Shakespeare : Invention

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The Shakespearean Canon

Where do personality and character come from? You may think they come from your parents, or you may think they come from God. If you belong to the "School of Resentment" Harold Bloom loves to deride, you may imagine character traits to be determined by one's location on the matrix of race, class, and gender. Whatever your position, chances are that you're wrong: Neither God nor family nor society invented you, but one William Shakespeare, "the man from Stratford." Such at least is the argument that literary critic Harold Bloom propounds in his typically audacious new book, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human.

Shakespeare's plays remain, for Bloom, "the fixed center of the Western canon" because "their influence upon life has been nearly as enormous as their effect upon post-Shakespearean literature." Not only literary characters but we ourselves derive from Shakespeare: "Had Shakespeare been murdered at twenty-nine, like Christopher Marlowe...we all of us might be gamboling about, but without mature Shakespeare we would be very different, because we would think and feel and speak differently." Certainly some of Shakespeare's figures are mere caricatures, but as Bloom traces Shakespeare's career, moving more or less chronologically through each of the 39 plays and infusing literary criticism with an unusual narrative force, we see the playwright progressing from such two-dimensional screens of inspired rhetoric as Richard III, who "has no inwardness," to the solidity of A Midsummer Night's Dream's Bottom the Weaver, and finally to the run of bottomlessly real and living characters that commences with Falstaff in Henry IV, Part One and concludes with the eponymous principals of Antony and Cleopatra. After the astonishing 14 consecutive months in which he composed King Lear, Macbeth, and Antony and Cleopatra, even Shakespeare, Bloom suggests, "was wary of further quests into the interior." Shakespeare depicts and creates the "interior" of the great characters through what Bloom calls their "self-overhearing," their self-conscious monitoring of the always-shifting relationship between what they say and what they do and are. "Iago and Edmund [the villains of Othello and King Lear, respectively] are the most Shakespearean characters because in them, and by them, the radical gap between words and actions is most fully exploited." Into this gap rushes meaning, and personality.

"The dominant Shakespearean characters," Bloom insists, "are extraordinary instances not only of how meaning gets started, rather than repeated, but also of how new modes of consciousness come into being." Whatever our own mode of consciousness, it was probably inaugurated by Shakespeare. Shakespeare thus turns out to have invented, say, Newt Gingrich or Harold Bloom: "Newt is a parody of Gratiano in The Merchant of Venice and Bloom a parody of Falstaff." This must surprise the Speaker of the House; it delights Bloom, and probably seems to him an instance of innocent Falstaffian self-love, for Falstaff is Bloom's favorite character in all Shakespeare. Even the extravagance of these somewhat silly claims can be seen in terms of Falstaffian exuberance.

Since Bloom approaches Shakespeare's work through character, his account of each play naturally centers on that play's most vivid personage. A Midsummer Night's Dream becomes Bottom's play; As You Like It would be better termed, to Bloom's mind, "As Rosalind Likes It"; and the Henry IV plays belong, of course, to Bloom's beloved Falstaff, the fat, jesting, impossibly intelligent knight. Falstaff is "a great vitalist," teaching us "the perfection and virtual divinity of knowing how to enjoy our being rightfully." Fat Jack refuses to grow old and insists that, for all his white hair and rolls of fat, he has not aged a day in his life: "My lord, I was born about three of the clock in the afternoon, with a white head, and something of a round belly." Bloom refuses to see such a figure as mere words upon a page. Falstaff creates us, not we him. And so real is Falstaff to Bloom that Prince Hal's rejection of the fat knight seems to grieve deeply the literature professor.

Still, for all Bloom's emphasis on "the invention of the human," his insights are not exclusively characterological. And despite his own preference for Falstaffian gusto, Bloom does not shy away from recognizing the darkness of so much of Shakespeare. "The authentic Shakespearean litany," Bloom observes, "chants variations on the word 'nothing,' and the uncanniness of nihilism haunts almost every play, even the great, relatively unmixed comedies." Bloom's last big book, The Western Canon, was joyously received by cultural conservatives, but his account in the new book of King Lear can hardly give comfort to trumpeters of "family values": "Shakespeare's intimation is that the only authentic love is between parents and children, yet the prime consequence of such love is only devastation." For Bloom, the reason to read Shakespeare is not that he will make us happy or wise. We must read Shakespeare because he has already made us, just as we are.

