The Shakespeare Wars

by Ron Rosenbaum

  “Yes,” she said (thank god). Actually, connective voice might be just as appropriate as “collective voice.” By the end of such exercises the acting company and its language becomes as much an organic whole as the play itself, however divided into parts it is. So that when each individual actor is separate on stage from the others they’re still connected, they’re still somehow on the wavelength of the collective voice. They’re one organism, the organism of the language, speaking through separate organs of speech.

  I was getting pretty excited thinking that I’d caught on to something important. I was still trying to be analytical, but felt that here was some essential element of what made Brook’s Dream so stirring to me so long ago—the endlessly echoing reverberation of voice within voice within voice deepening ad infinitum. Deepening into bottomlessness. Here was the vibratory subatomic physics of the Dream that changed my life.

  “The result,” I ventured, “is that the echoes of all the previous iterations of the sound are still echoing, vibrating within each of their voices as they speak?”

  “That’s right,” Cic Berry said.

  I’m still not sure I completely understand Peter Brook’s “secret play.” It’s a mystery I feel I’ve circled around but have not quite grasped. But one can’t argue with the achievement, and even if it’s something numinous he chooses to attribute his experience to, it has that importance.

  Still, “The best in this kind”—the best attempts at explication of Peter Brook’s secret play—“are but shadows.” I think Cic Berry may be offering us a glimpse into at least one secret play, or one play of vibratory phenomena, that underlies the words but is made manifest in subtle and even subliminal ways in Brook’s best work.

  * Brooklyn Academy of Music.

  * On the British version of The Weakest Link quiz show, a British actor was disqualified because he insisted on answering a question with “the Scottish play” instead of “Macbeth.”

  * The Riverside text, which I have chiefly relied upon, uses the Quarto’s “sallied flesh” as opposed to the Folio’s “solid flesh” and the conjectural “sullied flesh.”

  Chapter Twelve

  “You Can’t Have Him, Harold!”: The Battle over Bloom and Bloom’s Falstaff

  PART 1: LET FALSTAFF BE FALSTAFF!

  The director was working himself up to a frenzy over Harold Bloom and Bloom’s Falstaff; “You can’t have him. You can’t have him, Harold. You can’t contain him. You can’t nail him. You can’t put him in amber. You can’t define him. You can’t reduce him.”

  The director was the well-regarded Jack O’Brien and he was speaking specifically of Bloom’s Santa Claus–like interpretation of Falstaff which he intended to challenge with his Lincoln Center production.

  But he could have been saying that of Bloom and Shakespeare as well. And if he wasn’t, I will: “You can’t have him, Harold!”

  Bloom! Bloom! Bloom! like the beating of a big bass drum one can’t help hearing it, having it drummed into you. Certainly not if you’re writing a book involving Shakespeare.

  “So what do you think of Bloom?”, one will hear approximately one thousand times.

  What do I think of Bloom? How much time do you have? Short answer: I’m deeply conflicted, something I realized when I was witness to a remarkable struggle over Bloom’s Falstaff—over Falstaff, over Bloom—that played itself out on stage, and dramatized my ambivalence. A struggle, well, a love triangle, pitting Bloom against O’Brien in a tug of war over Kevin Kline, who was playing Falstaff.

  Kline’s mentor was Bloom, his director was O’Brien, his Falstaff would be … I’ll get into that, but first a little background, personal and philosophical.

  There’s little doubt that for most Americans, Bloom’s Shakespeare is Shakespeare. (His book Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human was widely derided in the United Kingdom for both good and bad reasons.) But is Bloom’s Shakespeare Shakespeare’s Shakespeare? Is Bloom’s Shakespeare Shakespearean? Is his Falstaff a true or a false-staff?

  Bloom! Such a larger-than-life character in brain, body and intellectual hubris. Deserving the Saul Bellow novel the other Bloom (Allan) got in Ravelstein. My conflicts are not about him, personally; it’s impossible not to feel affection for the larger-than-life Falstaffian character he plays. Impossible not to wonder what relation that character has to the man behind the curtain. Impossible not to wonder if it’s all—for better or worse—an act, a performance, a conceptual con game worthy of the con artist of braggadocio he most admires, Sir John Falstaff.

