Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human
by Harold Bloom
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Book Summary Information
Author: Harold BloomEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 1999-09-01
ISBN: 157322751X
Number of pages: 768
Publisher: Riverhead Trade
Book Reviews of Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human
Book Review: Persausive Bloom Strikes a Blow for the Falstaffs of the World
Summary: 5 Stars
This eminently readable tome, all 745 pages, is a fascinating, sometimes provocative display piece showing off Yale professor Bloom's lifetime absorption with Shakespeare's work. There is no index; the reader is left with a simple Contents breaking the plays into nine groups, not necessarily in strict chronological order. (Twelfth Night, for example, is listed with "High Comedies" preceding a group of four "Major Histories", all of which came before Twelfth Night). This simple grouping is then followed by a Chronology, a very useful listing, though also the subject of some controversy. Bloom chooses to endorse the disputed theory that Shakespeare was the author of a much earlier version of Hamlet, written sometime between 1589-93. However, save for this critical stretch, the remainder of the plays appear quite up to the latest critical placing. Bloom does not directly cover the Sonnets or poems.
After a short introductory essay, "Shakespeare's Universalism", Professor Bloom begins rounding up his suspects proceeding straightaway with a chapter for each play. This approach lends itself to browsing, turning to one play or another: the tried and true chapter-a-play approach offers some compensation for the lack of any index. The reader can determine Bloom's favorites by simply counting the pages involved in each separate essay. A few odditites exist: the not very well-known late play Cymbeline receives nearly 25 pages of text, while the highly popular Much Ado About Nothing is granted a mere 10. As Bloom prominently argues the importance of personality throughout his text Much Ado's short-changing relative to Cymbeline seems rather inconsistent: few critics would suggest Beatrice and Benedick (not to mention Dogberry) are lesser lights to the characterizations in Cymbeline. Perhaps Bloom like Shaw was never taken with the play.
But happily this example is the well-known exception to the rule; generally Bloom gives each play space appropriate to its stature. Unlike T.S. Eliot, who ostensibly preferred Coriolanus to Hamlet because the Roman tragedy was a far more 'perfect' play, Bloom refuses to push his theory of personality too far. Despite his exalted placement of Rosalind in his private pantheon of Shakepeare's creations, he admits As You Like It is less a play than Twelfth Night. Not surprisingly the major tragedies are well covered with full essays instead of short chapters as is the case with many of the earlier plays.
Central to Bloom's book is Henry IV, and especially Part 1. Bloom, like so many, is utterly captivated by the fat knight, Sir John Falstaff, and admits how painful it is moving on to other characters after writing about this astonishing creation. For Bloom Falstaff rivals Hamlet in Shakespeare's creation of character, and calls forth from the critic a deep personal response. In the end he quite sides with the Falstaffian ethos over the pragmatic and self-limiting path taken by Hal.
(Perhaps had Prospero been Hal's tutor things might have turned out better for the world, or at least the world as Bloom wishes it might be. Prospero ignored his reasponsibilites as ruler and lost his kingdom. He was spending too much time on his studies - perhaps Shakespeare's sly dig at the Philosopher King.)
Bloom's writing is often extremely creative, dense with meaning and highly poetic. This intensity reaches an apex as he marvels his way through his essay on Antony and Cleopatra. Shakespear'e most stunningly colored poetry, its sound cadences unrivalled till Poe and Baudelaire, draws from Bloom a marvelous essay. Cleopatra is shown as Falstaff's feminine counterpart, going him one better in personality if not wit. The lovesick Duke's opening of "If music be the food of love" is here amplified into a symphonic tapestry of poetry as music. With Cleopatra as absolute ruler, Queen of Egypt, descendant of milleniums of immortal Pharaohs, her utterances take on both a universality as well as a deep link with the timeless past. Unlike Falstaff Cleopatra's whims effect countless human destinies. Bloom does not underestimate her character: he writes with grace and empathy about one of the most complex creations in literature.
But too much of a good thing gets the better of him with her one-time paramour turned husband, Antony. Bloom finds in the military man Antony "the largest instance of metamorphic susceptibilty in all of Shakespeare"; greater even than Hamlet or Falstaff, Iago or Lear. Bloom's brilliant style wins the reader over at first, but I think he is here indulging himself. It's is a bit like something Fitzgerald said when asked about the missing months in the middle of The Great Gatsby when Jay and Daisy are 'together'. "Oh, I just covered it over with pages and pages of gorgeous prose.." Perhaps it is too difficult for Bloom to accept the soldier Antony, whatever his oratorical skills, as the reincarnation of a Golden Age Latin poet. Shakespeare was always struggling to balance his poetic tugs with the demands of stagecraft and character. (See Love's Labour's Lost.) I think in Antony and Cleopatra the truth is a little simpler than Bloom's involved analysis of Antony's character. The poet at the very height of his powers gave the playwright lines of such surpassing magnificence he (Shakespeare) couldn't live without them, however beyond the capacity of the creative understanding of his hero.
