Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human

National Review, Nov 23, 1998 by Hugh Kenner

Mr. Kenner will soon be retiring from his English professorship at the university of Georgia.

Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human, by Harold Bloom (Riverhead Books, 768 pp., $35)

WHAT about that mysterious subtitle Harold Bloom has picked for himself? Yes, mysterious it remains. One charm of this book is its way of circling back to a theme that each visit amplifies and deepens but cannot wholly clarify. What is it, we're repeatedly asked to ponder, that sets Shakespeare so bafflingly beyond literary, not to say human, norms?

There's no novelty in that theme. "Others abide our question," wrote Matthew Arnold; but "thou art free." So begins a sonnet, "Shakespeare," which ends:

All pains th' immortal spirit must endure, All weakness that impairs, all griefs that bow

Find their sole speech in that victorious brow.

And here's Ben Jonson's "He was not of an age but for all time"; and look, Dryden, the herald of eighteenth-century rationalism, assigning to Shakespeare "the largest and most comprehensive soul" of "all modern, and perhaps ancient poets."

But the context of Bloom's book is late-twentieth-century academe, where the notion of identifying a sole victorious brow, or assessing the comprehensiveness of poets' souls, appears positively pre-structuralist and na?ve. What, the with-it voice asks, is any professor's role but to exalt his turf to protect his greenkeeper's fees? (And as for Harold Bloom, doesn't he teach, ah, Shakespeare? Even begin his book by asserting that he's done little else for twenty years?) Nay, more, comes a feminist cry: Shakespeare's Globe Theatre couldn't even begin to nurture women dramatists, being so bigoted it required even Cleopatra to be played by a squeaky-voiced boy.

Bloom perceives "ideologically imposed contextualization" as "the staple of our bad time." As a tenured Shakespearean, you begin by locating "some marginal bit of Renaissance social history" that seems to sustain some political stance of your own. Then, moving in upon the poor play, you find "some connection . . . between your supposed social fact and Shakespeare's words." Says Bloom: "It would cheer me to be persuaded that I am parodying the operations of the professors and directors of what I call 'Resentment'-those critics who value theory over the literature itself-but I have given a plain account of the going thing, whether in the classroom or on the stage."

Shakespeare used to get more respect, Bloom recalls. In 1928, anticipating and refuting "Wittgenstein's annoyed comment that life is not like Shakespeare," a writer named Owen Barfield detected "a very real sense, humiliating as it may seem, in which what we generally venture to call our feelings are really Shakespeare's 'meaning.' " So-get braced for a long quotation from Bloom:

Can we conceive of ourselves without Shakespeare? By "ourselves" I do not mean only actors, directors, teachers, critics, but also you and everyone you know. Our education, in the English-speaking world, but in many other nations as well, has been Shakespearean. Even now, when our education has faltered, and Shakespeare is battered and truncated by our fashionable ideologues, the ideologues themselves are caricatures of Shakespearean energies. Their supposed "politics" reflect the passions of his characters. . . . I myself would prefer them to be Machiavels and resenters on the Marlovian model of Barabas, Jew of Malta, but alas their actual ideological paradigms are Iago and Edmund.

Iago is the reducer of Othello to chaos; Edmund, "the coldest personage in all of Shakespeare" and the "point-for-point negation" of King Lear. Such, Bloom is asserting, are our current mentors. Inventing the human, we may say, Shakespeare invented the inhuman also. For, yes, the negative implies-requires-the positive.

But 768 pages of hammering away at inhuman academics? No, fortunately, that is not at all what Bloom offers. Most of the book derives from Bloom's twenty-some years of teaching Shakespeare. In chronological order, from The Comedy of Errors (1593) clear to The Two Noble Kinsmen (1613), we are led through Shakespeare's canon, dwelling on play after play. This long central part seems not designed to be read through; it's the core of a cut-and-come-again book. Open it after you've seen, or read (or re-read), a work of Shakespeare's; turn to what's pertinent, for you, tonight.

Yet Bloom somehow seems to hope for a straight-through reading. "In the book that follows," he's warning us before we turn to his Part I, he'll be demonstrating "the extent to which all of us were, to a shocking degree, pragmatically reinvented by Shakespeare." Does he demonstrate successfully? Yes, so far has the Bard permeated our culture that we seem to meet anything he wrote as if we'd read it before, even when we first encounter it. At the same time, Hamlet, "the most aware and knowing figure ever conceived," always seems new-minted. "Hamlet is a Henry James who is also a swordsman, a philosopher in line to become a king, a prophet of a sensibility still out ahead of us, in an era to come." I quote that for the way it conjures up Henry James flashing a rapier. No, Shakespeare had no way to guess what he'd foreshadow. He did not "pragmatically reinvent" Henry James.