Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human. Harold Bloom. New York: Riverhead Books, 1998. xxii +745 pp.$15.95 pb.
From Sixteenth-Century Journal, 31.2 (Summer, 2000), 591-92.
Even before you open Harold Bloom's Shakespeare:The Invention of the Human, you can tell that it's meant to be a kind of monumental achievement, like the enduring masterpieces of Renaissance art. It's a big, fat slab of a book (745 pages), and the cover design comes from Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel. You'll also know that the book has been a smashing success in its own time: The cover of my copy identifies it as a " New York Times Bestseller," and the first three pages are devoted to sixteen quotations from reviewers that make the cover's subliminal message explicit. The book is Bloom's "magnum opus" (both the San Antonio Express-News and the Houston Chronicle say so),"the crowning achievement of his career" (Salon magazine), "A magisterial survey of the Bard's complete dramatic oeuvre. . . . Very nearly perfect" (Kirkus Reviews), and "the one book you read if you're only going to read one book about Shakespeare" (The New York Observer).
After all this, it's a little embarrassing to admit that I didn't like the book. In fact, I had a hard time getting through it. Bloom's prose style is lively and readable, but the book is much too long. Declarations that Shakespeare was a great genius are endlessly repeated, usually coupled with complaints about the pernicious influence of "academic criticism," "Parisian speculators," "feminists," and the like. When Bloom endorses a play or a character, you had better share his enthusiasm, because his way of arguing his case is to declare that people who think otherwise are defective. In the case of Taming of the Shrew, for instance, "One would have to be tone deaf (or ideologically crazed) not to hear in this [V.i. 130-38] a subtly exquisite music of marriage at its happiest." If you don't agree with Bloom's enthusiastic response to the play, "perhaps," he says, "you yourself are the problem."
The book begins with a chapter on "Shakespeare's Universalism" and ends with a twenty-one- page "Coda" and then another chapter called "A Word at the End" (as if Bloom had a hard time shutting off his own flood of words). In between are thirty-five chapters of varying length, mostly devoted to individual plays, except that the multi-part history plays are lumped together in single chapters . The Merry Wives of Windsor, which Bloom ranks lowest of all the comedies, gets a little over three pages. Hamlet the play gets forty eight, and Hamlet the character (along with Falstaff) takes up a lot of space in the other chapters as well-- but it's difficult to tell exactly how much because the book contains no index (no footnotes or bibliography either). As for texts, Bloom simply announces that although he generally prefers the Arden Shakespeare, he has "employed a variety of texts, sometimes silently repunctuating for myself." The organization of the chapters follows a developmental model, beginning with sections entitled "The Early Comedies," The First Histories," and "The Apprentice Tragedies," but Bloom's chronology is casual and impressionistic. He places The Two Gentlemen of Verona before The Comedy of Errors, for instance, because it seems "much less advanced" to him, and he places 1 Henry VI , which he also considers a "bad" play, first of all.
Bloom's thesis is that Shakespeare's great achievement was the creation of characters so varied and so real that they laid out all the possibilities for human personality. The best of Shakespeare's characters, in Bloom's view, have "an intensity of being far in excess of their dramatic contexts." Accordingly, he has no use for The Merry Wives of Windsor, which he dismisses in the shortest of all his chapters because the "pseudo-Falstaff" in that play "is a nameless impostor masquerading as the great Sir John Falstaff." The "real" Falstaff is another matter: "When we are wholly human," Bloom concludes, "and know ourselves, we become most like either Hamlet or Falstaff." Hamlet and Falstaff are two of the four heroes of Bloom's book: the others are Shakespeare and Bloom himself: The four repeatedly shade into each other, and much of what Bloom has to say in his 745 pages tells us more about Harold Bloom than it does about Shakespeare's plays.
There isn't much in this book to interest Shakespeare scholars. Many of Bloom's observations about the plays have been made before, others are just plain wrong, and his scholarship is seriously defective. However, although Bloom decries what he calls the "swamp of Cultural Studies," his book is interesting as a cultural phenomenon, because it exemplifies two of the uses to which Shakespeare is often put in contemporary American society. Its facile denunciations of recent Shakespeare scholarship ride easily in the wake of the well-publicized right-wing backlash against current academic work in the humanities. Bloom is hardly the first to enlist the authority of Shakespeare in the culture wars of the 1990's. Witness the public flap stirred up by the well-publicized but incorrect claim that Georgetown University was "dropping its Shakespeare requirement."
Bloom's Shakespeare is the Immortal Bard who summons us to a return to tradition and presents us with "universal" truths and values independent of historical circumstances, but although it aspires to a kind of Renaissance universality, his book is very much a product of its own time and place. As a glance at the advertisements in any upscale magazine will quickly reveal, "tradition" sells. In a time of the rapid accumulation of new wealth, nothing is so desirable as merchandise that gives the appearance of old money and enduring value. The current vogue for traditional household furniture and do-dads comes from the same cultural context that produced the flurry of movies based on Shakespeare's plays and on the novels of Jane Austen and other canonical nineteenth-century writers. If Bloom's book interests twenty-first century scholars, it may well be because it became a best seller during the same year that the Academy Award went to Shakespeare in Love.