aufidius of the Volsces, and of Aufidius’s returning declarations of love to Marcius, to a bringing to keen awareness of the a verisimilitude of moral and ethical spirits in men of honor, as to cause an emotional release of gratitude. Against such moments of truth, the truth being the thing always resurgent, recursive, and returning no matter of the repression of ideology and cant, no critic’s “political correctness” may stand. Whether Shakespeare was Catholic is moot beside his obvious catholicity, which is, shall we say, the sort of common sense enough of which comprises, as commented Einstein, genius. Bloom, for his stylistic peculiarities and obvious biases, remains, in the West, at least, one of “our” premier “critics,” or, shall we say, tenderly learned observers and rueful admirers of art as expression of consistent, coherent thinking. While finishing my own recent book, I have attempted to hew to coherent thinking as much as possible, and for most of his career as an artistic critic, Harry Bloom has himself hewed to such sensibleness. And clear argumentation.

The late critic Harold Bloom loved Shakespeare above all as the center of the western canon. He waspassionate about teaching literature as literature, not as psychology, politics, economics, theology orother ideologies. The emphasis is not on the stories (the Bard mostly borrowed these from historians orother writers) but the characters, personalities, and human nature. While Shakespeare was a dramatist,he was even more a poet, and developed the personalities through this poetry. The sonnets werecertainly poems, but so were the plays.Among the characters that Bloom emphasizes again and again are Hamlet, Falstaff, Cleopatra,Macbeth, Iago, Rosalind, Edmund and Lear. He treats the characters as real people, because theyseem more real than a lot of the people in so-called real life. So for instance, in Poem UnlimitedBloom offers speculation about what Hamlet did, going to England and Germany to learn dramaand other intellectual disciplines. Hamlet has actually surpassed his creator and become anauthor in his own right. We quote Hamlet as if we're quoting Socrates or Jesus or Buddha.These characters are traced through Shakespeare's career development with the comedies,histories, tragedies and romances (a term that Bloom dislikes for the final plays such asthe Tempest). When it comes to the genres, Shakespeare is beyond genre, as Poloniusshowed with his "history-comedy-tragedy" etc. and all the combinations including poemunlimited.Besides Hamlet, Bloom's favorite is Falstaff, from Henry IV part I and II. Even though he'sa raunchy big old guy, he is almost as smart as Hamlet and teaches us about joie de vivreand humor. The apotheosis or death of Cleopatra was the end of an era, as she had beenthe lover of Julius Caesar, Pompey, Mark Antony etc. Octavius went on to great politicalaccomplishments but was not as interesting as the previous generation. But Cleopatra'sdeath was also the end of Shakespeare's high tragedies.Bloom shows Shakespeare's development in relation to Chaucer, Marlowe who camebefore him, Ben Jonson who was a contemporary, Fletcher who came along towardthe end, and the successor John Milton. Bloom also relates Shakespeare's charactersto others in the western canon such as Dante, Cervantes, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky,Austen, Coleridge, Melville, Eliot, Joyce, Woolf and Proust.How does Bloom understand himself? He is a critic in the romantic tradition, alongwith Dr. Johnson, AC Bradley, Hazlitt, Swinburne and Goddard. He is passionate aboutteaching Shakespeare as literature and not through Freud or Marx. In fact he interpretsFreud through Shakespeare (!) rather than vice versa. This is a very long book but joyfullyquick.

His choice of quotes is good-ish. But, eg, he can't cope with The Merchant and doesn't quote Portia's great speech.H's view of J Caesar is eccentric, if not plain wrong.His tone is somewhat arrogant. Smacks of 'Well, I'm the expert, so just pay attention'. Too long a career teaching?A disappointing £18+ paperback.

Has its five stars as it is an excellent volume for the general reader to consult before seeing a play, to refresh memories of a play, to get some ideas etc. Plus it contains some great observations, and there is a very sharp intelligence at work, which deserves to grandstand a little. An idiosyncratic companion to the plays, worth more than many more strictly academic introductions. Very good value, too.

This book is about a legend and it is written from a very important man. I totally recommend it to people who are interested in how Bloom evaluates Shakespeare's contribution to humanity

Great book for an introduction to Shakespeare's plays. Page quality is good too.

amazing work, recommended to everyone who wants to know Shakespeare`s plays better