Shakespeare: The Inventionof the Human is a delightfully against-the-grain book. It revives the Great Man Theory of History while at the same time dispensing with any notion of literature's moral usefulness. In an age in which few people have time for poetry, it flouts Auden's claim that "poetry makes nothing happen." Poetry, it turns out, can make everything happen.

—Benjamin Kunkel

Jodie Morse

Bloom may feel spent after 745 pages, but his essays will energize readers to go right out and pick up -- or see -- a play.
— Time Magazine

Newsweek

Bloom..is a master entertainer and proselytizer....We get a thrill of recognition when Bloom articulates what we hadn't quite known we'd known.

James Shapiro

Had Bloom, one of the most gifted of contemporary critics, stuck to the plays and characters that he deeply understands, this book would have been a third as long and far more compelling.
—The New York Times Book Review

Michiko Kakutani

. . .[B]est read as an old-fashioned humanistic commentary . ..that gives us a renewed appreciation of the playwright's staggering achievement. . .[and] points up limitations. . . .It is . . .a study that is as passionate as it is erudite, as provocative as it is perverse.
—The New York Times

James Wood

...[A]n excellent work of popular criticism, overflowing with Bloom's personality, and often acute about Shakespeare's art.
—The New Republic

From The Critics

It is a grand lecture, a lifetime's worth of reflections on each of Shakespeare's plays.....[T]he volume is a capsule of one man's love and research...

KLIATT

It is likely that Bloom's stunning analysis of Shakespeare's works will stand as one of the more significant additions to the canon of criticism produced in the 20th century. It has received numerous awards, and it was a National Book Award finalist. Bloom, a preeminent writer and critic, explains that he has "read and taught Shakespeare almost daily for the past twelve years." Yet, he is certain that he sees Shakespeare "only darkly." His ruminations will undoubtedly enlighten all who share a passion for Shakespeare. Bloom is unabashedly a proponent of Bardolatry. His awe of Shakespeare's creation is unbounded. Many scholars have suggested that the continuing fascination with Shakespeare stems from his ability to capture universal human qualities in his characters. Bloom actually takes the extraordinary step of suggesting that Shakespeare is responsible for the "invention" of human nature as we know it. He boldly states: "Without mature Shakespeare we would think and feel and speak differently. Our ideas would be different, particularly our ideas of the human, since they were, more often than not, Shakespeare's ideas before they were ours." Following in the tradition of critics Johnson, Hazlitt, Bradley, and Goddard, Bloom presents a chapter analysis of each of Shakespeare's 35 plays, beginning with The Comedy of Errors and concluding with The Two Noble Kinsmen. His concern is decidedly focused toward characterization rather than plot, with particular interest in Hamlet and Falstaff "as they are the fullest representations of human possibility in Shakespeare." Reading each chapter is equivalent to attending a lecture given by a respected authority who has not only a thoroughknowledge of the play but also of the views of other critics. Each commentary is lively and vividly presented. Bloom often challenges, disagrees, and questions. For example, he considers The Two Gentlemen of Verona to be Shakespeare's weakest comedy. He finds "no intrinsic value" in Titus Andronicus. Romeo and Juliet, on the other hand, is lauded as "the most persuasive celebration of romantic love in Western literature." Love's Labour's Lost is "a festival of language, an exuberant fireworks display." Of Twelfth Night, Bloom feels that "one cannot get to the end of it, because some of the most apparently incidental lines reverberate infinitely." The character of Macbeth is "endowed with a power of fantasy so enormous that pragmatically it seems to be Shakespeare's own." Cleopatra is "the most subtle and formidable" of Shakespeare's representations of women. This is, at best, a brief sampling of the insights and opinions found on each page of this mammoth volume. Bloom's work will challenge its readers for years to come. It should prove most helpful for teachers and advanced students of Shakespeare. Clearly, Bloom does not feel that his work is definitive. As he suggests, "we can keep finding the meanings of Shakespeare, but never the meaning. It is like searching for "the meaning of life)." KLIATT Codes: A—Recommended for advanced students, and adults. 1998, Penguin Putnam/Riverhead, 745p, 24cm, 98-21325, $15.95. Ages 17 to adult. Reviewer: Anthony J. Pucci; English Dept. Chair., Notre Dame H.S., Elmira, NY, May 2000 (Vol. 34 No. 3)

