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much more comprehensive and much more subtle. Like all the rest of us,
he pretends-pretends to be a hero, pretends to be a coward. Inside there
may be an Iago, a Hamlet, perhaps a Prospero too. Bloom quotes
Morgann's decisive sentences:
If the characters of Shakespeare are thus
whole,
and as it were original,
whilst those of almost all other writers are mere imitation, it may be
fi
t. . .
to account for their conduct from the
whole
of character, from
general principles, from latent motives, and from policies not avowed.
Morgann, still not much known about or re-perused today, is the fore–
runner of Coleridge and Hazlitt and Kleist, the Romantics and often the
novelists of a golden age who fed, consciously or unconsciously, on a
"Morgannatic" understanding of Shakespearean character: its divisions and
paradoxes no less than its comprehensiveness, its steadfastness in "policies
not avowed."
Like those old-fashioned scholars A.
C.
Bradley and Mark Van Doren,
Bloom gives us separate essays on each play, but he ends with a coda: two
little studies, first on "The Shakespearean Difference," and then on the
dramatic need and process of "Foregrounding." Bloom's premise remains
firm and on the whole justified, that from Shakespeare's invention has
come "the most accepted mode for representing character and personality
in language," and that he "thereby invented the human as we know it"–
human sexuality as well. In a splendid phrase Bloom calls Shakespeare "the
original psychologist and Freud the belated rhetorician." The "ever-grow–
ing inner self," as revealed by Shakespeare, also accounts for his
preternatural awareness of bisexuality and its disguises. The obviousness of
bisexuality and its "policies not avowed" is accepted openly in the plays–
for example in Antonio's love for Bassanio in
The Merchant
oJ~nice--and
yet with the "ironic reserve" which drama requires.
As one might expect, Bloom finally comes down on the side of all
those wise persons, from Lamb onwards, who know that one should read
Shakespeare rather than see him performed. Nor was Lamb the first. It
comes as a shock in a way to find Shakespeare's own fellow-actors
Henunge and Condell, who edited the First Folio, advising us to "read him
therefore, and againe and againe." Homer and Chaucer were written for
performance, but they are enriched every day by the fact that we read
them. Shakespeare as Theseus in
A Midsummer Night's Dream
knew that it
is the words that matter, not the play-"for the best in that kind are but
shadows and the worst are no worse if imagination do amend them."