  Part of me admires Bloom for what—for a long time—was his fairly lonely struggle to assert the existence, the value of “literary value,” even literary greatness during a period in which academic orthodoxy disdained the concept as a baseless illusion, a Trojan horse of the hegemony designed to sneak its authoritarian values into the unsuspecting minds of readers like you and me.

  On the other hand Bloom’s bombastic rhetoric about Shakespeare just rings false to my experience of Shakespeare. Bloom’s Shakespeare is less about the language than about Big Ideas, Big Themes, Big Characters, Big Bigness. His characteristic rhetoric of overstatement, overinflation, the way he seems to want to beat us over the head with his bardolatry, to make us love Shakespeare not because of what Shakespeare writes but because of what Bloom bellows about him. It’s condescending to the reader and—I’d argue—a distortion of Shakespeare.

  Bloom suggests one limit of bottomlessness, that it is possible to love Shakespeare too much, to the point where one’s love crushes the love object to death in its embrace, or blows it up beyond all recognition.

  If Bloom has not reached the bottom of bottomlessness he has in a certain way become Bottom in his dream of union with a divine spirit, inventor of the human, past the wit of man, a veritable God. It’s more than bardolatry, it’s theology.

  Bloom’s incessant repetition of variations on the claim that Shakespeare “invented the human,” however unfounded in any real way, turned out to be a terrific marketing device. His wasn’t just a book about some writer, it was about God. By His One True Prophet. It was bardolatry as self-love, what the scholar Linda Charnes—in her brilliant paper on the Bloom phenomenon—was, I believe, the first to call “Bloomolatry.”

  I can’t resist another quote from Charnes’s essay—which as I’ll explain deserves celebration as a turning point in twenty-first-century Shakespeare studies. This is her way of characterizing Bloom’s overblown, overinflated versions of a character like Falstaff. Bloom removes Falstaff from the fabric of the play, and gives us a cartoonish parade float character, “inflated like the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man in Ghostbusters—stomp[ing] through our towns and cities.”

  Bloom’s Falstaff is Stay-Puft Shakespeare.

  While Bloom has somehow convinced the towns and cities he stomps through that he is Mr. Shakespeare, I wonder how many people who bought the massive Bloom tome got as far as his Falstaff essay. And how many of those who did take it seriously just because Bloom said it.

  How many would defend some of the things that Bloom says about Falstaff:

  “Falstaff is Shakespeare’s wit at its very limits” (his italics). Even as “Hamlet is the farthest reach of Shakespeare’s cognitive acuity” (his italics).

  Note how he says the character, whether Falstaff or Hamlet, represents the limits of Shakespeare’s wit and intuition, rather than the plays in which they appear. The characters have swallowed the plays for Bloom. It seems obvious and unnecessary to say, but the intellect who created Falstaff and Hamlet and everyone else in their plays is both wittier and more intelligent, Bigger, than Falstaff and Hamlet.

  But one doesn’t need to make Falstaff and Hamlet Bigger than they are through this puffery. If Bloom is being deliberately paradoxical the device is just a tiresome synecdoche—part invents whole—just as Shakespeare, presumably a human, becomes “the inventor of the human.” And “not to appreciate [Falstaff] would be to miss the greatest of Shakespearean originalit
ies: the invention of the human.”

  And Shakespeare’s not merely “inventor of the human.” In addition, “Shakespeare essentially invented human personality as we continue to know and value it and Falstaff has priority in this invention.”

  With Shakespeare inventing the “human,” inventing “our feelings,” and Falstaff inventing “human personality,” there’s little left for us to do then, is there? It’s all prefab for us. It’s as determinist and dismissive of individuality as some of the more extreme versions of Theory he deplores. It’s too bad most Americans didn’t have access to the brilliant, witty assessment of Bloom’s book by John Carey, the lead reviewer for the London Sunday Times, formerly a professor of poetry at Oxford, who responded to Bloom’s supernatural puffery (Shakespeare as “inventor of the human,” i.e., God) by writing:

  It is like chatting with an acquaintance and gradually realizing he believes death rays are issuing from his television screen. An obvious response to Bloom’s case is to ask for a single instance of a human faculty that is untraceable before Shakespeare. Mostly, Bloom floats above such tiresome details. But when, towards the end of the book, he briefly descends to specifics, the result is embarrassingly feeble. Our ability to laugh at ourselves, he instances, “owes much to Falstaff.” Not a scrap of historical evidence is produced to substantiate even this and, if Bloom himself is anything to go by, an ability to laugh at oneself is far from being an inevitable result of studying Shakespeare.

  Carey nails the point, punctures the pretension of “the invention of the human” by simply asking for “a single instance of a human faculty that is untraceable before Shakespeare.” Humor? Sadness? Love? Jealousy? Please.

  These may have been untraceable in Bloom before he read Shakespeare (although even that’s hard to believe), but it seems a bit overreaching to generalize from the fact that he had to learn to be human this way to the claim that all of humanity did as well.

  Bloom’s praise for Shakespeare is both shallow and erroneous. His entire “invention of the human” marketing campaign is based on a fallacy: that what makes Shakespeare distinctive, exceptional, Shakespearean is that he was first. That he was the Edison of the emotions, rather than that he may well have given us the most profound expressions of them. Not that he was first but that, judging by his durability so far, he may well be, if not the last, the most lasting.

  It’s a symptom of the insular academic world Bloom inhabits to believe that that which he reads, which may have invented him in some sense, invented us all. In some ways it can be seen as Bloom’s unwitting endorsement of the New Historicist ideology he purports to detest: our culture has been so Shakespeareanized, so infused with Shakespearean concepts and characters that it produces Shakespeareanized humans whether we know it or like it or not. At the extreme Bloom, like the historicists, denies human autonomy, or limits it to a choice of Shakespearean characters and models whose mold we are poured into.

  And Falstaff is a special case, über-human. Falstaff, co-inventor of the human, with Hamlet, apparent sole inventor of “human personality,” must not be considered an ordinary human in the sense of having any flaws. Bloom tells us: “To reject Falstaff[find any fault] is to reject Shakespeare.” He means of course, “to reject my inflated Falstaff is to reject Shakespeare. Worse, to reject me.”

  And in perhaps the most unself-aware remark about those who dare to criticize Falstaff, he tells us: “After a lifetime surrounded by other professors, I question their experiential qualifications to apprehend, let alone judge, the Immortal Falstaff.”

  Spending “a lifetime surrounded by other professors” is precisely what disqualifies Bloom from apprehending, let alone judging, “the Immortal Falstaff.” Spending a lifetime surrounded by other professors means that one’s view of roguery is limited to the antics of the faculty lounge cut-up. It means one simply lacks the “experiential qualifications” to put Falstaff in perspective.

  I don’t want to say I’m more qualified than Bloom to appreciate Falstaff, but having left Bloom’s faculty lounge sherry parties behind, I have to say I think I’ve seen more varieties of roguery—from the charming to the venal and vicious and all combinations thereof—than Bloom could imagine. “Experiential qualifications” that find echoes in Falstaff that the well-insulated Bloom might not be able to detect. That alone may not be an argument for a more complex Falstaff than Bloom’s “Socrates of Eastcheap.” And yet there’s no doubt Bloom’s faculty lounge point of view gives us a one-dimensional (merely) lovable rogue. Shakespeare gave us one with many more dimensions.

  But Bloom insists that to reject his overblown, sacralized, sentimentalized Falstaff (in any way) or to see him as less than a saint or holy man in disguise is to reject Shakespeare. To reject Bloom is to reject Shakespeare. One must accept both. I maintain one has a choice.

  Another instance why: Bloom tells us that “Falstaff … would be fully present to consciousness if only we could summon up a consciousness in ourselves to receive his. It is the comprehensiveness of Falstaff’s consciousness that puts him beyond us … in Falstaff’s way of immanence.”

  Now we’re getting the theology of Bloomolatry. You know immanence, right? In general, the presence of God within, or, in a specifically Christian sense, the Holy Ghost within the world, or within Jesus, or within a single soul who shares communion with Jesus. We must “summon up” a purity of heart to “receive” this spirit the way one receives the body and blood at the Mass.

  Before we get to Bloom’s Trinitarian view of Falstaff (seriously), we need to address an obvious error in logic: How can we know Falstaff outstrips our consciousness if we can’t, by definition, know anything beyond our consciousness? How would we recognize, “receive” it if we can’t know it (unless, possibly, one was Bloom, inventor of “the inventor of the human,” who like a priest receives it on our behalf)?

  This is just careless, lazy sacralizing. Trying to hoist Falstaff and Shakespeare to godhood by the bootstraps of religious rhetoric is unworthy of Bloom, of Shakespeare.

  Occasionally Bloom will say something perceptive if not new (as it has been said of Freud: “What’s true isn’t new, and what’s new isn’t true”). As when Bloom says, “Falstaff represents … the signature of Shakespeare’s originality, of his breakthrough into an art more nearly his own” than the earlier Marlowe-influenced works, or plays that worked Marlowe’s territory. Nothing in Marlowe approaches Falstaff. True! (But not new.)

  But then he will say something that is erudite-sounding nonsense: “Mind in the largest sense, more even than wit, is Falstaff’s greatest power; who can settle which is the more intelligent consciousness, Hamlet’s or Falstaff’s? For all its comprehensiveness, Shakespearean drama is ultimately a theater of mind, and what matters most about Falstaff is his vitalization of the intellect, in direct contrast to Hamlet’s conversion of the mind to the vision of annihilation.”

  A remarkable reductiveness, about Falstaff and Hamlet. And about Shakespeare: “ultimately a theater of mind.” Speak for yourself, Mr. Bloom. A theater of mind, yes, but a theater of body and blood, mind and spirit, sex and death all fused into a pageant that is far more than mind alone.

  So please, don’t tell us Falstaff is only about “vitalization of the intellect,” whatever that means. Or that Hamlet converts “the mind to the vision of annihilation.” That’s annihilation: it annihilates the plentitude of Hamlet, leaving us only simple-minded nihilism.

  This is not worthy praise, exegesis, critical inquiry—this is making repeated grand rhetorical gestures that one doesn’t expect to be examined too closely.

  And there are moments of pure lit-crit negligence as when Bloom, obsessively defending Saint Falstaff from any possible alleged fault, tells us: “Falstaff betrays and harms no one.”

  This is a CliffsNotes-level failure. One of the most famous Falstaff speeches of course is his cruel dismissal of the doomed cripples—the draftees he has corruptly conscripted to die under his “command” in the war—as
of no concern to him. They are worth nothing—“food for powder”—essentially condemned to death for their poverty and unfitness by Falstaff. So he can make a celebrated speech on “honor,” scorning the pretenses of warriors’ “honor.” But to say it’s merely an “antiwar” speech is to rip it from the context in which it’s delivered, from atop a pile of corpses he’s sent to an early grave. It flattens and reduces the Henry IV plays to a single perspective, rather than the multiple perspectives on the complexities of honor that Hotspur and Hal offer.

  Again it ignores both/and ambiguity, Falstaff as a brilliant satirist and skeptic who undermines his own satire with his cold-blooded venality. To do so is to ignore the whole picture Shakespeare gives in favor of Bloom’s flawless, faultless Santa Claus Falstaff.

  No one wants to turn Falstaff into a villain, just recognize a more complex character than Bloom gives us with his insipid “Falstaff betrays and harms no one.”

  No one? What about long-suffering Mistress Quickly, cozened with a marriage proposal? And then there are the Canterbury pilgrims robbed (with no intent to—as Hal did—give the gold back). And of course there is Justice Shallow’s stolen thousand pounds.

  Not that these are mortal sins but they are defining Falstaffian characteristics. At least part of him is an undeniably venal con man, however “immanent.”

  But it’s more than Bloom’s Falstaff being without flaw, being without sin; there’s the Jesus comparison. We’ve already had Falstaff as God, inventor of the human; we’ve had Falstaff as implicitly the Holy Ghost, the immanent Spirit of Shakespeare which the Elect may “receive” into themselves. And here comes the third member of the Holy Falstaff trinity: