The Function of Shakespeare at the Present Time
Shakespeare and the Future of Criticism
Shakespeare Institute, July 2000
It may seem odd that for a seminar on Shakespeare and "the future of criticism," I would evoke Matthew Arnold and the function of criticism at a "present" time that is now the distant past. I am interested in whether a self-conscious return to Arnoldian premises and practices, such as that recommended recently by Harold Bloom, is possible, let alone advisable, and in what the answers to these queries might suggest for future directions in Shakespeare study. Harold Bloom's Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human is one example of recent criticism that declares the advent of a new secular humanism, assigning to Shakespeare the task of preserving humanity by promoting cultural values through aesthetic means. I understand that Bloom and his book have not created a particularly great stir in British academic circles and I have no idea what impact the American cultural gadfly might have in the wider world. But in the U. S., Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human has been recognized not only by the general public, but also by the wider literary world. Shakespeare was a New York Times bestseller, a finalist for the National Book Award and for the National Book Critics Circle Award; it was a main selection for the Book-of-the-Month Club. Reviews from the New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and Newsweek were equally ecstatic; even The New Yorker declared that "You could hardly ask for a more capacious and beneficent work than Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human." Available in hardback, paperback, and audio cassette, on June 29, 2000 the book was ranked 4,253 on Amazon.com. By contrast, on that same day Helen Vendler's The Art of Shakespeare's Sonnets, another widely reviewed and appreciated book by an academic critic, was ranked 42,355. Park Honan's Shakespeare: A Life, which Amazon.com recommends to readers of Bloom, clocks in at number 67,618. Jonathan Bate's The Genius of Shakespeare, which covers similar ideological ground as Shakespeare and was published at roughly the same time, was ranked 79,327.
From the perspective of North American cultural politics, it is tempting to dismiss Bloom and his book as the latest in a long line of conservative jeremiads against late capitalist culture. Bloom, a respected academic and literary theorist in his own right, has come to seem embarrassingly at home in the company of figures such as Allan Bloom (The Closing of the American Mind) or Dinesh DeSouza (Illiberal Education). One can also see Bloom as the latest in a line of academics who attack literary theory and the various "isms" associated with it--feminism, Marxism, and so on. What distinguishes Bloom from the general ranks of pundits and conservatives, I think, is not so much his explicit and even thoughtful nostalgia for literary study as a form of secular humanism as his efforts to construct anew the Shakespearean critic's literary genealogy. It is this second aspect of Bloom's work that might suggest a complementary response from other Shakespeareans.
II. BARDOLATRY
It is because criticism has so little kept in the pure intellectual sphere, has so little detached itself from practice, has been so directly polemical and controversial, that it has so ill accomplished, in this country, its best spiritual work, which is to keep man from a self-satisfaction at which is retarding and vulgarizing, to lead him towards perfection by making his mind dwell on what is excellent in itself, and the absolute beauty and fitness of things.
Matthew Arnold, "The Function of Criticism at the Present Time"
Harold Bloom opens Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human by aligning himself with a long line of Romantic critics that extends from "Hazlitt through Pater to A. C. Bradley on to Harold Goddard" (Bloom 1998, 1). In the Romantics, Bloom finds the precedent and justification for bardolatry, "the worship of Shakespeare," which he claims "ought to be even more a secular religion than it already is" (xvii). Using the hyperbolic language of praise and blame familiar from documents such as Samuel Johnson's Preface to Shakespeare forward, Bloom luxuriates in bardolatry and places himself vigorously in opposition to current trends in contemporary criticism.
But as always in Shakespeare, one of Bloom's targets shadows another as manifest to latent content. He scorns various contemporary "isms"--feminism, Marxism, and so forth--but also attacks generally historicist criticism--old, new, and new/old--of both the Marxist and non-Marxist varieties. For this loosely construed group of historicist critics, rather inexplicably labeled "French Shakespeare,"
the procedure is to begin with a political stance all your own, far out and away from Shakespeare's plays, and then to locate some marginal bit of English Renaissance social history that seems to sustain your stance. Social fragment in hand, you move in from outside upon the poor play, and find some connection, however established, between your supposed social fact and Shakespeare's words. (9)
Named most frequently among the offenders are Jonathan Dollimore, Alan Sinfield, and Stephen Greenblatt, who is referred to only indirectly by epithet. In his polemic against these various strains of historicism, however, Bloom aligns himself less with the Romantics and their interest in Shakespearean character than with Matthew Arnold and his vision of literature's high seriousness. (As is typical for Bloom, this is a silent debt. While Shakespeare has no index, The Western Canon does, and there Arnold is an absent presence, appearing not once in the index.) In his evocation of Arnold, Bloom bolsters his project of bardolatry by eliding the historical distance between himself and his critical predecessor.
