The Shakespeare Wars

by Ron Rosenbaum

  “Falstaff … is still alive because Shakespeare knew something like the Gnostic secret of the resurrection, which is that Jesus first arose and then he died. Shakespeare shows Falstaff rising from the dead, and only later has Mrs. Quickly narrate the death of Sir John.”

  This Jesus comparison is a farrago of nonsense beginning with Bloom’s view of what “the Gnostic secret of the resurrection is”—a secret from most Gnostics. But no matter; Bloom is determined to make a Jesus comparison regardless of whether it falls apart upon closer examination.

  But Jesus is not even enough. He’s got to be Socrates too, “the Socrates of Eastcheap” Bloom calls him. Oh yes, and “like Socrates,” Falstaff is a “great educator,” a “sage,” and “he is the veritable monarch of language unmatched whether elsewhere in Shakespeare or in all of Western literatures.”

  Jesus, Socrates, “sage,” “great educator.” All of this diminishes rather than deepens Falstaff: he is not enough in himself without making him something or someone Other. A Bigger Other. Please, let Falstaff be Falstaff.

  What Is Bloom Really Up To?

  But could it be that John Carey is being unfair with his TV screen death ray analogy for Bloom’s “invention of the human” invention? Could there be a method to Bloom’s madness? A con game behind his elevation of con man to God? A hidden agenda behind this play Bloom’s not given credit for? I came to suspect, in rereading Bloom’s egregious Falstaff chapter, that Bloom must be putting us on. He must be doing what Falstaff did in his great post-robbery scene in the first part of Henry IV. Remember how Prince Hal and Falstaff plotted to rob a train of rich Canterbury pilgrims, but then the Prince and Poins decide to let Falstaff and friends do the robbery and then (in disguise) rob them of their stolen gold.

  Back at the tavern, after everything’s over, Falstaff tells a tall tale to the Prince about bravely carrying off the robbery but then being attacked by “two men in buckram suits,” and as he continues to tell successive episodes in the fictional fight (he actually ran away) it becomes, next, “four men” in buckram, then seven, then—piling fiction upon fiction, invention on invention—nine, then eleven.

  Until any pretense at attempting to tell the lies with conviction topples over into ridicule.

  “O monstrous!” says the Prince, “Eleven men in buckram grown out of two.” (One of the interesting unresolved questions about the scene is at what point—or whether from the very beginning—Falstaff knew the Prince knew he was lying and just continued for the sake of making himself “the cause of wit in others.”)

  It’s what we love Falstaff for: his shameless inflated exaggerations and “inventions.” “Invention” being, of course, a synonym in this case for “lie.”

  Suddenly one begins to glimpse, to wonder, if Bloom is deliberately imitating his hero in ratcheting up his praise for Falstaff. Bloom’s inflating his “inventions” to ever more ridiculous levels of invention, until he gets to the “eleven buckram men” of his analysis: “the invention of the human.”

  The motive? To browbeat the reluctant to care about Shakespeare by deliberately overinflating his most Bloomian character?

  There are consequences to this though: inflating Shakespearean characters to the point of overblown parade float caricatures results in their being abstracted from the plays they’re embedded in, turned into windy abstractions, hollow personifications, stand-ins for Big Ideas. Big Themes, in effect insisting that that’s what “all the fuss is about,” the Big Big Ideas embedded in the Big Big Characters. What a loss for those who read Bloom and then approach Shakespeare in such a way. One that paradoxically diminishes Shakespeare by making him (merely) Socrates with Big Characters to act out his Big Ideas.

  Blame Shelley

  Nevertheless I don’t think it’s Socrates’ fault; it’s Shelley’s. I want to tell you about the Bloom/Kline/O’Brien struggle over Kline’s Falstaff. But to place this struggle for possession of Falstaff, the struggle to recapture him from Bloom, this emblematic skirmish in the three-century-long war over Falstaff on stage, I’d like to advance my Shelleyan theory of Bloom’s Falstaff, of Bloom’s Shakespeare. As in Percy Bysshe Shelley, supreme poet of windy abstractions and empty personifications.

  I’ll admit this theory may seem parochially derived since it harks back to my having to sit through Bloom’s lectures on the Romantic poets as an undergraduate at Yale.