Library Journal

All libraries should own this latest work of scholarship by noted critic Bloom (humanities, Yale Univ./NYU), author of The Western Canon (LJ 9/1/94). Here he examines every play by Shakespeare, touching briefly on issues of attribution and chronology and then offering a new thesis--that Shakespeare invented character and personality. Before Shakespeare, Bloom maintains, literature was full of one-dimensional figures--think of Medea and compare her personality and characterization to that of Lady Macbeth. The plays are arranged in groups (the early comedies to the late romances), but each play receives its own in-depth treatment; the argument is strongest in the essays on Hamlet and Falstaff. Bloom's analysis is much more than guidance for the befuddled undergraduate or season ticket holder--readers will need to be familiar with at least the rough outline of a play in order to follow much of what Bloom argues. This is a challenging, well-argued, and quite entertaining book that will leave readers both agreeing with and arguing against its thesis.--Neal Wyatt, Chesterfield Cty. P.L., VA

Donald Lyons

...[T]urns out to be another occasion for articulating, in extreme form, things that have been on Bloom's mind for quite a long time.
— Commentary

Anthony Lane

An enraptured, incantory epic .. . .[Y]ou certainly catch an authentic tone of sovereign crossness in some of the pronouncements that litter [the book]. . . .If there is one belief that pulses throughout. . .it is the full-blooded sense of a Shakespeare who exists to teach us. . .to 'think too well'. . . .If Harold Bloom continues to devote his life to the hopeful proposition that ordinary readers. . .may become free artists of themselves, then good luck to him. He's only human.
— The New Yorker

Michiko Kakutani

. . .[B]est read as an old-fashioned humanistic commentary . ..that gives us a renewed appreciation of the playwright's staggering achievement. . .[and] points up limitations. . . .It is . . .a study that is as passionate as it is erudite, as provocative as it is perverse.
— The New York Times

Benjamin Kunkel

Where do personality and character come from? You may think they come from your parents, or you may think they come from God. If you belong to the "School of Resentment" Harold Bloom loves to deride, you may imagine character traits to be determined by one's location on the matrix of race, class, and gender. Whatever your position, chances are that you're wrong: Neither God nor family nor society but one William Shakespeare, "the man from Stratford," invented you. Such, at least, is the argument that literary critic Harold Bloom propounds in his typically audacious new book, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human.

Shakespeare's plays remain, for Bloom, "the fixed center of the Western canon" because "their influence upon life has been nearly as enormous as their effect upon post-Shakespearean literature." Not only literary characters but we ourselves derive from Shakespeare: "Had Shakespeare been murdered at twenty-nine, like Christopher Marlowe...we all of us might be gamboling about, but without mature Shakespeare we would be very different, because we would think and feel and speak differently." Certainly some of Shakespeare's figures are mere caricatures, but as Bloom traces Shakespeare's career, moving more or less chronologically through each of the 39 plays and infusing literary criticism with an unusual narrative force, we see the playwright progressing from such two-dimensional screens of inspired rhetoric as Richard III, who "has no inwardness," to the solidity of Midsummer Night's Dream's Bottom the Weaver, and finally to the run of bottomlessly real and living characters that commences with Falstaff in Henry IV, Part One and concludes with the eponymous principals of Antony and Cleopatra. After the astonishing 14 consecutive months in which he composed King Lear, Macbeth, and Antony and Cleopatra, even Shakespeare, Bloom suggests, "was wary of further quests into the interior." Shakespeare depicts and creates the "interior" of the great characters through what Bloom calls their "self-overhearing," their self-conscious monitoring of the always-shifting relationship between what they say and what they do and are. "Iago and Edmund [the villains of Othello and King Lear, respectively] are the most Shakespearean characters because in them, and by them, the radical gap between words and actions is most fully exploited." Into this gap rushes meaning, and personality.