In "The Function of Criticism at the Present Time," Arnold famously rejects criticism that is "directly polemical and controversial," arguing instead for a criticism that leads man to "dwell on what is excellent in itself, and the absolute beauty and fitness of things" (Arnold 2000, 1523). From this perspective, Bloom's attack on politicized criticism seems less an act of local aggression against the "power and gender freaks" than an affiliation with Arnold as a critical forbear of the moral kind. Like Arnold, Bloom hopes to detach literary criticism from both religion and politics. Like Arnold, he sees literature as serving ethics through aesthetics rather than containing moralistic content. Bloom does not claim the moral high ground directly. The idea of the self as a moral agent has many sources in the West, he says: Homer, Plato, Aristotle, the Bible, Dante, Kant, and many others. Shakespeare, alone among what Foucault might call "founders of discursivity," invented what we call "personality." His "sublimity" is ethical because it is psychological. Morality is a by-product of art, not the reverse.
Bloom's larger agenda also resonates with that of Arnold. In The Western Canon, Bloom mocks right-wingers who defend the canon for an intrinsic moral value that actually does not exist. Again like Arnold, he sees literature's function as more subtly educational, arguing that: "We need to teach more selectively, searching for the few who have the capacity to become highly individual readers and writers. The others, who are amenable to a politicized curriculum, can be abandoned to it" (Bloom 1994, 17). Compare this statement with the following one from Arnold:
It will be said that it is a very subtle and indirect action which I am thus prescribing for criticism, and that, by embracing in this manner the Indian virtue of detachment and abandoning the sphere of practical life, it condemns itself to a slow and obscure work. Slow and obscure it may be, but it is the only proper work for criticism. The mass of mankind will never have any ardent zeal for seeing things as they are; very inadequate ideas will always satisfy them. On these inadequate ideas reposes, and must repose, the general practice of the world. That is as much as saying that whoever sets himself to see things as they are will find himself one of a very small circle; but it is only by this small circle resolutely doing its own work that adequate ideas will ever get current at all. (Arnold 2000, 1525)
Bloom's affiliation with Arnold and the nineteenth century in general is also obvious in the agenda he sets for the private reader, whose selection of texts should aim to build individual character: "Ultimately we read--as Bacon, Johnson, and Emerson agree--in order to strengthen the self, and to learn its authentic interests" (Bloom 1998, 22). Although Bloom scorns the idea that literature directly edifies, he agrees that it "keep[s] man from a self-satisfaction which is retarding and vulgarizing" and in fact, goes Arnold one better by imagining that the master critic's selection of canonical works will educate not only the select circle, not only the general citizenry, but also the next generation of "strong poets," to use Bloom's formulation from The Anxiety of Influence.
Bloom's self-conscious debt to nineteenth-century discourse about the literary canon is also evident from his rhetoric. More obviously in Shakespeare than in the other two works, Bloom plays with the language of hagiography. John Guillory's concept of literature's "cultural capital" is the current rhetorical standard for discussions of the canon, but in the nineteenth century canonization was literally a more accurate term. In Shakespeare, Bloom describes himself as a "heretical transcendentalist, gnostic in orientation. I would be happiest with a Shakespeare who seemed to hold on to at least a secular transcendence, a vision of the sublime" (Bloom 1998, l13); for the "West," according to Bloom, Shakespeare's works have become a "secular Scripture." Beyond his penchant for hyperbole, Bloom seems to share in the complex spirit of Victorian literary canonization. In Lost Saints: Silence, Gender, and Victorian Literary Canonization, Tricia Lootens reminds us that for literary authors as for religious saints in nineteenth-century hagiography, reverence and parody are inextricable: "Secular sanctity is the genuine, if playful, heir to religious tradition" (Lootens 1996, 19). Bloom's bardolatry also veers toward parody. Consider, for instance, this testimony to the melancholy Dane: "After Jesus, Hamlet is the most cited figure in Wester consciousness; no one prays to him, but no one evades him for long either (Bloom 1998, xix). Bloom's affinities with nineteenth-century literary study are one part affect, one part affectation, but genuine and more deeply considered than some of his rhetoric might suggest. That affiliation, furthermore, can be used to tease out the problems and potential of Blooms old-new secular humanism.
