Harold Bloom - "Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human"

Harold Bloom is one of this country's preeminent literary critics he is sterling professor of humanities at Yale University as well as Berg professor of English at New York University he is edited and written the introduction some 400 volumes of literary criticism is also author of over 20 books including such influential works as the anxiety of influence and the Western Canon his new book Shakespeare the invention of the human examines the works of our greatest English playwright it has already been nominated for a National Book Award and I am always pleased to have him here especially this evening welcome back sir thank you how are you I'm breathing come on now if at 60a have much to look forward to I hope so you do it's very kind of you we will hope that you are right I am right you know that we have to talk about you he's been a fierce optimist I am a fierce optimist that's exactly right and you a realistic and knowledgeable pessimist what are you pessimistic essentially I mean you have I mean I'm aware of the struggles of your life well one hopes for self clarification and sometimes one is afraid is not really going to come but all right I want you to do I want you then to take a leap from where we just are where we are now in the conversation about sense of attitude and a sense of of perspective or whether it's character B of mine or yours and leap forward which Shakespeare has taught you about self-examination I think that Shakespeare had the first sense I know of what he actually called the self-same which is the persistence of identity through all kinds of vicissitudes and changes and I think that what is most crucial and important about Shakespeare that we have obfuscated that both in our universities and on our stages in recent years is his intensely vital sense of personality no no author by far no author I know of eastern or western world has ever invented so many vibrant and original personalities give me an example of what you're talking about Falstaff Hamlet well they're YouTube favorites yeah Cleopatra Iago yeah King Lear himself minor figures like apparently minor figures like bar Nadine whom you see so briefly in measure for measure the criminal who refuses to be executed but who is incredibly memorable sometimes in just think of speaks fewer than what is it 350 360 sentences and lines and yet the vividness is astonishing yeah but for you it's an evil vividness well the play I don't I think that Shakespeare was himself personally anti-semitic but the play is a profoundly anti-semitic play yes I there are no redeeming values in Thailand in no they're no they're not there are redeeming values in the play there were no redeeming values and in the character no wash Shakespeare prevents that the the most outrageous thing about the play which I have never seen much commentary upon is that Shakespeare invents the conversion of the enforced conversion which accepts at the end of Act four which is no part of the pound of flesh tradition Shakespeare didn't have to do it and I wonder indeed why he did it because he destroys the dramatic consistency of the characters I think I've remarked somewhere perhaps not in this book agreeing to become a Christian even in preference to death is rather likely a Patra consenting to become a vestal virgin at Rome it is not persuasive yes Shakespeare is punishing himself and punishing but for reasons I don't altogether understand do you find something new at every reading oh yes oh yes oh yes well not in all thirty-nine plays yep 24 or 25 of the 38 or 39 plays are so astonishingly original so endlessly fresh and exuberant but I think you would have to be deaf stupid blind quite dumb not to find something I don't even know each time round critics are saying this is a terrific book you know that and they don't say no follow the question they don't necessarily believe you have to buy your thesis that Shakespeare invented human personality to appreciate and enjoy your analysis and your passionate feeling for him well that is a perhaps kind way of putting it on their part but I still would like to know where our idea of personality came from if it did not come from Shakespeare's characters there's no evidence of our ideas of personality before Shakespeare there are ideas of moral character which are very powerful before Shakespeare there are notions of pathos individuals change because their relation to God or the gods change individuals indeed sick and grow old and die but they do not change because their relation to themselves changes they do not change because they overhear themselves and are startled by what they overhear and on that basis undergo extraordinary vicissitudes of mutability no I thought that that seems to me shockingly original with Shakespeare I don't even think that my thesis is that original it comes ultimately out of dr. Samuel Johnson and William Hazlitt my heroic precursors example we have largely forgotten because we are inundated yes go ahead now go ahead I'm not gonna interrupt oh should finish um I have a question we are inundated with politicized Shakespeare both in the classroom and in on our stages what does that mean politicize speak that those who staged Shakespeare's political and those who teach Shakespeare I will be generous about at once I would say that they are attempting to establish the relevance of Shakespeare but you know charlie to set out to establish the relevance of Shakespeare is a rather hopeless project it's rather like saying I'm going to establish the relevance of my own mother and father you think thereof and not your own mother and father are always going to be irrelevant and shape your choice to make that relevancy because this Shakespeare is our mother and Oh father why do you consider Samuel Johnson hazlit your kind of precursors well because they gauged in literary criticism because Johnson is the first critic to see and to say very powerfully that what is extraordinary about Shakespeare is as Johnson calls it the creation of distinct characters who differ absolutely from one another and from every other literary character or representation and characters who speak differently from every other hazlit because hazlit sees that what matters in the play most in fact that's what he called his splendid book the characters of shakespeare's plays that plot is secondary that action is secondary that ideas or politics of religion are not even secondary that what matters is the exuberant play of fresh personality Shakespeare rode around the turn from the 16th to the 17th century yes I think the last play was about 16 15 when it's somewhere right in there no 16 12 maybe he about 16 and 12 yes he dies about 1616 if I never properly explained Shakespeare the best