"The dominant Shakespearean characters," Bloom insists, "are extraordinary instances not only of how meaning gets started, rather than repeated, but also of how new modes of consciousness come into being." Whatever our own mode of consciousness, it was probably inaugurated by Shakespeare. Shakespeare thus turns out to have invented, say, Newt Gingrich or Harold Bloom: "Newt is a parody of Gratiano in The Merchant of Venice and Bloom a parody of Falstaff." This must surprise the Speaker of the House; it delights Bloom, and probably seems to him an instance of innocent Falstaffian self-love, for Falstaff is Bloom's favorite character in all Shakespeare. Even the extravagance of these somewhat silly claims can be seen in terms of Falstaffian exuberance.

Since Bloom approaches Shakespeare's work through character, his account of each play naturally centers on that play's most vivid personage. Midsummer Night's Dream becomes Bottom's play; As You Like It would be better termed, to Bloom's mind, "As Rosalind Likes It"; and the Henry IV plays belong, of course, to Bloom's beloved Falstaff, the fat, jesting, impossibly intelligent knight. Falstaff is "a great vitalist," teaching us "the perfection and virtual divinity of knowing how to enjoy our being rightfully." Fat Jack refuses to grow old and insists that, for all his white hair and rolls of fat, he has not aged a day in his life: "My lord, I was born about three of the clock in the afternoon, with a white head, and something of a round belly." Bloom refuses to see such a figure as mere words upon a page. Falstaff creates us, not we him. And so real is Falstaff to Bloom that Prince Hal's rejection of the fat knight seems to grieve deeply the literature professor.

Still, for all Bloom's emphasis on "the invention of the human," his insights are not exclusively characterological. And despite his own preference for Falstaffian gusto, Bloom does not shy away from recognizing the darkness of so much of Shakespeare. "The authentic Shakespearean litany," Bloom observes, "chants variations on the word 'nothing,' and the uncanniness of nihilism haunts almost every play, even the great, relatively unmixed comedies." Bloom's last big book, The Western Canon, was joyously received by cultural conservatives, but his account in the new book of King Lear can hardly give comfort to trumpeters of "family values": "Shakespeare's intimation is that the only authentic love is between parents and children, yet the prime consequence of such love is only devastation." For Bloom, the reason to read Shakespeare is not that he will make us happy or wise. We must read Shakespeare because he has already made us, just as we are.

Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human is a delightfully against-the-grain book. It revives the Great Man Theory of History while at the same time dispensing with any notion of literature's moral usefulness. In an age in which few people have time for poetry, it flouts Auden's claim that "poetry makes nothing happen." Poetry, it turns out, can make everything happen.

Benjamin Kunkel is a freelance writer who lives in Brooklyn, New York.
— barnesandnoble.com

Kirkus Reviews

A magisterial survey of the Bard's complete dramatic oeuvre by the always stimulating author of The Western Canon (1994). Bloom (Humanities/Yale) accurately describes himself as "Brontosaurus Bardolater, an archaic survival among Shakespearean critics." He unabashedly follows Samuel Johnson, William Hazlitt, and the great writer-critics of English Romanticism in concerning himself primarily with the dramatist as a peerless creator of characters and profound explorer of our deepest existential questions; he decries the "School of Resentment" (Bloom's blanket term for feminists, Marxists, deconstructionists, et al.) and high-concept modern directors, all of whom, he argues, interpret the plays in terms of historical particulars instead of universal truths. For Bloom, as the subtitle suggests, Shakespeare's greatest achievement was "the inauguration of personality as we have come to recognize it. [He] will go on explaining us, because in part he invented us." This emphasis makes the author an engaging explicator of the comedies, histories, and some aspects of the tragedies, which all feature personalities remarkable for their "inwardness"; his masterpieces are the discussions of the anguished, antic skeptic Hamlet and the jovial pragmatist Falstaff, whom he claims as "the fullest representations of human possibility in Shakespeare." Bloom is less effective with late works like The Winter's Tale, in which the Bard largely abandoned psychological realism in favor of a visionary mood that seems to make the critic uncomfortable. Philosophically, Bloom stresses the nihilism that animates Shakespearean villains and torments many protagonists; he tends to underrate the moments ofhard-won reconciliation that close many of the plays. In short, the author offers a personal view with inevitable omissions and weaknesses (unnecessary repetition and gratuitous polemics against political correctness among them). Nonetheless, this is a splendid book: elegantly written, scholarly yet accessible, radiant with Bloom's love for Shakespeare in particular and literature in general.