III. BARDOGRAPHY
The epochs of Aeschylus and Shakespeare make us feel their pre-eminence. In an epoch like those is, no doubt, the true life of literature; there is the promised land, towards which criticism can only beckon. That promised land it will not be ours to enter, and we shall die in the wilderness: but to have desired to enter it, to have saluted it from afar, is already, perhaps, the best distinction among contemporaries; it will certainly be the best title to esteem with posterity.
Matthew Arnold, "The Function of Criticism at the Present Time"
Lootens's discussion of Victorian literary canonization also provides a useful framework for disentangling Arnold--and to some extent, Bloom-from some strains of nineteenth-century ideology, in particular nationalism. To the extent that Bloom constructs for Shakespeare a saint's life, his criticism is hegemonic, for as Lootens points out, the narratives of medieval sacred lives "perform a harmonizing function and represent a dominant, if often temporary, compromise between divergent and shifting interests" (Lootens 1996, 36). But Bloom's hegemony is not isomorphic with the nationalistic impulse behind some nineteenth-century veneration of St. Shakespeare. Carlyle, in a well-known passage, insists that England would have to give up India before Shakespeare. What keeps the nation together is, of course, literature, and in particular, Shakespeare: "Here, I say, is an English King, whom no time or chance, Parliament or combination of Parliaments, can dethrone! This King Shakespeare, does he not shine, in crowned sovereignty, over us all, as the noblest, grandest, yet strongest of rallying-signs" (Thomas Carlyle, On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History, cited in Lootens 1996, 31). Bloom, by contrast, remains ambivalent about nationalism and about Shakespeare. To a large extent, his Shakespeare is rather American, an heir to Emerson. But Bloom's bard is, he also insists, universal, by which he means that Shakespeare crosses national boundaries.
In the chapter on Shylock and The Merchant of Venice, for instance, Bloom faces squarely the fact this play is profoundly anti-semitic. Shakespeare's Shylock is monstrous, but so is the fate dealt him. "What baffles" Bloom, and with luck the rest of us, "is how to stage a romantic comedy that rather blithely includes a forced Jewish conversion to Christianity, on penalty of death. When Shylock brokenly intones, 'I am content,' few of our audiences are going to be content, unless you can conjure up a cheerfully anti-Semitic audience somewhere" (Bloom 1998, 175). Throughout the rest of his chapter, Bloom goes on to show that Venice and Belmont alike are driven by filthy lucre and that Antonio comes to a lonely and therefore most unsatisfactory end. Shylock's fate, if not the character himself, is a rich source of moral enlightenment. What haunts Bloom, however, is the fact that because they have existed in the deep and recent past, "a cheerfully anti-Semitic" audience could spring once again into being. The critic-baiting, the slurs against feminism, Marxism, New Historicism, and queer studies are driven by what Bloom, at least, sees as a balkanization of the intellectual elite that makes it socially useless, even harmful, and certainly inferior to the general ranks of playgoers and readers of Shakespeare. Bloom's temporal and geographical provincialism, however, is the weak point in his argument and a point of entry for Shakespeareans to engage his legitimate concerns. A comparison with Arnold proves useful once again.
Evoking the epochs of Aeschylus and Shakespeare as lost utopias, Arnold concedes that both past and future perfection are unattainable. Because criticism cannot retrieve the past directly, standing as it must at the entry to a promised land that recedes at once into the distant past and into the future, criticism bequeaths to posterity only hope and desire to move forward toward perfection: "to have desired to enter" the promised land of Shakespeare, "to have saluted it from afar, is already, perhaps, the best distinction among contemporaries; it will certainly be the best title to esteem with posterity" (Arnold 2000, 1528). What Arnold espouses we might call not bardolatry, but bardography--a sense of veneration conditioned by the lessons that poststructuralism will teach, the Derridean recognition that in the realm of writing, both alpha and omega are deferred. Shakespeare cannot be present to us, nor we to him.
Arnold, in his elegy for lost literature, recognizes both truths and therefore confirms Foucault's sense of genealogy as a "gray, meticulous, and patiently documentary" science that avoids "the metahistorical deployment of ideal significations and indefinite teleologies" (Foucault 1984, 77). Genealogy refuses the search for beginnings and endings; it is a science of fragmentation. Fragmentation is a condition that troubles as well the project of religious and literary hagiography. The cult of authorship literally and figuratively involves the reconstruction of the saint's dismembered body (see Lootens 1996, 39). In a broader sense as well, the disjecta membra of truth must be gathered from far-flung places, in both a temporal and geographical sense. Elegaically, Arnold locates Aeschylus and Shakespeare in the dim past. He admits as well that criticism must search beyond England for its wisdom. While Carlyle may consider Shakespeare and India as equivalent properties for the British empire, Arnold recognizes, at least in an abstract way, that truth must also be sought in foreign places.
These are recognitions that Bloom largely evades by his insistence that authors and readers are individuals: "The Canon is the true art of memory, the authentic foundation for cultural thinking. Most simply, the Canon is Plato and Shakespeare; it is the image of individual thinking, whether it be Socrates through his own dying, or Hamlet contemplating that undiscovered country" (Bloom 1994, 35). For Bloom, social relativism is undesirable. Opposed to his pantheon of "indispensable Shakespearean critics--"Samuel Johnson, William Hazlitt, perhaps Samuel Taylor Coleridge, certainly A. C. Bradley"--is garden-variety "commentary" that "at best answers the needs of a particular generation in one country or another" (Bloom 1998, 717). For Bloom, writing is either ephemeral or enduring, trivial or transcendent, provincial or universal. For him, Shakespeare is not a plural signifier; there can be no Alternative Shakespeares, Post-Colonial Shakespeares, and so forth. Rather, "Shakespeare is an international possession, transcending nations, languages, and professions. More than the Bible, which competes with the Koran, and with Indian and Chinese religious writing, Shakespeare is unique in the world's culture, not just in the world's theaters" (Bloom 1998, 717).
IV. WHAT'S PAST IS PROLOGUE
Bloom's insistence that Shakespeare belongs to a "world's culture" that has the potential to become universal rather than merely homogenized, when linked to his construction of a critical genealogy extending from Johnson to Bradley, provides a point of entry for conversation with contemporary Shakespearean criticism. What links criticism and literature, the saint and his chroniclers, is their mutual fragmentation. The critic who collects reverently the disjecta membra of St. Shakespeare is, to use one of Bloom's own terms for strong poetry, "belated." His efforts to claim a genealogy for himself therefore involve the experience of fragmentation.
In recent years, we have seen wonderful efforts to write local histories of Shakespearean criticism that document the attitudes of different ages and places toward Shakespeare and describe the cultural uses to which they have put "Shakespeare." Think, for instance, of books ranging from Gary Taylor's Reinventing Shakespeare to Michael Bristol's Shakespeare's America, America's Shakespeare to Ania Loomba and Martin Orkin's Post-Colonial Shakespeares. But it has been some time since we have looked with similar eyes at the high-culture history of literary criticism, the genealogy of authors that Bloom claims for himself. In the last two decades, the graduate course in History of Criticism and Hazard Adams's Critical Theory Since Plato has yielded to the course on Literary Theory and a host of anthologies that range no further back than Eliot's "Tradition and the Individual Talent." Yet as Richard Finkelstein has shown in the case of Disney's appropriations of Shakespeare for children's animated films, the individuals behind what we think of as popular culture are brought up on university fare and see their Shakespeare through the lens not only of Bradley and Coleridge, but also of Eliot and Northrop Frye. Whether we like it or not, the staying power of a critical ideology is much longer in the wider world than it is in academe itself.
We saw, in the 1960s and 70s, an interest in the history of Shakespearean criticism and an effort to provide readers with easy access to primary texts. Consider, for instance, M. M. Badawi's Coleridge: Critic of Shakespeare (1973); Arthur Eastman's A Short History of Shakespearean Criticism (1968); R. D. Stock's Samuel Johnson and Neoclassical Dramatic Theory: The Intellectual Context of the "Preface to Shakespeare" (1973); S. Viswanathan's The Shakespeare Play as Poem (1980); and primary sources such as Terence Hawkes's Coleridge's Writings on Shakespeare (1959); and R. A. Foakes's Coleridge on Shakespeare: The Text of the Lectures of 1811-1812 (1971); and even Daniel Fineman's edition of Maurice Morgann's essay on Falstaff (Morgann 1972). This history might now be reconsidered as a history of fragmentation. As Martin Orkin (1998) discusses in his account of South African Shakespeare, "Ania Loomba has argued that no hybridity can be understood by reading only the colonized culture" (Loomba 1996, cited in Orkin 1998, 200). Hybridity, as Orkin further argues, involves provincializing the text, returning it to Europe (203). A genealogy of Shakespearean criticism as a history of fragmentation might contribute to such a project.