It was not just a whim when Queen Elisabeth asked to see "Falstaff in Love." Such a request was cunning. Elisabeth was never an absolute ruler on the scale of her contemporary in Russia, Ivan the Terrible, but she certainly had no trouble having her way with Shakespeare's acting troupe. Before a year was out Falstaff returns, by royal command, "in Love." Bloom finds the play, The Merry Wives of Windsor, a very light meal indeed after Falstaff's previous role. However, he seems to miss the true signifigance of this falling off, there is more to it than just a rush job on a play. Living under constant peril for her life, Queen Elisabeth understood, in ways Bloom misses, terrors unique to rulers. The paranoia that consumes Shakespeare's Macbeths and projects their internal terrors outward across Scotland is never far from the daughter of Henry VIII. Elisabeth was much happier enjoying Falstaff free of such mutterings as Richard II's "For God sake let us sit upon the ground and tell sad stories of the death of kings...all murthered".
We know far more about the essence of these plays, their poetic richness, their complex intellectual contradictions and concepts than the finest critics of a hundred years ago. Bloom's work is certainly prima facie evidence of that. It seems fair to say the playgoers at the original performances could not possibly grasp the enormous meanings now invested in them following several hundred years of performance and criticsm. The Playgoers of Shakespeare's day went to the plays looking not for major works of epic poetry - that would be the last thing they would choose to see on the stage. Their interest was kindled by word of a new exciting story, or the return of a popular actor. Catchy lines and songs, comic prattle and elegant costumes filled the bill. These left stronger impressions than any philosophical musings. Serious criticism in depth wasn't meted out to plays. A young boy playing Cleopatra at its premiere is many degrees of difficulty and communication removed from a performance of the role by Katharine Cornell. The age's love of language permitted a free reign to poetic oratory in the theater. But only a handful of Shakespeare's fellow actors and stage friends, and not university professors, worked to leave us his legacy. They alone had lived with the lines long enough and closely enough to recognize the magnitude of the plays, what the playwright had bestowed on his countrymen and contemporaries. And because of their efforts, despite all the changes in language and custom we today can appreciate Shakespeare's unique gift.
Bloom's book pays homage to both these acts, Shakespear's writings and those who had the wisdom to understand their significance. Bloom's books passes on this sensibility, and captures in distinquished prose his deepest probings of the universality of Shakespeare's creative self.
Summary of Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human
"The indispensable critic on the indispensable writer." --Geoffrey O'Brien, New York Review of Books
A landmark achievement as expansive, erudite, and passionate as its renowned author, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human is the culmination of a lifetime of reading, writing about, and teaching Shakespeare. Preeminent literary critic Harold Bloom leads us through a comprehensive reading of every one of the dramatist's plays, brilliantly illuminating each work with unrivaled warmth, wit and insight. At the same time, Bloom presents one of the boldest theses of Shakespearean scholarships--that Shakespeare not only invented the English language, but also created human nature as we know it today.
"Personality, in our sense, is a Shakespearean invention, and is not only Shakespeare's greatest originality but also the authentic cause of his perpetual pervasiveness." So Harold Bloom opines in his outrageously ambitious Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human. This is a titanic claim. But then this is a titanic book, wrought by a latter-day critical colossus--and before Bloom is done with us, he has made us wonder whether his vision of Shakespeare's influence on the whole of our lives might not be simply the sober truth. Shakespeare is a feast of arguments and insights, written with engaging frankness and affecting immediacy. Bloom ranges through the Bard's plays in the probable order of their composition, relating play to play and character to character, maintaining all the while a shrewd grasp of Shakespeare's own burgeoning sensibility.
It is a long and fascinating itinerary, and one littered with thousands of sharp insights. Listen to Bloom on Romeo and Juliet: "The Nurse and Mercutio, both of them audience favorites, are nevertheless bad news, in different but complementary ways." On The Merchant of Venice: "To reduce him to contemporary theatrical terms, Shylock would be an Arthur Miller protagonist displaced into a Cole Porter musical, Willy Loman wandering about in Kiss Me Kate." On As You Like It: "Rosalind is unique in Shakespeare, perhaps indeed in Western drama, because it is so difficult to achieve a perspective upon her that she herself does not anticipate and share." Bloom even offers some belated vocational counseling to Falstaff, identifying him as an Elizabethan Mr. Chips: "Falstaff is more than skeptical, but he is too much of a teacher (his true vocation, more than highwayman) to follow skepticism out to its nihilistic borders, as Hamlet does."
In the end, it doesn't matter very much whether we agree with all or any of these ideas. What does matter is that Bloom's capacious book sends us hurrying back to some of the central texts of our civilization. "The ultimate use of Shakespeare," the author asserts, "is to let him teach you to think too well, to whatever truth you can sustain without perishing." Bloom himself has made excellent use of his hero's instruction, and now he teaches us all to do the same. --Daniel Hintzsche
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