BOOKS
A Pos tmodern Bardolator
SHAKESPEARE: THE INVENTION OF THE HUMAN. By Harold Bloom.
Yale University Press. $24.50.
There was a time when it was possible to write about Shakespeare as if
one were writing about Mont Blanc or the forests of the Amazon; with,
as it were, a purely descriptive enthusiasm. This is what Hazlitt and
Coleridge did, and A.
C.
Bradley of
Shakespearean Tragedy.
Shakespeare was
a phenomenon of nature, to be explored and wondered over. The won–
der went with the almost invisible process of his sanctification, which
took place in what was roughly speaking the Romantic era. Before that
critics were shorter, and sometimes sharper. Dryden remarked that "the
images of nature were still [i.e., always] present to him, and he drew them
not laboriously but luckily." That is as potentially barbed as Ben Jonson's
wish that of the many lines Shakespeare wrote "would he had blotted a
thousand."
Dr. Johnson could be sharp too; but a general blandness reigned until
well into the twentieth century. It was replaced by the need for "a line" on
Shakespeare, some overall explanation of the way the stuff had been pro–
duced, which usually had the effect of cutting the Bard down to size. A
reductive school of criticism pointed out the ways in which Shakespearean
characters are in fact all stock types, commonplaces of the Elizabethan the–
ater. Recent emphasis has been on the Bard's mere historicity; on gender,
class, and economic questions; on the instability of the text; on the prodi–
gious bit of luck, the "great reckoning in a little room," that removed
Marlowe from the scene so that Shakespeare no longer stood in another's
shadow. Overall was the standard post-modernist attitude: Shakespeare is
no more than what you care to make him. And the dumbing-down of high
art in our age means an end to the unlimited bardolatry of the Romantic
era and the nineteenth century, and the corresponding tendency in those
ages for critics
to
preen themselves on their affinities with Shakespeare's
own ineffable inner intelligence.
For as with Falstaff, who is Harold Bloom's premier Shakespearean
hero, Shakespeare's inunense imputed powers of perception became the
opportunity for perception in others. It flourished unchecked among his
readers-for in Romantic and post-Romantic times, Shakespeare was
read
rather than played and seen. Bloom, one feels, would rather meditate over
the text than spend afternoons among actors and audience at the new
Globe. His idea that Shakespeare invented us, as we think we are, could
