Shakespeare: the Invention of the Human, By Harold Bloom, Fourth Estate, 745 pp, £25 in UK
Harold Bloom now claims that Shakespeare invented the human personality as we know it today. The playwright's conception of the rich inner life of personalities like Hamlet or Falstaff was without precedent. Other artists merely reported the doings of static characters, he insists, but Shakespeare went beyond mere representation, designing entirely new versions of the person in the process of transformation.
The audacity of such claims is staggering, and open to question. Professor Bloom is, after all, advancing the thesis rather late in a career which has won golden opinions for such elegant books as Yeats (1970) and The Anxiety of Influence (1973). Those were studies of the ways in which artists wrestle with the legacy of predecessors in a sort of "family romance". Their readers might have been forgiven for viewing Sigmund Freud rather than Shakespeare as the real theoretical source for Bloom's ideas of personality-in-action.
Freud himself had the humility of true genius. Although he claimed to have unleashed the lower depths in man, he added that what he had to say was really a codification of what had been already suggested, in a more artistic language, by poets. Shakespeare was undoubtedly a major source in many of Freud's best essays and in the thinking of modern psychologists, but a source of ultimately less significance than the dramatists of classical Greece. Phrases like "Oedipus complex" or "Electra Complex" are proof enough of that .
So why does Harold Bloom give one jobbing actor and playwright so much credit for patenting a new notion of "the human"? Shakespeare's direct contemporaries were not so generous, rating Ben Jonson (whose characters were in the mechanical "humours" tradition) as a superior artist and intellect. It was only in the 18th century that Bardolatry took hold, and it did so on the Continent before England. "He was made in Germany," quipped Joyce's Stephen Dedalus, "as the champion french-polisher of Italian scandals."
No western author equals Shakespeare in intellect, says Bloom, who argues that he devised a way to show changes in the human state, brought about by willpower or by moral flaws. But, again, what about the reversal - and - recognition scenes of Greek tragedy? Bloom suggests that it is "personality" rather than "character" which is at issue here - personality in the modern sense of the word.
I wonder. Madonna (in her public persona) is rightly called a personality, whereas someone like Nelson Mandela has character. Shakespeare would have been fascinated by both, but I think I know which of them he would have made the centre of a play.
Bloom writes unashamedly out of a 19th-century critical tradition in which the emphasis was on the central person in the play - the enigma of Hamlet, the subversive energy of Falstaff, and so on. That tradition still influences much school study and Bloom hopes that, no matter what tinkering is done with syllabi, Shakespeare at least will survive.
Few would quarrel with that. But the deeper agenda here is that which informed Bloom's recent study of The Western Canon (1994): an attack on those radical critics who yoke a political stance on to a piece of Renaissance social history in order to contrive a partial, polemical reading of a play. Stephen Greenblatt is probably the main target of these "invisible bullets". Bloom prefers to stress Shakespeare's "universalism" (which in practice is merely western, since the dramatist's knowledge of eastern lore was even more restricted than Bloom's) yet he insists that we should not try to "shape Shakespeare by our own cultural politics", e.g. western Christianity. This needs some unpacking.
So do Bloom's ideas on personality. Hamlet "ceases to represent himself and he becomes something other than a single self . . . a universal figure." This sounds plausible, in the sense that Hamlet outgrows the play in which he appears to become a cultural icon of the agonised intellectual: but his real tragedy is that he is never allowed to represent himself at all. His admirers, Horatio and Ophelia, lament that he can never become his true self, because of the injunction to simplify his being in a crude revenger's plot.
Hamlet is indeed modern, but a modern who can play every part except his own. He can imitate Osric, coach the players, teach the Queen to assume virtues she doesn't have, parody Rosencrantz and Guildenstern - but he remains only a potential, "likely, had he been put on, to have proved most royally".
In his obsession with the characters, Bloom sometimes seems to forget what modern criticism has taught: that the plays are also poems with their own iterative images. What is valuable in his book is his humble, healthy insistence that Shakespeare's plays remain mysterious and that all readings are partial . . . not just Stephen Greenblatt's. And that raises a useful question: why do we still expect people, whether in plays or on the street, to posess and project believably coherent identities ? That expectation may in time be revealed as a strange affectation of the creators of "the western canon".
If you can forget the exorbitant central thesis, Bloom has much wisdom to offer in passing. Productions of A Midsummer Night's Dream are, he contends, generally brutal disasters. The portrait of Shylock in The Merchant of Venice really is anti-semitic. The best Falstaffs never condescend to the character. The really memorable dramatis personae stay in the mind and imagination because they are artists with words.
It is, however, foolish to recruit Shakespeare for campaigns to assert the superior status of "elite" western culture over any other expressive forms. For one thing, much of the playwright's energies derive from folk rituals and the popular vernacular. For another, plays such as Othello and the Tem- pest, in embodying the glory of European culture, also cannily hint at its limits.
Declan Kiberd teaches in the English Department at UCD.