Bloom In Love

Bloom, Harold:  Shakespeare; The Invention of the Human

Riverhead Books; New York 1998

Warning: This review may endanger your innocence. It is based on the substantial body of facts that place the Seventeenth Earl of Oxford as the person who required the pen name (or more properly the, alias) of William Shake-speare. Other than to evaluate Harold Bloom’s book no attempt is made (or needs to be made) to further the many arguments in favor of this authorship. 

Whoever said that “time was out of joint” would love this book. Other than the sad fact that he has been biologically dead for 395 years, Shake-speare’s own predictions of his inevitable anonimity remain safe with Harold Bloom. Well, nearly safe. This is a qualification essential to any serious review of this otherwise forgettable work. Perhaps we can start with “Time”, a word that gets two and a half pages in the Schmidt Shakespeare Lexicon.

Bloom starts with a chronology based on the standard authorship dogma. He sticks the plays anywhere from one to twenty-one years after their known dating, an average of ten years per play. Of course this imprisons his readers in the magical forest which he and his cohorts have religiously guarded with their “scholarship” for several centuries. The fallout from this gambit is prodigious: it allows his beloved playwright to be a disciple of Marlowe, who was fourteen years younger than the Bard. Malvolio becomes a send-up of Ben Jonson. But he was only nine years old when the Bard needed a cross-gartered leg to titillate the London audiences who readily recognized Sir Christopher Hatton, Oxford’s rival for Elizabeth’s attention. 

While looking in on Falstaff (which he believes should be the title of Henry IV) he notes the possibility of WH as a model for Prince Hal. It fits his theory of a father-son relationship. In hopes that Bloom has scored we go back to the real time-table. Nope! Henry Wriothesley was all of eight years old at Falstaff’s literary birth. But of course Bloom was right for the wrong reason: Oxford’s relationship with the Third Earl of Southampton was parental, perhaps in a potentially dual capacity. Bloom seems to share in the kind of innocent poetic insight that allowed Ted Hughes in Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being to create a hologram of the real Shake-speare without knowing it.

Bloom wonders at his Shaxper’s writing twenty-seven plays between 1592 and 1602. Disarmed with the facts, things become even more wondrous, knowing that over forty-six plays, plus the sonnets plus many other poems, were written in the span of some twenty-four years!

Bloom invokes a frightening host of literary shades to prop up his delusion: Chaucer Dostoyevsky, Marlowe (he says many of WS’s plays are “Marlovian”), Ben Jonson, Chapman, Middleton, Carlyle, Tennyson, Whitman, Blake, Emily Dickenson, Nietszche, Eliot, Samuel Johnson, Dante, Joyce, Homer, Tolstoy, Cervantes, “perhaps” Dickens, Newt Gingrich, Pirandello, Becket, Oscar Wilde, Brecht, Browning, F. Scott Fitzgerald Roy Cohn, and Freud. Who in their right mind is going to argue with all of these good people?

Bloom drags an approximation of Freud on stage whenever there is need of some psychological support. But this not done until he has emasculated him with a deft reference to the good Doctor’s “ambivalence” about the authorship. My guess is that Freud had already been backstage and knew what was really going on. Helen Vendler, in her cryogenic deconstruction of the Sonnets (The Art of Shakespeare’s Sonnets) makes the same unforgivable mistake.

How does Harold Bloom balance the two bodies of fact that he recognizes with respect to his subject? One, the plays and sonnets (less at least two important plays) are not in dispute. The other, a page and a half of discouraging facts about the life of William Shakspur, late of Stratford-on-Avon, has but one real distinction. It is the basis of he greatest burst of creative speculation and inspired fiction in the history of the printed word. It is second only to the canon itself.

