inexhaustible, but this collection at least makes an attempt to define the parameters of the subject.

Size: px

Start display at page:

Download "inexhaustible, but this collection at least makes an attempt to define the parameters of the subject."

Chester Anthony
5 years ago
Views:

1 282 BEN JONSON JOURNAL inexhaustible, but this collection at least makes an attempt to define the parameters of the subject. John Mulryan St. Bonaventure University Harold Bloom, Hamlet: Poem Unlimited. New York: Riverhead Books, pages. The slender Hamlet: Poem Unlimited marks Harold Bloom's return to Shakespearean criticism after a five-year hiatus following the release of his prodigious Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human in The purpose of his present book, Bloom explains, is to provide a "postlude" to that earlier work, specifically its chapter on Hamlet, which Bloom now regards as something of an Ur-Chapter, in which most of what he "thought and felt about Hamlet remained unsaid" because of his "obsessiveness" over the question of literary sources for the play (1-2). Accordingly, Bloom claims that the present book has a "revisionary relationship" to his earlier work on Shakespeare (2), but just how much so is, of course, the question. The book is composed of twenty-five short chapters on the play, and much of the book is devoted to what Bloom calls "meditative surmises," a form of writing that perhaps explains the absence of documentation save line numbers for the texts quoted, as well as the lack of other supporting evidence and the occasional leaps required to follow some of his more unlimited readings of the prince and the playwright. As Hamlet: Poem Unlimited opens, the bardolatrous Bloom passionately avows that "Shakespeare is my model and my mortal god" (2). Characteristically outrageous, this confession is nonetheless a fitting opening for the book, especially since much of it is concerned with important questions about death and transcendence, though Bloom consistently approaches these subjects in his own secular terms: "As a meditation upon human frailty in confrontation with death, [Hamlet] competes only with the world's scriptures. Contrary, doubtless, to Shakespeare's intention, Hamlet has become the center of a secular scripture" (3). Much of the tension that will inform Bloom's boldest meditative surmises on

Book Reviews 283 death and transcendence in Hamlet: Poem Unlimited is hinted at in this sentence indeed, throughout the remainder of its chapters, the book will passionately insist on the Bloomian

2 Book Reviews 283 death and transcendence in Hamlet: Poem Unlimited is hinted at in this sentence indeed, throughout the remainder of its chapters, the book will passionately insist on the Bloomian secularity of Hamlet, while summarily and perhaps anxiously dismissing contrary ways of interpreting the play's complexity, most notably readings that account differently for the play's many "religious" or supernatural references, dimensions, and intimations. The book seems to divide into three parts: chapters 1-10 offer an impressionistic reading of acts 1 1 of the play; chapters 11-20, the heart of the book, discuss the mysterious fifth act in some depth; and chapters offer concluding surmises on Hamlet and its various significances for what Horatio first described as the "yet unknowing world" ( ). The first section gets into full swing with Bloom's defense of his own "Bardolatry" as the proper approach to Hamlet and Shakespearean drama in general: "I think it wise to confront both the play and the prince with awe and wonder, because they know more than we do. I have been willing to call such a stance Bardolatry, which seems to me only another name for authentic response to Shakespeare" (7). As in Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human, Bloom's particular point of departure is his wonder over Shakespearean characterization, in this case that of the "formidably unique" Hamlet, possessed of so "extraordinarily ambivalent a consciousness" (7, 8). Bloom's exploration of Hamlet's character is full of observations alternatively striking and strained. For example, he responds powerfully to D. H. Lawrence's observations on the prince and the play: "We can sympathize with Lawrence's ambivalence: that a 'creeping, unclean thing' should also be 'as sincere as the Holy Spirit' is the essence of Hamlet's view of humankind, and of himself in particular" (9). On the other hand, he expends a good deal of energy and overstatement in distancing Hamlet from his fictional family and most other mortal creatures, Shakespeare perhaps excepted: "Hamlet always has had nothing in common with his father, his mother, and his uncle. He is a kind of changeling nurtured by Yorick, yet fathered by himself, an actor-playwright from the start, though it would not be helpful to identify him with his author... Hamlet, his own Falstaff, is also his own Shakescene, endlessly interested in theater" (9-10). Here one consistent mark of Bloom's reading of Shakespeare is apparent: his

3 284 BEN JONSON JOURNAL radical insistence on the independence of the character under consideration both from other characters in the play (described later as "mindless shadows" in comparison [124]), and from the plot as ordered by the dramatist, who cannot confine or control the character though he attempts to do so (71). Although such insistence provides Bloom with wide interpretive freedom, it also limits the persuasiveness of his strong misreading, at least for those inclined to read the plays with more than Hamlet's intense "genius... for consciousness" in mind (118). Such reservations aside, the first part of the book contains several illuminating sections. Chapter 2 on Horatio develops the intriguing argument that "Horatio is Shakespeare's instrument for suborning the audience even as Claudius manipulates Elsinore" (16). Bloom is likewise strong in his responses to the strangeness of the play in chapter 3; his discussion of why Shakespeare might "cheerfully hazard the dramatic continuity" of the play by including the digression on the Poets' War in act 2 is striking in its awareness of the strange quality of Shakespearean representation, which will only become stranger as the dramatist approaches his last plays: "We are so mastered by Shakespeare (as we should be) that we rarely stop to reflect upon how bizarre Hamlet's story has become. Is it still a drama? Isn't Hamlet himself no more or less ghostly than his father? So powerfully has Hamlet impressed his creator, as well as ourselves, that he is asked to survive as a veritable apocalypse of theatricalities, heaped upon one another" (24). In chapter 6, Bloom also reflects penetratingly on the Player King's important speech ("our thoughts are ours, their ends none of our own") in the play within the play of 3.2: "Whose nature is mirrored here, Hamlet's or humankind's? Do all of us will against our own characters/fates, so that our designs are always thwarted?... Freud thought it was all over before our first birthday; Hamlet seems to give us even less freedom from overdetermination" (48-49). Bloom, however, is not blind to other, less than impressive facets of Hamlet's character. For instance, his analysis of Hamlet's "monstrous" actions toward Ophelia and his rejection of love is illuminating and astute (41-44), as is his reflection on Hamlet's fundamental "murderousness," which is discussed in the interesting "Hamlet Complex" section of chapter 7 and leads Bloom to one of his promised instances of self-revision: "Some critics believe Ham-

4 Book Reviews 285 let when he complains that he is caught up in a play not at all suitable for him. I once believed that, but now I rather doubt that we ought to give credence to Hamlet, because he is his own Iago as well as his own Falstaff" (56). Still, Bloom's faith in Hamlet dies only momentarily, and the second part of the book (chapters 11-20) is devoted to Bloom's reading of act 5, in which he argues that a mysteriously changed Hamlet, "resurrected" (49) and returned to Elsinore from the sea, "becomes the freest artist of himself in all literature" (51), breaking loose into an "unlimitedness" of consciousness beyond even Shakespeare's control (71). How Bloom understands this exaltation of Hamlet's mind is still not entirely clear or complete perhaps in this way his words resemble Hamlet's own final utterances but the stakes remain quite high in his mind, as a perusal of some of the loftier chapter titles in this section suggests: "Let It Be," "Apotheosis and Tragedy," "Hamlet and the High Places," and "Annihilation: Hamlet's Wake." While this is the most engaging and provocative part of the book, it also demonstrates one of Bloom's more notable hostilities, particularly toward readings of the play that take more seriously its "religious" or supernatural dimensions, either as suggesting something of the play's subtler significance or as reflecting the charged religious context in which Shakespeare wrote for the theater both areas under fruitful reconsideration by contemporary Shakespeare criticism, but which Bloom regards as fundamentally "irrelevant" to Hamlet's drama (117). Unfortunately, this is one area in which Bloom's new work offers little revision of Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human and its book-long jangling of authoritative yet unjustified judgments on the subject, such as "Shakespeare seems too wise to believe anything," or "Shakespeare intentionally evades (or even blurs) Christian categories throughout his work... I find nothing in the plays or poems to suggest a consistent supernaturalism in their author" (14, 519). Turning to Hamlet: Poem Unlimited, one likewise encounters sweeping judgments against the critical relevance of "theological fantasy" and "the imagined lands of Catholics, Calvinists, or Lutherans" that are less than persuasively defended (117), but which nevertheless serve to bolster his larger claim throughout this book that Hamlet is "pragmatically nihilist, which does not rule out spiritual yearnings, whether Catholic, Protestant,

5 286 BEN JONSON JOURNAL or hermetist" (119). A good example of Bloom's technique is found in chapter 15, "Let It Be," where he comments on Hamlet's reflection on providence at : Hamlet's New Testament references are personal, and have neither a Calvinist nor a Catholic aura. Clearly, he is audacious enough to adopt the accents of Jesus so as to appropriate them for the passion of his own betrayal (by Laertes) and his own sacrifice, though not to Yahweh alone, which was the stance of Jesus. If there is a precise providence in a sparrow's or a prince's fall, such providence nevertheless excludes Calvin's system. (90) Rash banishment of more commonsensical or contextual approaches to passages like this one seems also required to support Bloom's argument that the pragmatic nihilist Hamlet achieves "apotheosis" and "secular transcendence" in his enigmatic but thrilling death, which the author zealously champions, though again with a certain qualification: Paradoxically, what ought to have been (as T. S. Eliot argued) aesthetic failure became the most absolute aesthetic triumph, by standards the character and the play pragmatically have invented. I have no idea whether Shakespeare intended Hamlet's apotheosis, but more than any other writer, he sets in motion energies that in themselves give the impression of being transcendental... Why are we persuaded that somehow Hamlet fights for us? That apparently infinite fascination of the figure stems from the enormous magnification of consciousness that it embodies, yet also from the refinement of consciousness into a quintessence that plausibly can intimate apotheosis. (97) After pondering a number of passages like this one (e.g., 83, 87-88, 91, 94-95,103, 111, and ), which often cloak their meditative surmises in an air of near-gnostic mystery, one feels that Hamlet and its prince, rather than representing a "third newness" of human consciousness following in the wake of David and Jesus (145), have instead suffered a sea change into something too rich and too strange and too unexplained through the power of Bloom's own critical alchemy.

Book Reviews 287 Hamlet: Poem Unlimited concludes by shifting from its visionary account of the "high places" in act 5 to a short sequence of reflections relating the rough-hewn Hamlet and his

While readers aware of Bloom's earlier work on Shakespeare will find his discussion of Shakespeare's art of character creation, inwardness, and ambivalence familiar, the elder Bloom's depiction of

6 Book Reviews 287 Hamlet: Poem Unlimited concludes by shifting from its visionary account of the "high places" in act 5 to a short sequence of reflections relating the rough-hewn Hamlet and his limitless drama to Shakespeare's development as an artist and to our own sense of ourselves (chapters 21-25). While readers aware of Bloom's earlier work on Shakespeare will find his discussion of Shakespeare's art of character creation, inwardness, and ambivalence familiar, the elder Bloom's depiction of the audience's encounter with Hamlet seems to serve as a fitting, closing image of his book: "Every production that I've seen thins the complexities out, wishing them away. We set limits on the poem unlimited, thus warding off what it is in Hamlet himself we cannot assimilate, an apprehension of mortality a touch too sharp to bear" (135). Despite its many perceptive points and characteristic flashes of great insight, Hamlet: Poem Unlimited ultimately cabins and confines interpretation of the play within Bloom's peculiar limits, which tend to ward off any facets of the play that cannot be assimilated to his own often revealing surmises on Hamlet's "secularized and destructive" consciousness (145). Stephen Smith Hillsdale College Shakespeare's Last Plays: Essays in Literature and Politics. Ed. Stephen W. Smith and Travis Curtright. New York: Lexington Books, xii pages. For the previous few decades, scholars and critics have generated a simply enormous amount of commentary about Shakespeare and his plays. Thousands and thousands of books and essays appear yearly. The proliferation of critical schools and the vast applications of various theories contribute to a seemingly endless stream of published books and essays. The size and scope of this matter preclude any single person from reading all the secondary material, nor would anyone really want to read the entire output. Some people fear that we have arrived at a saturation point and that nothing new of note can be said about Shakespeare and his writings. There may be, in fact, some merit to this claim. Perhaps

Shakespeare s Hamlet An Introduction. d

Shakespeare s Hamlet An Introduction http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=scvc5tappe8&feature=relate d A Brief Introduction to Hamlet Hamlet is a play that has fascinated audiences and readers since it was first