by Harold Bloom
Herbert Marks is again our best guide when he catches the superb irony that it is life’s “vanity” that makes it precious. I was his teacher many years ago, and we became lifelong friends. I recall telling a Shakespeare discussion group in which he participated that my hero Falstaff, who is endlessly accused of “vanity” by Prince Hal, is, rather, the apotheosis of this hevel that is the mere breath of our lives.
I am now older even than Sir John Falstaff and chant to myself many exhausted mornings the wonderful opening verses of chapter 12:
Remember now thy Creator in the days of thy youth, while the evil days come not, nor the years draw nigh, when thou shalt say, I have no pleasure in them;
While the sun, or the light, or the moon, or the stars, be not darkened, nor the clouds return after the rain:
In the day when the keepers of the house shall tremble, and the strong men shall bow themselves, and the grinders cease because they are few, and those that look out of the windows be darkened,
And the doors shall be shut in the streets, when the sound of the grinding is low, and he shall rise up at the voice of the bird, and all the daughters of musick shall be brought low;
Also when they shall be afraid of that which is high, and fears shall be in the way, and the almond tree shall flourish, and the grasshopper shall be a burden, and desire shall fail: because man goeth to his long home, and the mourners go about the streets:
Or ever the silver cord be loosed, or the golden bowl be broken, or the pitcher be broken at the fountain, or the wheel broken at the cistern.
Then shall the dust return to the earth as it was: and the spirit shall return unto God who gave it.
Vanity of vanities, saith the preacher; all is vanity.
Geneva Bible, Ecclesiastes 12:1–8
This is, at my age, hurtful yet sublime. There is a tremor in my fingers, my legs tend to hint at giving out, my teeth diminish, incipient macular degeneration dims my eyes, deafness increases, birdsong is scarcely heard, every height augments my apprehension of falling, and even moving about on a walker encounters fears in the way. In Jerusalem, as I well remember, spring commences with the almond tree flowering, but the resurrection of the grass no longer is answered by desire, because I mourn for my vanishing generation.
Some exegetes compare Koheleth’s sense of emptiness to the “void” of Buddhism, since it is a remarkably full emptiness. The Rabbis attempted to tame Koheleth by reading his despair as an invitation to happiness. Chapter 12:9–14 is their debasement of a great work, for they back away from his ironic wisdom and instead arrive at the lame “Let us hear the conclusion of the whole matter: Fear God, and keep his commandments: for this is the whole duty of man.” I find that unacceptable, though I am moved by the verse just prior: “of making many books there is no end; and much study is a weariness of the flesh.”
The blessing given to me by Koheleth reverberates before the silence that impends in these, my final years. Falstaff’s outcry, “Give me life!,” is the Shakespearean response to the ironies of our diminishing existence. A kind of laughter akin to Falstaff’s emerges from the text of Koheleth. Without Falstaff I would be much poorer, and without the literary power of the anonymous scribe who gathered our rich vanities in his brief book I would know even less than I do.
[ Part Two ]
SELF-OTHERSEEING
AND THE
SHAKESPEAREAN SUBLIME
The Concept of Self-Otherseeing and the Arch-Jew Shylock
IT IS NOT EVERY DAY that the world shapes itself into a poem, according to Wallace Stevens. When John Stuart Mill said that poetry was not so much heard as overheard, he showed remarkable insight. The genealogy of self-overhearing was not Mill’s concern, but I am a Nietzschean and not a utilitarian. Origins fascinate and trouble me. Nietzsche thought that the memorable was an affair of pain rather than pleasure. The prophet of Zarathustra had little in common with Wittgenstein, and yet both stemmed from Schopenhauer. It is in the spirit of The World as Will and Representation that Wittgenstein gave us the apothegm “Love, unlike pain, is put to the test. One does not say: ‘That was not a true pain because it passed away so quickly.’ ”
Every one of us experiences, perhaps infrequently, the surprise of suddenly overhearing himself so that it seems as though someone else had done the talking. There are a few such moments in Montaigne, and yet Shakespeare probably did not read him before 1603 at the earliest. However odd it sounds to credit a particular writer with the invention of self-overhearing, at least the representation of such a moment does not commence before the advent of the Bastard Faulconbridge in King John. With the frightening eruption of Shylock, whose great speeches arise from his shock at his own audacity, something radically new enters European tradition.
Except for the gallant Bastard, son of King Richard Lionheart and the outspoken hero of the otherwise rather drab King John, the masters of self-overhearing tend to be hero-villains at best, if not monsters of depravity. Shakespeare’s grand negations are the ones who stage incessant dialogues with themselves: Hamlet, Iago, Edmund, Macbeth, and Leontes. To term Hamlet a hero-villain is to enter an area of grave dispute, but what else can be said concerning someone who is responsible for eight deaths, his own included?
I do not know whether Shakespearean self-overhearing necessarily creates a poetics of negativity. In King Lear, the hero-villain, the brilliant Edmund, is a fountain of self-overhearing, whereas the monsters Goneril, Regan, Cornwall, and Oswald cannot hear anyone, themselves included. Edgar, Edmund’s victim and finally his nemesis, is even more a study in change founded upon self-overhearing. The fathers, Lear and Gloucester, who share Edgar’s love, are incapable of self-overhearing, a lack that plays a considerable role in their catastrophes. With Cordelia and the Fool a kind of purity enters the process of change.
