Shakespeare

...Bloom here, as everywhere in his work, is a true elitist: Ph.D...

...On the contrary, he insists, there is usually one party that speaks clearly and unambiguously for freedom and one that does not...

...Neither Soviet dissidents nor the leaders of the pro-democracy movements in Eastern Europe thought that way, however...

...William Shakespeare invented all the possibilities for the modern personality, from Hamlet to Falstaff, and all you have to do to discover the truth of that is to read all thirty-seven of his plays...

...Eric Foner's The Story of American Freedom harkens back to that era...

...How could it be...

...Two colossal figures in the Shakespeare canon incarnate and exhaust the promise of "more life": Falstaff and Hamlet...

...Were white women free because they did not have owners who could sell them, or unfree, and thus comparable to slaves, because they were subject to the authority of their husbands...

...If any writer in this century, in English, comes close to the moral stature of Samuel Johnson, we have to say now that it is Harold Bloom...

...Now all this sounds as though Bloom regards literature, and Shakespeare especially, as the only authentic religious text for modern mankind...

...In a world where academic criticism is ever more aridly formalist and/or politically correct, ever less connected to the needs of human readers, this book is exhilaratingly oldfashioned, arguing, as did Matthew Arnold and Cardinal Newman, that we read poetry to save, or find, our lives...

...SO I'm delighted--and bemused-to find that we share so many healthy prejudices about him...

...Bloom means his subtitle literally...

...And invariably Foner identifies the cause of freedom with his own particular view of how the world ought to work...

...In fact, close reading, the careful attention to metaphor, versification, and plot structure has never been his strong point or his major interest...

...My course is "Shakespeare for Non-English Majors," since I really believe the poet is too important to be left in the hands of the technologues of culture...

...For him, Shakespeare does invent us all, at our heights and depths and our in-betweens, and to discover him is to discover who we are...

...I do not, like Bloom, inhabit him...

...What an astonishing claim, especially in the currently politicized academic climate...

...Not really...

...I'd like to introduce him to my favorite living theologian, John Dunne...

...But in doing so, Foner narrows the conception of freedom in ways which will prevent his book from becoming the definitive work it ought to have been...

...In recent decades scholars have stressed the role that previously invisible individuals---most of them women and people of color--have played in our nation's development...

...Mozart...

...The only thing more astonishing than Bloom's claim for the centrality of Shakespeare is that the claim will almost certainly be derided by the apparatchiks currently in charge of departments of English...

...Hamlet, after all, is the only major character in Shakespeare whose first words on stage are an aside--addressed not to anybody in the play, but to the audience, or just to himself...

...Sometimes it does make sense to insist that freedom has to mean something concretely, from which it follows that some people who use its language deny its meaning...

...By organizing his historical survey around the same idea, Foner has produced an impressive challenge to the postmodern suspicion of master narratives...

...And if Falstaff is all immanence, Hamlet, his only conceivable rival in acuity of intelligence, is all transcendence, aware to the point of pain of the world's complexity, and wanting nothing so much as to evade it all for the absoluteness of one's own being...

...I'd quarrel here too---but only against the assumption, not against the brilliance the assumption generates...

...For them, a willingness to confront Soviet power advanced the cause of freedom...

...But Bloom's Shakespeare is not just about "words...

...But, for all our long friendship, Bloom and I have never had a conversation about the Bard...

...I don't know a more eloquent tribute---it's how I always begin my own class in Shakespeare--and I'm sure Bloom would not mind my describing his brilliant book as a long excursus on that splendid observation...

...Now there's not much new about this...

...Have any of our truly valuable critics been anything else...

...or taxi driver, you are in his church if you can open yourself to the poem and find yourself there...

...Virgil, of whom Bloom says nothing, and Saint Augustine and Dante seem to me equally creators of the Western idea of the self...

...But into the midst of this spiritual desert comes Bloom, proclaiming at the top of his voice---alas, like his least favorite prophet, Jeremiah, he seems to know no other register--that literature matters because it helps us save or at least possess our souls, and that no, that's no, literature matters as intensely as Shakespeare's just because Shakespeare, in any human context, is the greatest writer who ever lived...

...Almost as much as its great original, it contains the Blessing: more life...

...By the same logic, those American leftists who Commonweal 2 2 November 6,1998...

...Were wage workers in the nineteenth century free because they were not slaves, as Frederick Douglass once proudly proclaimed, or unfree because they could be considered wage slaves...

...And now at the end (and Bloom knows it's the end: this is in every sense a summary book) he argues that such salvation exists, if anywhere, most splendidly in the works of Shakespeare, the heart of the heart of the Western canon, the man who--he's really serious about this--invented us...

...The Story of American Freedom is at its best when demonstrating how contested a concept freedom really is...

...DEFINING FREEDOM ISN'T EASY Alan Wolfe 0 nce upon a time, surely before the advent of tenure, historians were disposed to write panoramic accounts of an important idea, synthesizing huge amounts of scholarship in a language accessible to nonspecialists...

...None of these questions had easy or automatic answers, and Foner offers his readers a fascinats guide through the appeals made by individuals on all sides of these issues...

...But is it just as obvious, as Foner suggests, that national-security managers abused the language of freedom in justifying the cold war...