  But I think this glimpse of his preoccupation then—and, if one could bear it, the obscurantist critical vocabulary he invented (anyone remember “clinamen”?) but seems to have discarded, one which could vie in jargonic pathos with the worst of the Theory people he supposedly deplores—might shed some light, indeed the pure “white radiance” of Shelleyan Eternity, on the matter of Bloom and Shakespeare.

  Once long ago Bloom could actually read poetry closely, rather than merely beat the drum for it. I recall, back then in college, admiring Bloom’s provocative exegesis of Keats’s ode “To Autumn,” a poem that was and is a touchstone for me—one that led me to that last-day-of-summer stubble-fields-of-Winchester vision that probably impelled me to press on to Stratford and get a glimpse of the Dream that changed my life. I guess I owe Bloom for this. And this is how I pay him back? Well, I’d say I repay him with honesty I hope he’ll be large-spirited enough to respect. He’s got enough uncritical adulation. (As I said I’m conflicted.)

  What made Bloom’s “Autumn” exegesis a signature, if perhaps over-ingenious, Bloomian reading was his interpretation of the bleating lambs. Bloom heard in what others had usually read as a harmless pastoral reference in the ode—“lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn”—a virtual sign of the apocalypse. The lambs are “loud bleating,” Bloom argued in his edition of the Romantics, because they are either anticipating their slaughter, or are actually being slaughtered, leaving only the echo of their dying bleats behind.

  Bloom’s reading a premonitory echo of slaughtered lambs in those bleats turns a pastoral ode into quite something else: the Blood of the Lamb, an echo of Exodus, an echo of the Crucifixion’s sacred slaughter of the Lamb of God, perhaps a hint of the apocalypse when all us sinners will be led like lambs to slaughter.

  No lamb can make a murmur without Harold Bloom hearing the hoof beats of the Four Horsemen! But I liked it at the time, even defended it in a heated session of Carnegie Fellows as I recall, because I love reading and thinking about Keats—I still find in “The Eve of St. Agnes” almost the same unbearable pleasures as I do in Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis. And I think that as a Shakespearean commentator, Keats said perhaps the most important two words uttered about Shakespeare: “negative capability.” Which he defined as Shakespeare’s ability to offer us uncertainty, challenge us to coexist with uncertainty and ambiguity—without rushing to reduce “both/and” to a single “either/or” answer, with what Keats called “an irritable reaching” for certainty. (Bloom’s nothing if not an irritable reacher for certainty.)

  On the other hand there was the Bloom who sacralized the other Romantic poets, particularly Shelley, whose overblown abstract rhetoric, I’m sorry, with few exceptions I just could not take seriously. Typical is this, from the opening of Shelley’s “Hymn to Intellectual Beauty”: “The awful shadow of some unseen Power/Floats though unseen among us …”

  Yes, I think we get the point, it’s unseen. We just can’t see it! Overblown speechifying in verse, emptily raising everything to a Big Idea, inevitably, portentously announced with a boom! boom! boom! amplified in his lectures by Bloom! Bloom! Bloom!

  Everything sublime! (and thus, alas, nothing really sublime). Yes, I love that one passage in “Adonais”: “Life, like a dome of many-colored glass,/Stains the white radiance of Eternity.” And this is precisely the problem. Bloom is always looking for the pure “white radiance of Eternity” in Shakespeare, when in fact Shakespeare is preeminently a poet of many-colored (stained) glass. Shakespeare doesn’t regard life as a stain as Shelley does.

  Shelleyan sublimity, insisted upon at endles
s length over tens of thousand of lines, becomes less sublime than tedious in both Shelley and Bloom. Not vatic, or prophetic, barely poetic, but merely … windy, repetitive and unpersuasive. Just saying something is sublime doesn’t necessarily raise it to sublimity for others beyond the—what shall we call him?—sublimer, so to speak.

  I don’t think I’m alone in this preference for poetry of a different sensibility (cf. T. S. Eliot and F. R. Leavis). After reading Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, Jonson, Donne, Herbert, Webster and the Metaphysicals, not to mention Pope (and among the Romantics, Byron), poets who can make abstractions somehow a pure pleasure to read (Pope’s “Windsor Forest”: ravishingly beautiful!), I find it hard to take seriously the iconic Romantic, Shelley, that Bloom was asking us to venerate.

  To prefer Shelley to Byron and Keats! It says, alas, everything you really need to know about Bloom’s Shakespearean criticism. It takes a tin ear for language and an identification of poetry with the Greatness of its Ideas, for musings however tedious about the soul and of course the Emersonian “Over-Soul.”

  And while Bloom had obviously been reading Shakespeare all his life, when he turned from writing about the Romantics to writing about Shakespeare (not systematically until 1988) he seems to have seen him through the lens of Shelley. Although he had to turn up the volume.

  Having raised the likes of Shelley to the stature of virtual godhood—or prophet of the Emersonian Over-Soul—with his rhetoric, Bloom had nowhere to go but actual godhood with Shakespeare, thus the invention of “the invention of the human.” What advertisers and marketers used to call “the unique selling proposition”: I bring you not merely Shakespeare, the way other so-called literary critics do. I am not merely the ambassador of a poet, I am the prophet of a God.

  Still, even his critics concede that Bloom’s deifying belief in literary value has some virtue.

  “At least in Bloom’s ‘zesty’ world,” his critic and (paradoxically most persuasive) partial admirer Linda Charnes writes, “there’s some humor, pleasure and (gasp) an openly avowed Love of Art.”

  This from one of the most sophisticated Theorists whom Bloom has provoked into at least entertaining the idea of the “Love of Art.”

  And, as I said, I’m conflicted. I recall flying up to Boston just to hear Bloom do a staged reading as Falstaff sponsored by Robert Brustein’s American Repertory Theater. It was a freezing winter night but the place was full and Bloom sat on stage with a lineup of professional actors who fed him his Falstaff cues.

  And he was terrible! I was shocked because Bloom is such a scathing critic of stage productions, and of the way most actors and directors falsify the “higher” reality of printed Shakespeare, Shakespeare read silently in the soundproof booth of the mind.

  But here he was flattening all Falstaff’s energetic, intellect-vitalizing felicities into a dismissive monotone. What was the point? None of his vocalizations had poetic or dramatic inflection, none offered any insight into the lines. He barely mumbled them. He couldn’t have believed he was making the case for this semidivinity he’d turned Falstaff into, this character even more deeply implicated in the “invention of the human” than Hamlet, and obviously in Bloom’s own self-image.

  Was it another Falstaffian joke? Could he be doing this as a kind of reductio ad absurdum of spoken Shakespeare? Saying, in other words, You think this is bad, it’s all this bad, any attempt by mere humans to utter the immortal Falstaff’s godlike words? (But just one viewing of Orson Welles’s Chimes at Midnight disproves that.)

  Still, afterward at the reception I had a brief conversation with Bloom about the Shakespearean experience that changed his life: seeing Ralph Richardson play Falstaff. So he wasn’t immune to great acting, but what was the reason for this depressing reading that barely seemed to concern itself with making the words audible? Ill health? He did look like Falstaff as Lear: short of breath, he was a couple of years away from a triple bypass operation.

  But it wasn’t so much what Bloom said that night as his palpable mournfulness, the knight of the woeful countenance, suffering the unbearable sublimity of Shakespeare for our sake. It’s impossible not to feel affection for him the way it’s impossible not to feel affection for that aging con man he deifies, Falstaff.

  The Bloom Effect: Despite Everything, Maybe It Works

  I guess I find Bloom irresistible mainly as a Shakespearean character, his criticism a kind of Falstaffian braggadocio. Were it not that so many seem to take it seriously: “My god, Falstaff—eleven men in buckram, what a bold and fearless warrior you are!” Rather than Hal’s aware but indulgent “O monstrous!”

  I’m not saying he doesn’t believe it, I’m suggesting he may be exaggerating for effect. For good and bad effect. Perhaps he saw the hopelessness of getting Americans to read Shakespeare unless he made Shakespeare not just a god, but the god, our god, our inventor, which turned the plays into a secular bible.