In 1986, Terence Hawkes wrote that Bradleyan ideology is insidious because it functions, "through a system of universal education which has established the study of Shakespeare as its linchpin, as part of the air we breathe" (Hawkes 1986, 31). While this statement stills holds true generally, Bloom's late-career anger, making strange the critical monuments of his own youth, provides the rest of us with an invitation and an opportunity to reconstruct once again the history of Shakespearean criticism. What Bloom's bard may call for is a New History of Ideas to complement the historicist and materialist critique that has been ongoing since the 1980s. The New History of Ideas would, like recent studies of Shakespearean appropriation, be local histories. How does Coleridge figure in the history of Indian Shakespearean criticism as opposed to Canadian criticism? How is the Eliot revered in the American South differ from the Eliot of Harvard? Some of this work has been started by postcolonial accounts of the Bard's cultural function in India, Africa, and elsewhere, scholarship that has been conducted with a far greater degree of self-consciousness than much Anglo-American criticism, which does seem in danger of reverting to the ideological "innocence" of an old-old historicism.
So who is the new Shakespeare? Barbara Hodgdon, in her analysis of Shakespearean legend, describes the lifelike mannequin of Shakespeare sitting in his study, quill pen poised over parchment, that can be seen at the Shakespeare Birthplace: This Shakespeare
sits in a study armchair, eyes cast down to the book he holds in his lap, a pewter tankard beside him on the rush-mat floor covering, a cup and a large leather-bound volume on a nearby joint stool. His desk, tucked into a corner lit by a lattice-paned window and covered with a small turkey carpet or tapestry fragment, holds a writing stand, inkwell, book stand, and vase of flowers; just above it are several shelves stacked with books, a pocket portfolio, and a candlestick. Looking much like an upscale early modern version of today's computer desks, this setting imagines a Shakespeare who is not a theatre man but an author, even an academic. (Hodgdon 1998, 200)
The Shakespeare of Stratford is exactly the Shakespeare envisioned by Bloom. The bard described by Harold Bloom already exists, not only in the Stratford tourist industry, but also in Disney's studios and yes, still in university classrooms. By meeting this figure head on, we may be able to answer Bloom's rather damaging assertions of Shakespeare's faux universality and, with careful articulation of a new History of Ideas, to continue demonstrating that this universal Shakespeare is merely a simulacrum. The New History of Ideas would not banish Shakespeare the gentleman of letters, it would just recognize that he is a man of wax.
Works Cited
Arnold, Matthew. "The Function of Criticism at the Present Time." (2000). In The Norton Anthology of English Literature (M. H. Abrams and Stephen Greenblatt, Eds.). 7th ed. New York: Norton. 1514-28.
Badawi, M. M. (1973). Coleridge: Critic of Shakespeare. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Bloom, Harold. (1998). Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human. New York: Riverhead Books.
---. The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages. (1994). New York: Harcourt Brace.
Eastman, Arthur M. (1968). A Short History of Shakespearean Criticism. New York: Norton, 1968.
Finkelstein, Richard. "Disney Cites Shakespeare: The Limits of Appropriation." (1999). Shakespeare and Appropriation (Christy Desmet and Robert Sawyer, Eds.). London: Routledge.
Foakes, R. A. (ed.). (1971). Coleridge on Shakespeare: The Text of the Lectures of 1811-1812. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia.
Foucault, Michel. (1984). The Foucault Reader (Peter Rabinow, Ed.). New York: Pantheon Books.
Guillory, John. (1993). Cultural Capital. The Problem of Literary Canon Formation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Hawkes, Terence. (1959). Coleridge's Writings on Shakespeare. New York: Capricorn Books.
---. (1986).That Shakespeherian Rag: Essays on a Critical Process. London: Methuen.
Hodgdon, Barbara. (1998). The Shakespeare Trade: Performances & Appropriations. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
Loomba, Ania. (1996). "Shakespeare and Cultural Difference." In Alternative Shakespeares, Vol. 2 (Terence Hawkes, Ed.). London: Routledge. 164-91.
Lootens, Tricia. (1996). Lost Saints: Silence, Gender, and Victorian Literary Canonization. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia.
Morgann, Maurice. (1972). Shakespearean Criticism. Ed. Daniel A. Fineman. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Orkin, Martin. (1998). "Possessing the Book and Peopling the Text." In Post-Colonial Shakespeares (Ania Loomba and Martin Orkin, Eds.). London: Routledge.
Stock, R. D. Samuel Johnson and Neoclassical Dramatic Theory: The Intellectual Context of the "Preface to Shakespeare." (1973). Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.
Viswanathan, S. (1980). The Shakespeare Play as Poem: a Critical Tradition in Perspective. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.