The short answer is that Bloom has spent twenty years wrapped in a grand literary romance. Many images offer themselves: one is a kind of giant ecclesiastical organism floating along just out of reach of reason. Slowly sinking, it is being paddled furiously by its prophets, acolytes, and addicts. They are protecting their hallowed professorships, grants, and publications. When things take a turn for the worse, they have been known to jettison certain basic assumptions to lighten ship. But for the publishers of Bloom’s new book they seem to still be afloat.

I often employ another metaphor which seems better to fit this book. It is suitable to Bloom’s interest in religions; his more lucid passages deal with Shake-speare’s understanding of this slippery subject. While not an angel, I would certainly refrain from any fine and applied treading on Bloom’s well-tilled turf. But his perceptions of the Bard’s ecumenicism are carried to a point where, if applied to Oxford, they almost “speak (his) name”. What is missing is the realization that the Stratfordian persuasion is a myth in itself, reflecting the process by which (I believe) all religions are formed. Joseph Campbell would have made a great Shakespearian scholar. But religions survive on the truths from which they are forged; another way of saying that they require survival value. There is little chance that Bloom’s critical fundamentalism will continue to satisfy inquiring hearts and minds.

My other metaphor is a sacred forest tended by its priests alternately cringing and parading behind a scrim of brilliant misprisions. It is all but impregnable to factual analysis. The credo is simple: the canon was handed down by someone who is “unknowable”. This book is a fine example of how this unknowing is perpetuated. The first line of defense is constructed of ambitious and recondite words stapled to the scrim. Anyone who would penetrate it might well first look up (as I had to do) some of the following typical words chosen at random from his verbal pharmacy:

historiography, multicultural universalism, Yahwistic, epithalamium; euphuism, adumbrate, rodomontade, epithelium, Pandecta, heterocosm, Plautine, prelapsarian, cosmological contraries, praxis, and proleptic.

The latter word gets used as many as four times on a page as things heat up. These high-order hypersyllabic abstractions mock the classic simplicity and abiding brevity of a great poet. Bloom uses seven hundred forty-five pages to examine the entrails of a work that (in one of my editions) needs just over a thousand. His technique depends upon litany. Perhaps afraid that his perceptions might become lost, he finds ingenious but tiresome ways to repeat them in an abundance of contexts.

From time to time there will be a new idea, or a different way of saying something notable. He observes that we “worship” three major “literary” characters plus Shake-speare, and that “Nobody prays to him but no one evades him for long either.” Many of his random and disconnected insights have merit if placed in their proper context. I found myself discovering that Bottom’s being “translated” is not a malaprop; it’s about his identity in the play. Bottom (Oxford), his head in Titania’s (Elizabeth’s) lap explores the possibility of kiss and-tell and (threatening?) to sing of it when she is dead. We know that HRH was in the audience that night.

In his play-by-play analyses Bloom blows hot and cold. To Merchant of Venice he brings the benefit of his philosophical investigations, relating the play (quite appropriately I believe) to Hitler and other cosmic misfortunes. Midsummer’s Night gets some deft attention; and because he has hopelessly identified himself with Falstaff, the Henriad comes in for some serious critical treatment. His ability to identify the actor(s) who speak for the Bard is remarkable in light of the fact that he has no idea who Shakespeare was. Hamlet, Falstaff, Jaques (and Touchstone), Falcounbridge, Lear’s Tom, Bottom (but he missed Oberon) and several of the fools all crowd into the buskin waiting for their chance to compromise four hundred years of disinformation.

Falstaff, “the mortal god of (Bloom’s) imaginings”, was sacrificed to a theatrical need that Bloom simply does not understand. Early in the book he makes it clear that he agrees with many of his equally misinformed predecessors that it is more important and rewarding to read rather than see the plays. Had Bloom been able to identify with this (or any other) playwright he might have understood the real tragedy of Falstaff. Shake-speare, after stuffing his resurrected Lollard with his own inspired irreverence, re-dedicates him on the desperate altar of patriotism; all in the context of an Elizabethan John Wayne war movie. And for this form of intellectual suicide the author was well paid.

Although he plays second fiddle to Falstaff, Hamlet is the one “character” that Bloom sees as being able to have written all of the other plays. The Dane is more than a “courtier, soldier, and scholar”; he is a “royal playwright”. How close can one get to the scrim without burning it down? To Bloom “historicism” is a dirty word, but in is corrupt form, it has ever been the foundation of the Stratford conspiracy. When confronted with history’s ugly truths, Bloom resorts to a conventional stable of epithets of which the leading is “French Shakespeare”. I think it has something to do with the following quote:

“There is a fashion among some current academic writers on Shakespeare that attempts to explain away his uniqueness as a cultural conspiracy, an imposition of British imperialism and so a weapon of the West against the East.. Allied to this fashion is an even sillier contention: that Shakespeare is no better or worse a poet-playwright than Thomas Middleton or John Webster. After this we are taken over the verge into lunacy. Middleton wrote Macbeth, Sir Francis Bacon or the Earl of Oxford wrote all of Shakespeare, or whole committees of dramatists wrote Shakespeare, commencing with Marlowe and concluding with John Fletcher. Though academic feminism, Marxism, Lacanianism Foucaltianism, Derrieanism and so on are more respectable (in the academies) than the Baconians and Oxfordians, it is still the same phenomenon, and contributes nothing to a critical appreciation of Shakespeare”.

This suggests several explanations. The simplest is that the Yale Library needs an overhaul. The second is that Bloom’s “academies” are out of step with current scholarship (as opposed to scholarly dabbling in the approved mysteries). A third, drawn from Bloom’s studied treatment of the events and personalities that shared the majesty of Elizabeth and Edward deVere makes a case for deliberate obfuscation, if not outright denial. His phobia of the several “isms” probing Mirkwood is equaled only by the boorishness with which he puts them down. We can help by adding to his list of famous collaborators one Joseph McCarthy, with whom he may be able to protect the received dogma.

In addition to his lexicographic poultice, Bloom populates his pages with an endless stream of actors and writers parading in and out of their plays. He claims that they hear each other speak and seem to write each other’s parts. Of course they do; they were conceived by a real person, in real time and were based (for the most part) on real people. OK, his playwright is “Marlovian”. Let’s invent the term “Stoppardian” to describe Bloom’s teeming pageants. Stoppard at least tried to keep all of the characters in their own play. Bloom’s naivety with regard to the creative process does nothing to increase our understanding of the plays themselves. This suggests a proof of Bloom’s premise; that Shakespeare “invented” us. The plays and sonnets do carry abundant concern about anonimity; it gives one the chills to think that Shakespeare, in inventing the likes of Harold Bloom, was taking no chances.

Another tool used in his autopsy is something called “foregrounding”. I have been assured that this is a scholarly term in good standing. The concept earns a postlude in the book and a fine quote from Emerson. Bloom’s explanation is touching; he wants us to accept the characters for what they are in the words that reveal them, rather than see them as developed from some previous existence (background). This, he hopes, will shut out the nasty marxist-feminist-Oxfordian-etcetera yahoos who, I believe, he fears are on to something. But Bloom himself profanes this holy posture by accepting, and nattering on and on about Hamnet being Hamlet, Mary Arden’s bright forest, and palpably fraudulent dating; all with his arm stuck in the looming dike of questionable gender. Having lived inside the plays too long, he has become his own genre figure. His “foregrounding”, divested of the necessary understanding, creates the image of someone holding the sextant upside down and looking through the wrong end of the telescope. What fun Shake-speare would have with him today!

After all of this I find it hard to say why I am so disappointed in Bloom’s troubled stay on Cuttyhunk (or Martha’s Vineyard). Could he not identify with Gielgud as Jan Kott’s Leonardo/Gallileo/Prospero long enough to see this grand metaphor for life versus theatre? A garlanded Bard, who has brought his characters to the strange new world, puts them through their paces, then takes them back to their homes to live out their myths. He leaves us, his audience, to fend for ourselves. Now, Harold, we can use Becket; maybe that is where he got Didi and Gogo. Ariel, our spirit freed by the poet’s divine wand; and of course Caliban, that splendid commentary on (the body of) mankind; still marooned, but in a brave new world. If Bloom believed that once upon a time his idol was a human being, he might have been able to allow Falstaff’s early irreverance evolve into Prospero’s late-life vision. Or did an Oxfordian Gielgud bring him (oh, so gently) too close to the scrim? For shame!

Here at Humility Press we have been looking for ways to move the Doomsday Clock ahead toward the witching hour, when, like a Swiss clock the Oxfordians can emerge from the closet while the Strats go back in. The tenacity of this festering myth suggests an alternative hour; one when academe will grant parity to both (or all) fields of research, study and/or worship. To this end we need to invite scholars in a number of related fields such as law, religion, medicine (especially psychiatry), government, and (oops!) history. At first the bait can be thesis topics; then doctorates, and finally a re-take of the Lambs. What young child will not thrill to the adventures of a perpetually twelve-year old orphan who took on a real kingdom, and through it the entire world?

Many topics can be spread out among the behavioral sciences. Why, for instance, has this popular delusion and crowd-folly thrived in an otherwise well-informed and free society? What has kept us from hearing the lonely voices of those who find the Stratford person sartorially challenged? Is this disinformation any different from that which muzzled the Gnostics, or keeps us from accepting that the early books of the Old Testament were first written in cuneiform? What can Oxford’s ecumenicism tell us about two centuries of disgusting religious warfare? Can we learn something useful for today? Did Gurdgieff follow Bruno and Dee back to hermetic, healing sources? Die-hard Stratfordians can be less than rational about the subject: is the madness individual or endemic? Can some other discipline offer a cure? Was Southampton slated to become Regent (or King) of the New World? If the denominator of the Canon is responsibility and cause and effect, is that why common men and women coming to the New World wove its wisdom into the documents that would allow them to govern themselves?

The current debate over the need for a chip on the Internet to protect the psyches of our children (already drenched in daily news of fresh human massacres) suggests a way to deal with Bloom’s fat tome. There is much of interest in his energetic pursuit of the kinds of truth often overlooked by dry scholars of any persuasion. But the setting for these gems is so out of joint that the book should be kept away from those who might believe the parts that are not based on any known facts. Some sort of polite chip might be in order to protect those without appropriate intellectual antibodies.

Susan Vere, Lady Montgomery, one of Oxford’s three daughters to whom he gave his Castle Heddingham, was in evidence at the publication of the First Folio. Did she wonder whether she was Cordelia, Goneril, or Regan? What would she have thought of being crammed into Dr. Bloom’s chapter on King Lear with the entire cast, Solomon, Freud, Yahweh, Auden, Borges, Blake Heidegger (French Branch), Tolstoy, Nietzsche, Marlowe, Falcounbridge, Machiavel, Don Juan, Falstaff, Goethe, the Sumerians (pentateuch), Homer, Dante, Mohammed, Yeats, Mark, Dr. Johnson, Wittgenstein, Kierkegarde, Melville, Emerson, Chesterton, and an etui of feminist critics to discover something more that we will never know about her father? All I could think of was another less hallowed literary allusion; the bodies piled up around the castle in Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court.

While I am sure that there are reasons why these worthies are cited repeatedly, no real connections are made as to why. This compounds the overgrowth of repetition and speculation, non-fact and fancy that girds the magical forest surrounding Stratford-on-Avon. Whether this is criticism or praise depends upon one’s goals. The high priests protecting the golden myth will, of course, happily accept Bloom’s offering even though in his enthusiasm he has come dangerously close to (and nearly burned down) the scrim. For the student facing each new gnashing head of the monster within the sacred enclave there is the challenge to penetrate the scrim with the bright weapons of scholarship or --- has anybody got a match?

Joseph L Eldredge 1999