...Oddly, however, Foner's insightful elaborations of the complications of freedom in nineteenth-century America turn simplistic when he comes to the twentieth century...

...The closer we get to the present day, the more certain is Foner that freedom is not a contested concept at all...

...Twelfth Night is the better play, but how can you not prefer As You Like It, since it has the infinitely lovable ("Falstaff's niece," according to himself) Rosalind...

...Falstaff is, for Bloom, the very archetype of life in the moment, of consciousness as a perpetual, minute-byminute celebration of itself and all it sees, for all the ill it sees: he identifies himself as primarily Falstaffian, and I think he would say the same for his favorite roodCommonweal 2 | November 6, 1998 ern poet, Wallace Stevens...

...It is if one believes that the cold war was little more than an excuse for American imperialism...

...Freedom, as Foner points out, provided the language by which Southern whites defended slavery, Northern businessmen fought unions, and the national security establishment justified the cold war...

...This, in other words, is not an objective review...

...George Steiner, observing the four-hundredth anniversary of Shakespeare's birth in 1964, wrote that "the very words with which we seek to do him honor are his...

...But that's just my personal delight at encountering this great book...

...For Bloom, the signal gift J and Shakespeare, in their austere originality, bring us is their interpretation of the Old Testament idea of The Blessing, which Bloom identifies, lucidly, as "more life...

...and that's just the point...

...Unwilling to stretch the reach of the concept that much, Foner rightly seeks to narrow the meaning of freedom to those actions---such as the abolition of slavery or the establishment of the New Deal--which enhanced the autonomy and dignity of large numbers of Americans...

...Is Bloom autocratic and eccentric...

...His authentic passion--as with the unapproachable Samuel Johnson and the great critic/sages of the Romantic era-is with the creation of possibilities of human character, the forging of mirrors in which we see ourselves better, literature as "equipment for living," as Kenneth Burke called it...

...No one can finish this book without appreciating the centrality of freedom for the American experience...

...I've been teaching Shakespeare for almost as long as Bloom has...

...Clearly slaveholders abused the language of freedom, just as segregationists distorted the language of rights by daiming them for states rather than people...

...Welcome at any time, his book is especially welcome now...

...Against this absolute love of what poetry really does for us, the idea of the "profession" of literature pales, Commonweal 2 0 November6, 1998 as it should, altogether...

...The right analogy for him is Beethoven, who so exhausts the possibilities of music that there is very little left after him but-Brahms to Wagner to Mahler--belated commentary...

...Bloom has finally achieved what I think he wanted all along...

...Frank McConnell, Commonweal's media critic, teaches English literature at the University of California, Santa Barbara...

...For them, freedom was the idea around which their political struggles were organized...

...But I have to quarrel with this assignment of total originality to the Bard...

...Bloom manages to weave this grand opposition across the whole range of the plays, illuminating all the major characters--Rosalind, the Fool in Lear, Macbeth, Iago, etc.--and making wonderful if idiosyncratic sense out of why we find Shakespeare, somehow, simply indispensable...

...Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human is, simply, the book of a lifetime, the culmination of a career--twenty-two previous books, and countless essays, editions, introductions, etc.----devoted, with an intensity that needs to be called "holy," to understanding literature as the human testament, as, however ambiguously, the means to secular salvation...

...If you believe that literature is a crucial fact of being human, for God's sake read and use this book...

...Anyway, it's significant to me that the other commentators on Shakespeare to whom Bloom refers most often--and again, in defiance of current academic fashion-are Samuel Johnson, G. K. Chesterton, and W.H...

...There's, in fact, a central connection between Shakespeare and Bloom's earlier book, The Book of J, where he writes a superb commentary on "J," or the Yahwist, the earliest narrator of the Hebrew Scriptures...

...He was my teacher and my dissertation advisor at Yale---a role equivalent to that of "Godfather" in Mario Puzo's universe---and has continued to be my friend, adversary, rabbi, and counselor...

...But then I only read, teach, and love Shakespeare...

...Was freedom best guaranteed by property or by government...

...J and Shakespeare, Bloom has often written, are the only two writers who are, for him, absolutely original: that is, without any real precursors...

...Of course Shakespeare is our strong precursor, and of course his massive presence towers over everything since and, scarily, before---him...

...Shakespeare is bound to get bad reviews from the professionals--I have in mind here folks like Gary Taylor and Gerald Graft--because it's a call, and a splendid one, to just that kind of reading the professionals fear and are incapable of, the full engagement of the mind and soul with the book at hand...

...Nothing if not a vitalist, Bloom finds in Shakespeare (and J) a gift of life imagined and consciousness created which makes us--even against our will--richer for reading them...

...And Iago is just too much fun to be true, while Prince Hal (later Henry V) is a Nixonian, cold-as-a-fish monster...

...Harold is fond of describing himself as a Jewish gnostic atheist (shuffle the terms any way you like he does), and that's about right, since it means he's essentially a deeply troubled religious man, which is to say the only kind of religious man the twentieth century can tolerate...

...Auden--all of them, with different and masterly kinkinesses, profoundly religious writers...

...Bloom's thesis is simple and his procedure even simpler...