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PARTISAN REVIEW
only come about through prolonged perusal, Emersonian contemplation.
Robust reductive critics, like John Carey at Oxford, have scoffed at
Bloom's conviction that Shakespeare created human nature as we know it,
observing that Homer, Chaucer, and Dante, to say nothing of Virgil, Ovid,
and the Greek playwrights, had a good shot at revealing how much
"humanity" there was inside us, once we started to look around.
But in his review of
Shakespeare: The InlJention of the Human
Carey
missed the point. Bloom's contention is more subtle than he was prepared
to grasp; and while dismissing Bloom as just another old-fashioned blath–
erskite of the sort that modern Shakespeareans suppose extinct, Carey
merely revealed the limitations of a critic who thinks H. G. Wells and
Arnold Bennett greater writers than Proust and Henry James. The real
point about Bloom's critical stance is that he reinstates the novelists who
followed Shakespeare-from Richardson and Aus ten to James and Joyce–
as the true heirs and discoverers of Shakespearean understanding.
Post-Shakespearean perception is unavoidable by the modern intelligence:
unknowingly we read ourselves and our friends through Shakespearean
spectacles. Exactly this point was made by Jane Austen in
Manifield Park,
with a hidden irony which Shakespeare and Falstaff and Hamlet all would
have approved. We really don't need to know about Shakespeare, proclaims
the egregious young Henry Crawford. "He is in the blood."
Crawford couldn't have said that unless he had been as familiar with
the Bard as was any other English lady or gentleman of the time; and
Bloom is seeking-a heroic if hopeless exercise-to restore that blood–
familiarity to the common reader of today; to endow them, in this respect
at least, with the consciousness of an English-English-speaking as it
would now be-gentleman of Jane Austen's era. For Bloom tries valiant–
ly to pretend that we today can all still speak the same Shakespearean
language, have the same understandings and grounds for discussion, the
same sympathies and powers of impression.
Impression
above all. Bloom's book has no index, another gentlemanly
touch-what did Shakespeare care about indices after all?-but he pays the
right tribute to the gentleman who began it all, the eighteenth-century
Welsh diplomat Maurice Morgann, who in the intervals of exercising his
own intelligence by helping to give those New Englanders their indepen–
dence, produced a seminal essay on "The Dramatic Character of Sir John
Falstaff," Bloom's greatest Shakespearean hero and in a sense the only
begetter of this book.
Morgann's whole point was "Impression." Falstaff is compelled by the
play to engage in all this theater business, this "foregrounding," in Bloom's
phrase, of dramatic role and function: being a braggart, being a coward,
being rejected. But his real dramatic character, pointed out Morgann, is