It is not difficult to comprehend the link between the startling experience of hearing ourselves, as though someone else was speaking, and the will to change. Much subtler is the connection between our experiencing something that seems to be happening to someone else and the actual changes that take place in drama. I cite my own recent memories here, because they are likely to be shared by many of my readers. Some months ago, I fell against a wall of my house and fractured a rib. I was unable to rise until our friendly neighborhood firemen were summoned, after which I departed by ambulance for the Emergency Room at Yale New Haven Hospital. As I lay helplessly on the floor in pain, waiting for assistance, there rose in me the strong sense that this had nothing to do with me but was happening to someone else. Only a few months later, I fell against the front door when I walked over to it with a cane, in search of the morning newspaper. Again I went down, this time with a lesser pain, as I dislocated the middle finger of the hand I relied upon to write. With chagrin, I had to wait for the same firemen again to hoist me up and get me off to the Emergency Room. I recall the repetition of an acute phantasmagoria that this was not happening to me but to some other person.
It is, I think, a common human defense to be convinced that someone else suffers, no matter how grave our own pain seems. It need not be an injury: something close to this vastation can attend our exposure when we are found out and caught in an untruth or in an act unworthy of us. The humiliation seems somehow to belong to someone else even as we suffer it. I think that this syndrome is a function of what in Shakespeare I now call self-otherseeing. It has to do with our impulse to stage our own suffering and our crises. By self-otherseeing, whether in Shakespeare or in life, I mean the double consciousness of observing our own actions and sufferings as though they belonged to others and not to ourselves, while being aware we possess them. The consequence is a strangeness that makes us shake our heads and rub our eyes in perplexity.
Shakespeare’s leading attribute is his strangeness, since we cannot easily accommodate a cognitive power that incessantly gifts us with a capacious strangeness of meaning. Even
where he may seem most direct, Shakespeare is elliptical and uncanny. I take as instance the moment in The Merchant of Venice when the good Christian merchant Antonio (a part I surmise was played by Shakespeare himself) suggests that Shylock’s punishment must include his enforced conversion to the religion of mercy, so well exemplified by the kicks, curses, and spitting manifested by Antonio toward Shylock earlier in the play:
PORTIA What mercy can you render him Antonio?
GRATIANO A halter gratis, nothing else for Godsake!
ANTONIO So please my lord the duke, and all the court,
To quit the fine for one half of his goods,
I am content: so he will let me have
The other half in use, to render it
Upon his death unto the gentlemen
That lately stole his daughter.
Two things provided more, that for this favour
He presently become a Christian:
The other, that he do record a gift
(Here in the court) of all he dies possess’d
Unto his son Lorenzo and his daughter.
THE DUKE OF VENICE He shall do this, or else I do recant
The pardon that I late pronounced here.
PORTIA Art thou contented Jew? what dost thou say?
SHYLOCK I am content.
PORTIAClerk, draw a deed of gift.
SHYLOCK I pray you give me leave to go from hence,
I am not well,—send the deed after me,
And I will sign it.
“Presently” in Shakespeare means “immediately.” Kenneth Gross in his Shylock Is Shakespeare (2006) reminds us that Shakespeare himself added the forced conversion to the old pound-of-flesh story. I always ask my students why this happened, but I’ve received no cogent responses. They are hardly to be blamed, since The Merchant of Venice scarcely requires this added complexity. Gross usefully remarks that this Shakespearean intervention is so blunt that we find difficulty in speaking about it. That may be why Shylock’s “I am content” is so empty of affect.
I suggest that Shakespeare punishes both himself and the audience as much as he inflicts this outrage upon Shylock. We want to know why but perhaps never will. I cite Antonio’s diabolic suggestion while acknowledging that he might see his motivation as benign. The otherseeing here is entirely Shylock’s; his amazing “I am content” and “I am not well” give the strong impression that something in him sees this as happening to someone else.
Shakespeare removes Shylock from the remainder of the play. We are left with the sense that what we have just heard and seen can be no part of an ongoing Shylock. It is as though he himself can no longer hear or see. Since Shakespeare has portrayed him as a murderous paranoid, the issue is scarcely one of our sympathizing with this figure who has become the Arch-Jew of Western literary tradition. In this context, I wish only to note that Shylock’s inability to react is a highly deliberate instance of Shakespearean otherseeing. I turn to another example, the threshold to Antony’s botched suicide in Antony and Cleopatra:
ANTONY Eros, thou yet behold’st me?
EROSAy, noble lord.
ANTONY Sometime we see a cloud that’s dragonish,
A vapour sometime like a bear or lion,
A towered citadel, a pendent rock,
A forked mountain, or blue promontory
With trees upon’t that nod unto the world
And mock our eyes with air. Thou hast seen these signs?
They are black vesper’s pageants.
EROSAy, my lord.
