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PARTISAN REVIEW
Indeed it not infrequently happens that the requirements of the play
are at odds with the importance Morgann attached
to
our "impression" of
the characters, and what they do and seem. In his second coda "A Word at
the End on Foregrounding," Bloom writes wisely of this tricky question,
which has caused so much dissension among critics and even annoyance
among frustrated playgoers. "Why does no one behave other than zanily in
Twelfth Night,
or other than madly in
Measure Jor Measure?
Why must
Shylock be compelled to accept Christian conversion, or Malvolio be so
outrageously tormented?" The answer of course is the needs of the play,
which Bloom calls its foregrounding. Impression and character are the
essential background; theatrical business the sometimes tedious and fre–
quently perverse foreground.
"Impression" gives total freedom to the idea of character. We may feel
that the great characters all contain and create each other. Hamlet is his
own Falstaff just as he is his own Iago, and vice versa. One of the best or
rather worst examples of foregrounding is the plot of
Measure Jor Measure,
which virtually destroys the intellectual impression made by the play. What
helps to confirm the subtlety and importance of Bloom's general diagno–
sis is the way in which critics who have failed to perceive and to grasp the
importance of "impression," as opposed to "foregrounding," have always
tried to save the appearances in
Measure Jor Measure
by pretending that
Shakespeare contrives to keep the playas a unified whole when it is clear–
ly nothing of the kind, and when Shakespeare in any case fairly obviously
did not care.
Thus Hazli tt spent page after page fulminating at the vani ty and
hypocrisy of the Duke, who is "more solicitous of his own feelings than
of his subjects' welfare." A shrewd and indeed accurate
impression;
but it
perversely refuses to recognize that Shakespeare in this play has taken the
daring course of presenting his Duke as two people: one vulnerable and
vain, "human, all-too-human"; the other sometimes eloquent and indeed
awe-inspiring representative of divine grace. The plot cannot persuade us
to bring the two together, but our natural empathy with Shakespearean
impression cannot stop us trying to do so. The result is a play that is in
equal measure exasperating and fascinating.
As part of the leveling techniques of our age, which make it our duty
not to discriminate too much between one kind of "art" and another, it is
culturally correct to place Shakespeare as first in degree among Elizabethan
playwrights, but no different from them in kind. Bloom will have none of
that. "Shakespeare is a phenomenon, totally unlike anything else, and the
proof of that is the extent to which human nature and idea and specula–
tion have totally absorbed him." Shakespeare had luck of course. The
language he wrote in has become world language, just as his own art has