  If Bloom’s apocalyptic hectoring jars some part of the populace to read and see Shakespeare, all the better, I guess. But if they read and see it seeking only sublime abstractions Bloom’s Shakespeare offers …

  Here’s a carefully chosen excerpt from Bloom on Falstaff in Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human. I’ll explain why I chose it in a moment. First, listen to Bloom at the close of his chapter on the Henry IV plays:

  It is very difficult for me, even painful, to have done with Falstaff, for no other literary character—not even Don Quixote or Sancho Panza, not even Hamlet—seems to me so infinite in provoking thought and in arousing emotion. Falstaff is a miracle in the creation of personality, and his enigmas rival those of Hamlet.… Falstaff’s prose and Hamlet’s verse give us a cognitive music that overwhelms us even as it expands our minds to the ends of thought. They are beyond our last thought and they have an immediacy that by the pragmatic test constitutes a real presence, one that all current theorists and ideologues insist literature cannot even intimate let alone sustain. But Falstaff persists after four centuries, and he will prevail centuries after our fashionable knowers and resenters have become alms for oblivion.

  Falstaff’s enigmas rival Hamlet’s? Please. Falstaff a miracle? Enough already. Yes, there is the matter of the infinite. Bloom finds the “infinite” in the body of Falstaff, I find it in the body of Shakespeare’s work, but let’s not quibble.

  As I said I chose that selection with cause. It was from an essay by the aforementioned Linda Charnes, a leading Theory scholar at Indiana University, who presented an absolutely remarkable, still too-little-noticed paper at a Shakespeare scholars’ conference.

  It was a paper that I believe will ultimately be seen as a turning point in Shakespeare studies, and it demonstrated that Bloom’s strategy, outrageous inflation to command attention in order to bully Shakespeare—his Shakespeare—into people’s consciousness, was succeeding in earning the respect if not the acquiescence of even a disdainful academy, or one of its brightest stars, as Charnes was.

  Charnes’s paper was read aloud at a small seminar I was lucky to find myself auditing during the Montreal convention of the Shakespeare Association of America. The seminar was billed as “Harold Bloom and Shakespeare” and I had expected from the names of the participants I was familiar with, such as Jay Halio (pro) and Terrence Hawkes (anti), that there wouldn’t be much of a meeting of minds. But I never expected to hear the kind of insightful, self-critical clarity, wit and reflectiveness that I did from Linda Charnes, whose work until then seemed to represent the antithesis of Bloom.

  It was absolutely exhilarating, her paper, both a critique of Bloom and a critique of academics like herself. A great cultural essay. After I wrote about the seminar in The New York Times Book Review, a collection of the seminar’s papers was collected in a book (Harold Bloom’s Shakespeare, edited by Christy Desmet and Robert Sawyer) and it’s worth getting for Charnes’s sparkling piece of cultural criticism alone.

  What was fascinating was how the clarity of Charnes’s paper differed from her
customary “practice.” I quoted in my Book Review account of that turning-point seminar some passages of Charnes’s Lacanian analysis of Hamlet (Jacques Lacan being the postmodern Freudian the popularity of whose sophistry among influential academics remains a puzzle to me):

  Mass culture is being increasingly “quilted,” to use Lacan’s term, by the points de capiton of what I would call the “apparitional historical.” It is therefore no accident that “Hamlet” is the play to which contemporary culture most frequently returns. Hamlet-the-prince has come to stand for the dilemma of historicity itself.… But the subject of affective time is incommensurable with the order, and the nature, of events. This was one of Lacan’s greatest insights, and one of his advances over Freud: his assertion that the true subject of the “impossible real” isn’t constituted by her narrative reconstruction of her “story” but rather by the failure of that story to “include” its affective event-horizon—its epistemological starting-and-end-point. As Joan Copjec has recently written about the Lacanian gaze …

  It’s as impenetrable as Bloom’s rhetoric is puncturable. But it was almost as if hearing another person entirely in her Montreal talk, so smart, so witty and self-aware, puncturing Bloomian pretensions—and those of her peers. She starts out by contemplating the book jacket of Bloom’s The Invention of the Human—not Shakespeare or anything Shakespearean, but “a detail of the Delphic sibyl,” the famous prophetic figure of the ancient world (guess who the implicit modern equivalent is?) from Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel “as backdrop for a large black boldface type that, if glanced at too hastily,” she says, “can easily be misread as ‘Shakespeare the Invention of Harold Bloom.’ ”