ANTONY That which is now a horse, even with a thought
The rack dislimns and makes it indistinct
As water is in water.
EROSIt does, my lord.
ANTONY My good knave Eros, now thy captain is
Even such a body. Here I am Antony,
Yet cannot hold this visible shape, my knave.
I made these wars for Egypt, and the Queen—
Whose heart I thought I had, for she had mine,
Which, whilst it was mine, had annexed unto’t
A million more, now lost—she, Eros, has
Packed cards with Caesar, and false-played my glory
Unto an enemy’s triumph.
Nay, weep not, gentle Eros. There is left us
Ourselves to end ourselves.
This marvelous passage begins with the swordsman Antony sounding almost like the intellectual Hamlet. This one time only in the vast pageant of Antony and Cleopatra, Antony experiences a self-otherseeing that places in doubt his own reality. He cannot find himself in what he sees, whether in the clouds or in his own betrayed and defeated sense of being. Shakespearean woe and wonder could hardly be more awesomely displayed. A great captain of action is reduced to a reflective mode he cannot recognize or sustain. The bewildered responses of Eros stand in for our own primary reaction as readers and auditors.
What we hear is anything but a self-staging for the inward show of Shakespearean tragedy. Antony will recover something of his greatness before his actual death, but here he is at the nadir of his consciousness of being. At no time capable of self-overhearing, this Roman hero has self-otherseeing thrust upon him.
Hamlet, Lear, and Iago stage their burgeoning selves through self-otherseeing. Long preceding Rimbaud, they show that the self is always an other. Presence for them is governed by the will, desire for the face they had before the world was made.
Luther (whom Shakespeare may never have read) is a monster in his absolute love for Yahweh, who to me is a scary literary character, the Real Presence literalized. Nothing could be less like Shakespeare, who is very wary of casting his major protagonists as being absolute, whether for death or the death of love.
The reader initially may find my invented term, self-otherseeing, a touch strange, but I will show its usefulness in confronting the Shakespearean sublime, which is an art of apotheosis, particularly in Hamlet and Lear. There is a potential richness in the idea of self-otherseeing that answers Shakespeare’s extraordinary capaciousness. The other that his personae see can be something estranged in themselves, the daemon that is their own genius. Even more, it refers to their sense of the reality of other selves, without which they are in danger of falling into the abyss of solipsism. Hamlet and Lear do fall, outward and downward, into that abyss, and never quite clamber up again.
The Bastard Faulconbridge
THERE ARE four aspects to self-otherseeing:
To see one’s own other selves
To see (by glimpses) the shattering reality of others and of otherness
To see nothing that is not there and the nothing that is
To see everything that could be there and the plenitude that already is
The first figure in Shakespeare’s vast panoply of vital individuals is the Bastard Faulconbridge in the early history, The Life and Death of King John. I once thought it had been revised as late as 1595 but believe now he wrote all of it no later than 1590. There are elements in the Bastard that Shakespeare will develop into aspects of Falstaff and of Hamlet. Indeed, he is the first instance of what I have termed the Shakespearean Invention of the Human.
Take him out of King John and the play scarcely would be readable or worth staging. Everyone else in it chants a kind of Marlovian, fustian rhetoric, but the Bastard possesses a language and a wit entirely his own. Interestingly, he is entirely Shakespeare’s creation; the chronicles barely mention such a person.
Like Falstaff, he has cast aside all false reverence and is addicted to telling his own truth. And, again preluding Sir John, he declines to have concepts not his own thrust upon him. As the natural son of King Richard Lionheart, once he is acknowledged by his uncle King John and his grandmother Elinor, he is freed to b
e a warrior who avenges his father while surpassing him in prowess and in eloquence. I follow Harold Goddard by finding the Bastard to be Shakespeare’s first implicit spokesman:
And not alone in habit and device,
Exterior form, outward accoutrement,
But from the inward motion to deliver
Sweet, sweet, sweet poison for the age’s tooth:
Which, though I will not practise to deceive,
Yet, to avoid deceit, I mean to learn;
For it shall strew the footsteps of my rising.
Is it extravagant to hear in this the voice of a twenty-something-year-old poet-dramatist of rapidly developing genius who suddenly beholds something of his true relationship both to his own time and to ages to come?
How are we to interpret “poison” here? Ostensibly, it might mean “flattery,” but the Bastard and his creator interpret it as “truth.” We can characterize Shakespeare’s deepest art as “the inward motion” and find one of his earliest instances in the Bastard’s meditation upon “commodity,” the gain of all self-interest:
With that same purpose-changer, that sly divel,
That broker, that still breaks the pate of faith,
That daily break-vow, he that wins of all,
Of kings, of beggars, old men, young men, maids,
Who, having no external thing to lose
But the word ‘maid’, cheats the poor maid of that,
That smooth-fac’d gentleman, tickling commodity.
Commodity, the bias of the world,
The world, who of itself is peised well,
Made to run even upon even ground,
Till this advantage, this vile drawing bias,
This sway of motion, this commodity,
Makes it take head from all indifferency,
From all direction, purpose, course, intent: