Bardolatry

Some among us who last saw a Shakespeare play many years ago, and who last read him even more years ago—probably in school—are inclined to wonder whether the exalted place he holds in mankind's esteem is justified. After all, they say, he was really just an adapter and editor, cobbling his work from older plays or Holinshed's chronicles. And they admit to finding his plays hard work to sit through; to being bored by long speeches in what seems to them practically a foreign language, perplexed by the unintelligible badinage, and embarrassed by the singing of "hey nonny no." To such people the eulogies and adorations that stream from American critic Harold Bloom's new book, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human, must seem incomprehensible.

Now, I am a bardolater. I love Shakespeare. I go to every production of any of his plays which come my way. I read him almost constantly. I review books about him frequently, even those absurd books which claim he was Bacon or Marlowe or a whole committee of playwrights. I thrill with admiration for his genius, for he is undeniably one of the greatest geniuses ever. His achievement is staggering. To measure it, consider how different the world would be if its literature lacked Hamlet, Lear, Iago, Falstaff, Prospero, Shylock, Richard III, Cleopatra, Macbeth, Romeo and Juliet. Consider how impoverished the English tongue would be if it lacked the rich, apt ornamentation of Shakespeare's phrases. And yet I find Bloom hyperbolic, almost hysterically so, in the claims he makes about Shakespeare. For Bloom says: "Shakespeare invented the human," and he means it.

There is a serious question at stake here, concerning the nature of Shakespeare's genius. With the exception of a few eccentrics, chief among them Tolstoy, no one disputes that he was a genius. The debate is about the character of that genius, or perhaps what is the same thing: its sources. The Shakespeare scholar Jonathan Bate has suggested that, in fact, matters should be placed the other way round: we should recognise that we had to invent the term "genius" in its modern sense to accommodate Shakespeare's inventive and perceptive powers. This, if true, makes it as pointless to ask what makes Shakespeare a genius as it would be to take a tape-measure to the Standard Metre in Paris.

But Bloom goes much further. His paean has a single aim: to state and substantiate the claim that Shakespeare did not merely portray human nature in all its variety and complexity, but actually invented it, giving us the categories and the patterns of different selfhoods which, before and without him, it was not so much as possible for us to think about.

Bloom's book is swollen and repetitive. It does not merely tremble on the edge of absurdity but plunges—indeed, hurls itself—in; as when, for example, he suggests that Shakespeare's works constitute a secular Bible, and that bardolatry could be the new universal faith. The world, he says, needs a "unifying culture" and it cannot come from any of the established religions, whereas "English already is the world language... Shakespeare, the best and central writer in English, already is the only universal author, staged and read everywhere," whose influence surpasses that of Homer and Plato and "challenges the scriptures of West and East alike in the modification of human character and personality."

What explains this excess is Bloom's membership of that tremulous vanguard of bardolaters for whom the only permissible attitude to Shakespeare is, as Bloom himself puts it, "awe, wonder, gratitude, shock, amazement." This is truly the stuff of religion, and it had its first important expression in Coleridge, who ruled that no one should venture criticism of Shakespeare who does not hold him in "reverence."

As if wishing to be hung for a sheep, Bloom adds some extraordinary ancillaries. For one amazing example, he asserts that Desdemona is a virgin. He is an admirer of William Hazlitt, one of the greatest of Shakespearean critics, yet forgets Hazlitt's explanation of the depths of Othello's jealousy in the erotic power of his relationship with Desdemona—a view which led the scrofulous Blackwood's Magazine of Hazlitt's day to brand him a pornographer. Strangest of all is Bloom's admiration for Dr Johnson as a Shakespearean critic! For such unsteadiness of mind, the only cure is another good dose of Hazlitt.

Yet among Bloom's inflations and absurdities there are some very good points. He comes as close as anyone to identifying the essence of Shakespeare's genius, as if, in the moments before casting his torch on to the bonfire of his common sense, he manages to illuminate it in passing. To see how, let us retrace our steps and take another route.

Consider Tom Stoppard's film Shakespeare in Love, a pleasingly clever romp which makes good use both of oeuvre and legend to portray the young Shakespeare suffering writer's block in his efforts to get Romeo and Ethel, the Pirate's Daughter finished. Love unblocks him, and Romeo and Juliet is the result; the play's poetry itself provides the medium of erotic and romantic intercourse between the principals. It is tongue-in-cheek (Shakespeare has a mug on his table bearing the legend "Souvenir of Stratford-upon-Avon"), and Stoppard's own experience informs his presentation of the playwright at work—for example, showing him scavenging others' remarks for later use, and repeatedly scribbling his own name while awaiting inspiration.

But in one crucial respect the portrait misleads. Stoppard has Shakespeare searching for an original story, sitting at a desk with pen, ink and paper. Provokingly, he has Marlowe suggest the tale to him in a pub. But Romeo and Juliet is an adaptation of the poem by Arthur Brooke, published in 1562, called The Tragicall Historye of Romeus and Juliet. In almost all cases Shakespeare's desk groaned under the weight of his sources and references. For example, to write A Midsummer Night's Dream he needed Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, Thomas North's translation of Plutarch's Lives, Berners's translation of Huon de Bordeaux, Scot's The Discoverie of Witchcraft, Cooper's Thesaurus Linguae Romanae et Britannicae, Apuleius's Golden Ass, the Handefull of Pleasant Delites by "Clement Robinson and divers others," and The Tragedy of Pyramus and Thisbe. The presence of material from each of these works is clear in the play's text; yet further sources may be invisible or unobvious. Shakespeare's use of sources was typically very close; Holinshed provided many of the speeches, sentiments, epithets and descriptions in the history plays, and Enobarbus's famous description of Cleopatra in her barge is almost a transcription from its original.

But the key lies in "almost." By a wonderful alchemy, the various materials Shakespeare gathered into the alembic of his imagination issued from it as pure gold. He ignored the classical unities prescribed by Aristotle and his successors, ruled in the shaping of his dramas strictly by the need to tell a whole story economically yet fully, never skimping what was required for his audiences to feel what his characters felt, or to understand the history and conditions of the action. But this, the mere mechanical part, is the least of it. The real greatness of Shakespeare's art lies not in technique, but in his subject matter and his language. His subject matter is love, hate, ambition, hubris, revenge, loss, murder, historical cruces of rebellion and war, power (human and inhuman), and the divine and tragic possibilities of intimacy. By his language I mean his extraordinary ability to express what is greatest, most moving, most true and deep in that subject matter. Shakespeare is capable of projecting himself into every one of his creations. Each character in his plays, apart from the walk-ons, is an individual; each develops with psychological truth through the action of the drama as a strongly recognisable personality undergoing experiences—of love, tragedy, ambition, disaster—which affect him or her exactly as his or her personality determines. It has been well said that if you remove the big names from the text of a Shakespeare play, you can still tell who is speaking. If proof were needed of Shakespeare's genius you need only point to the grip which his characters and his language have on our sensibilities. His characters are archetypes, his words are constantly in our mouths. He holds a mirror to human nature, so exact and so magnifying that we see the porous greasy skin, the black follicles of hair, the variegation of the irises, all familiar, yet so newly and hugely presented that we stagger back and gasp. And he says what our souls wish they could say at their moments of tenderest or most agonised consciousness, so that to hear his words feels almost like remembering them.

This last point leads to another often expressed reservation about Shakespeare. It is that Shakespeare is too familiar, especially in his own land where he is the national cultural icon. To read or see one of his plays is indeed to remember him; as someone once remarked in unconscious genuflection to his influence, he is full of cliches. What if our enthusiasm for Shakespeare has staled him, made him difficult to perceive properly, like an Old Master painting obliterated under varnish and age? This question misses the point. Continual staging of Shakespeare is what keeps him alive. Experimental stagings, film versions, adaptations and novel interpretations, are all valid operations on the Shakespearean canon—as valid as classic renderings in which different leading actors bring his great roles before us according to their own lights. In recent years I have seen several actors in straightforward stagings of Lear (for my money, the late Eric Porter in Jonathan Miller's production at the Old Vic was best), and relished the differences as much as I cherished the familiar. Difference only makes sense against a background of continuity; there would be no purpose in discussing the merits of Garrick and Kean, Richardson and Gielgud, if there were no constants to give comparison its point.

In assessing the grounds of Shakespeare's genius, Jonathan Bate considers it under the headings made traditional by debate on the nature of art since classical times. In that tradition it is variously held that a work of art is great—and therefore its creator a genius—if it has some or all of the following characteristics: it is true to nature; it evokes strong feelings in us; it makes us think; it possess formal beauty; and it stands comparison with what has been acknowledged as great art in the past. On all but one of these counts, Bate observes, Shakespeare passes with flying colours. The exception is the requirement for "formal beauty," because the beauties of Shakespeare do not derive from classical conceptions of form; his dramas violently flout the "unities" of place, time and tone, they veer from tragedy to comedy and back again, they have several plots unfolding at once, they bring a large motley of characters on to the stage, and in general take whatever loose shapes they feel they need, in defiance of ancient rules.

Shakespeare shared the same rhetorical training as his fellow Elizabethan and Jacobean dramatists. Like them, he read Ovid and Seneca, the Greek tragedies in translation, Roman and English histories, Chaucer and Spenser, any number of romances and tales from the Italian and French, Montaigne in Florio's translation, and of course his own contemporaries, especially Marlowe and John Lyly. But none of them, not Marlowe nor Ben Jonson, not Beaumont, Fletcher nor Thomas Heywood, comes anywhere near him in power of characterisation, or beauty of the poetry which expresses it. Their characters are cardboard, his are flesh and blood. Their language (excepting Marlowe) is often strained and sometimes bombastic; his is easily and gracefully poetic.

Shakespeare was thought to be "artless"—an untutored spirit—because he ignored classical constraints. In the 17th century his genius went underrated until Dryden kindly remarked that, although he was not a university man like Marlowe, he was nevertheless forgivably ignorant. Something of that strain remained in Carlyle, 200 years later, who insisted on calling him "the peasant from Warwickshire," and marvelled patronisingly at how well he got on in London. But Carlyle, not uncharacteristically, was facing in the wrong direction. By the time of the first two great Shakespeare critics, Coleridge and Hazlitt, questions of the unities no longer mattered, nor the necessity of a university education; and Shakespeare's art could be assessed on its merits.

Every age reads Shakespeare through its own concerns. In the 18th century it was simply unacceptable that the good should not triumph at last; so Nahum Tate revised the ending of Lear to make it happy—Cordelia marries Edgar and Lear lives cheerfully with them ever after. It happens that one of Shakespeare's sources has an ending rather like that; but Shakespeare is larger than his sources. In the 19th century Shakespeare's happy bawdry was unacceptable-there could be no Queen Mab for Victorian girls to read about, teaching maids how to lie on their backs and become "ladies of good carriage." But Shakespeare is larger than moral and historical fashion. We are, incidentally, fortunate that he lived in a most fluid period when the line between private and public was being redrawn (as it is once more, as we move beyond the modern).

If there is one thing to agree about in specifying Shakespeare's genius, it is his chameleon ability to inhabit all points of view. All commentators from Dr Johnson to Jorge Luis Borges make that point. Johnson described Shakespeare as "a diversity of persons"; Borges said that he was everyone and no one. In an effort to explain the inclusiveness and disinterestedness of his capacity to see and feel so many and such varied, often competing, points of view, Carlyle said: "If called to define Shakespeare's faculty, I should say superiority of Intellect, and I think I had included all under that." To this must be added what so many critics seem to overlook: that he was an actor. He played the Ghost and the Player King in Hamlet, and generally served his company not only as a playwright but as a bit-part player—mainly of older and graver figures, including Prince Hal's father. It is a banality to observe that actors have to know how to inhabit many different roles authentically. Famously, Shakespeare has Jacques say, in As You Like It, that all the world's a stage, and all men and women merely players; as a means of transporting oneself into different viewpoints, the insight is as good as it is simple. Annex that ability to a generous and intelligent mind, and you have a hint of Shakespeare's universalising capacity, his paradigmatic exercise of Keats's "negative capability." The point is well put by a scholar whom Bloom greatly admires (and who was the tutor with whom I read Shakespeare as an undergraduate), AD Nuttall. Shakespeare was not, Nuttall says, and did not seek to be, a problem-solver, a clearer-up of difficulties. That is a good observation. Shakespeare accepted ambiguities, the open-endedness of things, their givenness and stubborness. When people seek Iago's motives, they fail to see that it was enough for Shakespeare that he had them. When people wonder at how Macbeth, so unsure before the murder of Duncan, could become so tough and resolute afterwards, and how Lady Macbeth, who was so tough before, could become so weak and deranged afterwards, they look at the brevity of the play and surmise that there must be a portion missing which contained an account of the transitions. But for Shakespeare it is enough that they occur; for that is what life is like.

Bloom sees all this; he even says most of this; and then he goes beyond it and launches upon transcendentalism and apotheosis. I prefer the thought that Shakespeare was human, possessed of a very great talent, who belongs in a pantheon with Mozart and Michelangelo, Aristotle and Einstein. But I agree with Bloom on a point which is his best and truest, namely that Shakespeare was among the first to open the inner self of man, and thus contributed mightily to the Renaissance's work of detaching the individual from the wedged mass of undifferentiated humanity which an older metaphysics believed in. Shakespeare is one of the founders of modern consciousness because he puts individuals (not types or tokens, as his fellow dramatists did) before us. He lets us listen to their secrets and share their feelings in their soliloquies.

If Bloom had restrained himself he could have made two valuable remarks. Shakespeare introduced us to two connected things, both new and important in their representation to us in literature. First, the idea of genuine individuality—the idea of the solitary soul, the reflecting, self-communing self which speaks and listens to itself and is acutely aware of its sufferings and desires-and correlatively, the idea of inner life, not only as something which exists but as something which can be explored, eavesdropped upon, used as the motor of dramatic action on the stage just as it is the motor of personal action in real life. In an unhappy flourish of rhetoric Bloom insists on sloganising these points as "the invention of the human," and then proceeds to believe his own rhetoric, as if there were no such thing as individual inner life before Shakespeare showed it at work. The difference lies between seeing Shakespeare as the articulator of inner life, as the first and most powerful portrayer of personal and individual subjectivity as a moral fact in the world, and its actual inventor. Hard as it is to credit, Bloom insists upon the latter, for he says that without the category and the language to express it—-both of which Shakespeare provides—it could have no existence.

Bloom irritatingly provides no index to this huge book. He introduces among his larger paradoxes such controversial claims as that Shakespeare is himself the author of the early Hamlet from which the Hamlet we know and love is drawn—and much besides, in a characteristically emphatic, unargued vein. Bloom's favourite Shakespearean character is Falstaff; indeed, he seems to see himself as the Falstaff of criticism, rollicking and boozy and offensive and clever and witty and a generally sly but lovable rogue. Well, he is welcome to the likeness, for after this performance he looks like the bedraggled, beaten and conjured Falstaff of Merry Wives after the ladies have played their pranks with him.