possible question to ask at the beginning of this book I can say I can't explain him after all these decades of teaching him I think the proper stance towards him is or it is astonishing that it could have happened you can trace any other writer to some source you can talk about if you will societal context you can talk about history but Shakespeare transcends any context that you try to find for him the power of creation in him I I think I can even focus it there's an excess in him there is an overflowing not just of meaning but of being there is a sheer newness which comes flowing out of him for which we have no precedent and in a deep sense he has had no successors in spite of the fact that he's been such an immense influence on all who came afterwards he is Lord he is I suppose the largest single miracle I know of not just in the history of the human arts but in the history of human consciousness I suppose that if you are a religious believer and you know you might want to talk about Moses and Jesus and Mohammed but as a secular figure this is as astonishing a phenomenon as any of the great religious founders have been this is indeed the secular scripture the complete place of Shakespeare or the complete works of Shakespeare I think I remark somewhere in that book and a kind of wonder myself that Hamlet has become the intellectuals Christ and even though in the past I have been much condemned for saying that the Western worship of God is the worship in the end of three literary characters you know the alwah storge right is yahwah the gospel of Mark's original Jesus and Muhammad's Allah I think only Shakespeare competes in his nine or 10 strongest characters with those three great literary characters which of course you know is a is a somewhat blasphemous thing to say but I am a bard Allah chair at one point in the book I only half-jokingly since I am a dinosaur now in academic terms I refer to myself as bloom brontosaurus Barda Latour and I think that's a perfectly good description I I see that been quoted against me by several reviewers but it seems to me a perfectly valid self designation but no III cannot explain Shakespeare I can appreciate your experience I can hope to help others to appreciate him or I can hope to teach others to see that we must not condescend to him but he is always out ahead of us that he always knows more than we do but he has always more than anticipated our latest developments you can push any idea you want to into Shakespeare and it will not necessarily light up the play but the play will light up the idea and say the the power of mind the power of consciousness the power of sheer stuff of being in him is beyond parallel and if it's beyond parallel then in some sense it's beyond explanation I think my largest single quarrel aside from people who politicize Shakespeare or who you know put on a production of The Tempest in which suddenly both Caliban and Aria are rebellious black slaves you know contending just isn't so Ariel is an angel and it's not rebellious has a strange love for Prospero even though it is difficult for Ariel and Caliban is certainly no black slave he is only half human he has a Berber witch mother and some sort of sea beast or sea devil for a father but I think it's far worse the historicize Shakespeare Ralph Waldo Emerson whom I also worship as I worship hazlit and dr. Johnson chose to begin his first set of essays with an essay called history which every professional historian I've known including the great Vann Woodward has always denounced to me it opens with a great sentence there is no history only biography but the problem is no Shakespeare we haven't really got the biography we've got a few external facts I remark somewhere in the book that what do we know about Shakespeare he seems to have been very lustful towards both men and women you can tell from the place that he greatly prefer drinking to eating and that he hated lawyers but you know I find extraordinary that the the modernity but that is what I mean by saying it's beyond relevance to the beyond I mean what we do these days without so-called post modernity which is going to post millennial just disappear and be vacuous and out of fashion he is so far ahead of the postmodern or whatever the post-postmodern will be um it's like whitman at the end of song of myself saying i stop somewhere waiting for you you know catch up with me if you can Shakespeare even more so always seems to be saying implicitly I stop somewhere waiting for you it's your business to somehow catch up to me you know this is not a good time Charlie no matter what side one is on politically it's quite awful what has happened I think to the teaching of literature in the universities I mean stop me on this because I've become permanently furious on this subject but um they don't teach literature anymore for the most part they teach ideology of one sort or another and most productions that I see if Shakespeare I idea logically / considered Ian McKellen is a great actor but I want to see him play Richard the third I don't want to see him play oswald mosley as I did at the book that Academy of Music where a brilliant director what was it mr. Eyre I think of the Old Vic Virginia yeah I was so so so concerned still to fight the battle against the Lady Astor in the Cliveden said that it was definitely sauce walled nicely yeah what can one do high high concept directors are I think now the courser Shakespearean production who's the greatest Shakespearean actor of the 20th century Sir Rafe Richardson overwhelmingly that book exists because when I was fifteen I saw here in New York City the Old Vic with Rafe Richardson playing Falstaff in part one of Henry the fourth in the matinee and then that same evening Falstaff in part two with Olivier playing Hotspur in the afternoon and marvelously just as shallow in the evening Richardson is much the finest actor that I have ever seen Shakespearean actor what's the British you know they're very strange the English or the British they don't produce poets anymore though they don't like my saying that they've got one poet at the moment Geoffrey Hill and he lives in Boston they've got one novelist and that's Iris Murdoch and she's got Alzheimer's the one who come after her are not very impressive um they don't really have composes anymore but my heavens do they have actors every time I look up there are a dozen new she experienced actors and actresses who really can do astonishing things and I don't know why that is I don't understand I mean I is their tradition so different I think their tradition is much more comprehensive than ours is and there's much more continuity there we have some good Shakespearean actors but we don't have this plethora this endless stream and our good actors more likely more often to leave the stage yes yes whereas there's return to the stage did they dead that umbilical cord is always there it always brings them back whereas I always do not necessarily come back to Shakespeare could have been writing about not just his time but any time oh I think he took great care to be writing about all time and it's very it's very difficult to know even in the histories whether you really are in the time that he is supposedly talking about in the end it's more about though his true genius is about not plot but character he was not terribly interested in plot he didn't like to devise plots he stole them wherever and whenever he could you know with both hands when he hasn't got when he hasn't got a source as in The Tempest you've got a plot let's play nothing happens yeah no he was not he was not terribly interested in action he was no Aristotelian he was immensely fascinated by men and by women and I think he taught us more I mean that truly is the invention of the human I mean where else do you learn that the ultimate difference between men and women is an on the hall women are compared to marry down not because of social convention not because of social constriction but simply because for the most part the best among them are better than the best among us that's hardly a feminist remark on my part feminist critics and I do not get along which is notorious but Shakespeare is fiercely perceptive I think in the inadequacy of men as compared to women he somehow understood that it takes that a woman could be at 14 or 15 emotionally and spiritually and in terms of generosity fully mature and that it took men 60 or 70 years and then all they were really good for was to die we still don't know knowing so little about Shakespeare we do not know why he was so obsessed and fascinated and wise about in herself no we don't know we don't know the curiosity we don't know though we don't know the elect we don't know we don't know that there's such a gap between his apparent origins and what he is able to do that I don't think we were ever we will ever solve that there has to have been a great deal of personal suffering there is one son Hamlet died when he was still quite a young boy and there seems to have been a great deal of erotic suffering erotic suffered great deal of erotic suffering it's on it was erotic suffering meaning he was heartbroken I think the sonnet seemed to show that he felt profoundly betrayed both by a man and by a woman both of whom he had loved and I think that gets into the players also this book you go through 35 you begin with these two quotes one from Nietzsche them that one the one from Nietzsche fascinates me I've been much condemned for it because it's my own translation but I think I've gotten to write and I got it from one of my mentors the late great great Kenneth Burke who always left to quote that to me and said Harold I hand it to you use it and I have used it that for which we can find words is something already dead in our hearts there's always a kind of contempt in the act of speaking that's pure Hamlet and it's profoundly unsettling it means that if somebody says that they love you you can't believe them because they're saying something which is already dead in their hearts and I just opposed it with astonishing lines at the end of the player King's Speech was undoubtedly written by Hamlet himself when he converts the murder of Gonzago into the most drop but orderly to end where I begun our wills and fates do so contrary run that our device is all overthrown all thoughts are ours their ends none of our own I guess it's a kind of despairing juxtaposition but I think Shakespeare did despair I think I think the burden of his work if you follow it shows him moving into a time of great rancidity of spirits and Troilus and Cressida and measure for measure and ending in the two noble kinsmen in the parts of the play that he wrote with a real revulsion from human sexuality and I think I think that transcends dramatic representation I think I think there's a Creed occur okay this book goes from the early comedies a comedy of errors Taming of the Shrew to gentlemen of verona through the first histories into the six King John Richard the third The Apprentice tragedies including Caesar Lucy to the high comedies including them Midsummer Night's Dream The Merchant of Venice much ado about nothing.the major history is Richard the second Henry the fourth Merry Wives of Windsor - the problem plays all's well that ends well the great tragedies Hamlet Othello Lear Macbeth Antony Cleopatra through the tragic epilogue the late romances and the romances that was Edward Dowden an Irish critic friend of the ADEs family in the late Victorian period they're not romances they're their tragic comedies of a very peculiar kind but to call them romances is to make them more supernatural than they really are do you feel that this was the book that you had to write and this is somehow your makes me sad I will not write anything like this again quite aside from the fact that an old fellow 6860 carried away with a bow I know I know I know but you are perpetually young you are the Fountain of Youth I am NOT no I I was a long time writing this I wrote other things in between I'm writing a book now called how to read and why it should be a short book and I hope a pungent and useful one this tries to be useful you know this is not addressed to academics God knows I don't want one of them to read it I see a couple of them have reviewed it I wish they hadn't it is for what Johnson and Virginia Woolf called common readers and common plate goers it aspires to be helpful I mean aside from what the argument of it is or is not and you didn't even have to read it you know in Charo I have allowed some incremental repetitions because I want people to be able to read a chapter before they go see a particular play or read a particular play and then read a chapter and see if it's somewhat helpful as I hope it is but it makes me sad now that it's out of a yes because I think it's my book I not only won't do better but I think the book is better than us which makes me sad partly because it's dr. Johnson and hasn't from whom I have borrowed so deliberately thank you for coming bless you thank you for having me Charlie Shakespeare the invention of the human Harold Bloom thank you thank you for joining us see you next time

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Published: Fri Nov 22 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/CarnivalCarnivore]

So happy you posted this! I have been binge watching lectures by Bloom since last night. I ordered two of his books. He reminds me of Christopher Hitchens in his ability to string together long sentences while remaining perfectly grammatical. I hope somebody filmed his classes at Yale.