Canonizing Shakespeare : Canonizing the Critical Self

Dr. Siddhartha Singh

Sr. Lecturer & Head,
Department of English,
M.M.P.G. College, Kalakankar,
Pratapgarh, U.P.

A writer's genius lies in the strength of his works which are

capable of ensuing fresh perspectives and rich
interpretations, irrespective of time and space. Shakespeare
is one of those rare geniuses who compel each generation
to reinterpret his works with fresh perspectives. The
contemporary academic world, which is so intensely
involved in the debate on the process of canon-formation
(of-course I am talking about the western literary canon) has
striven to see Shakespeare in the light of different theories.
Sometimes, some of these theorists demand to open the
canon since they see some politics behind the canon. Such
an offence on the canon, sometime it may be right, aims to
reduce the canonical stature of an author of genius to the
level of either an historian or a propagandist and
Shakespeare is no exception to it.

The present paper shall seek to explore Harold

Bloom's concern of the canon-formation. Bloom is one of the
fiercest canonizers of our time. He has established himself
as great bardolater (i.e. a worshipper of Shakespeare whose
bardolatory gives him strength for a certain kind of self-
canonization.

Harold Bloom, a Yale Professor, emerges in 50s as a

great romantic critic antithetical to the critical hegemony of
 [2]

T.S. Eliot and the New-critics. His critical journey, with the
publication of his first work Shelley's Mythmaking (1959),
begins with the recanonization of the romantic poets. He
later develops his early critical insights into the theory of the
anxiety of influence. This theory is exemplified in his books.
The Anxiety of Influence (1973), Kabbalah and Criticism
(1975), A Map Of Misreading (1975) and Poetry and
Repression (1976). Though these books and the subsequent
works establish him well as a theoretician yet his real fame
comes with the publication of his most famous book The
Western Canon (1994). Alongwith this work his later works
Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human (1998). Genius :
A Mosaic of One Hundred Exemplary Creative Minds (2002),
Where Shall Wisdom be found (2004), and Hamlet : The
Poem Unlimited (2005), constitute him not only as a great
Shakespearean reader but also as an important critic
involved in the contemporary debate on the process of
canon-formation in the Western literary tradition.

The world Canon, which means a "reed" or "rod" of

measurement, has a Christian application, which means
rules of the church regarding the ordering of the Church and
religious life. In literary context "canon" suggests the
principle of selection by which some author or text is
deemed worthier than other texts or authors. A historical
approach, following Foucault 1
shows that literature has
always served political power and that the canon has been a
construct for similar ends. So Foucault would say let the
canon be deconstructed to reveal this power structure and
let the literary values be redefined to serve social goals. This
almost invariably means the goals of feminists and multi-
culturalists also. They argue that the process of canon-
 [3]

formation has expressed the exclusion of women,

homosexuals and non-Europeans. In the context of
Shakespeare, this approach has led these theorists to
reinterpret Shakespeare as a racist, anti-feminist, colonialist,
gay and finally a biased propagandist ideologue. Bloom
lumps together the various critical schools, which derive
inspiration from this approach as the School of Resentment.

Bloom's reading proposes that it is not the secret

service to the ideology, which makes an author like
Shakespeare canonical. Bloom finds that 'originality' and
'strangeness' makes the author canonical and Shakespeare
is the zenith of these parameters. In a way the Bloomian
reading of Shakespeare in itself is a search for the rules of
canon formation. In his attempt to explore and re-establish
the Shakespearean touchstone, Bloom lays following basic
assertions:-

1. Shakespeare is the centre of the canon or more

precisely he is the western canon. Along with it
since he has had the status of a secular Bible, he
is the secular canon 2
.

2. Bloom emerges as a champion against New-

Historicism which aims to read a genius
like Shakespeare as history. Instead Bloom
proposes a Shakespearean reading of history:
" . . . history is more than the history of class
struggle or of social oppression, or of gender
tyranny. "Shakespeare makes history" seems to
me a more useful formula than "history makes
Shakespeare"". 3
 [4]

3. Bloom observes that Shakespeare's greatest

achievement is the creation of uniquely
compelling characters. The uniqueness of his
genius is "in his universality in the persuasive
illusion (is it illusion) that he has peopled a world,
remarkably like what we take to our own, with
men, women and children preternaturally
natural". 4

Shakespeare's characters not only change in the

course of the plays, itself an innovation, but have
the capacity to change themselves through the
power of their inwards and reflexive
consciousness. 5
Bloom goes on to say that
Shakespeare's representation of character has
permanently reformed the "universal human
expectations for the verbal invitation which has
usurped not only our sense of literary character
but our sense of ourselves as characters". 6
Bloom
extends his argument that Shakespeare's
characters "get up and walk out of their plays,
perhaps even against. Shakespeare's own desire,
therefore they are 'free artists of themselves',
thus Shakespeare's power remains beyond
comparison. Following this parameter Bloom sets
Falstaff, Hamlet, Edmund, Cleopetra, Rosalined
and other Shakespearean characters as literary
touchstones.

4. Shakespearean consciousness is bewildering as

he opens his characters to multiple perspectives.
Thus Shakespeare suggests "more context for
explaining us than we are capable of supplying
 [5]

for explaining his characters" 8

. Therefore,
explaining him is an infinite exercise which
exhausts one long befo9re the plays are emptied
out. It is Shakespeare's strength that he is open
for any ideological interpretation but himself is
free of any ideology. To probe deeper into this
matter Bloom devotes an entire book entitled
Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human , in
which he advances his earlier defense of
Shakespeare that Shakespeare's eminence is
"the rock upon which the School of Resentment
must at last founder". 9

5. Bloom is obsessed with the idea that

"Shakespeare has invented us". 10
As most of
Bloomian arguments originate against some prior
argument, this thought too originates against an
argue the Dutch psychiatrist Jan Hendrick Van
Den Berg's The Changing Nature & Man idea that
the inner self in modern sense begins with Martin
Luther. Bloom comments- "As always with
Shakespeare, it is both and neither, and so
perhaps the Lutheran inwardness broadly
affected the Shakespearean sense of human
consciousness. But Shakespearean inward selves
seem to me different from Luther's in kind and
not just in degree, and different indeed in kind
from the entire history of western consciousness
up to Luther. Hamlet's radical self-reliance leaps
over the centuries and joins itself to Nietzsche's
and Emerson's, then goes beyond their
outermost limits, and keeps on going beyond
 [6]

ours". 11
Simultaneously Bloom erects Hamlet as
the character who involves the pre-history of the
first absolutely inner-self which belongs not to
Martin Luther but to Shakespeare.

Bloom further explains Shakespeare as the

incomparable psychologist (thus Bloom rejects a
Freudian reading of Shakespeare, instead he
offers a Shakespearean reading of Freud),
inventing a new origin which is the most
illuminating idea that any poet ever has
discovered or invented the 'self-recognition' or
'self-overhearing'. Following this Bloom rebukes
the school of resentment that they are too
overwhelmed by social history and by ideologies
to recognize our indebtness to William
Shakespeare. 12

6. Bloom generally offers conclusive statements to

prove the supremacy of Shakespeare. An
important idea that he proposes is that
Shakespeare's indifference is astonishing; he
gives the opposite impression of making as at
home out of doors. 13
Thus Shakespeare's
supremacy is in his unmatched power of thinking
and he even surpasses Dante- "Dante has been
the poet's poet, Shakespeare has been the
people's poet". 14

7. Shakespeare is free of the anxiety of influence.

Though he gets some ideas from Chaucer and
Marlow but after the creation of Hamlet his
contest is with his own self. 15
All the above
 [7]

arguments point to only one Bloomian parameter

of canon-formation, i.e., the representation of
Character. Before the publication of Genius
Bloom has nothing substantial to say about the
medium 'in' which Shakespeare has presented his
character. In Genius he hints this aspect of
Shakespeare's achievement and contribution to
the language in which he writes. Bloom says-
"Shakespeare's language is primary to his art,
and is florabundant. He had a deep drive to coin
words anew - he employed more than twenty one
hundred separate words". 16

Alas Bloom has nothing more to say about the

exuberant beauty of Shakespearean language. In
fact he is idiosyncratically obsessed with the
characters; especially with Falstaff and Hamlet.
He is so obsessed with Falstaff that he wants to
see himself as a "parody of Falstaff". 17
More than
Falstaff he is obsessed with Hamlet whom he
wants to establish as a demigod and the supreme
test of canon. He repeats again and again his
experiences about Hamlet which in fact
establishes Bloom as an experiential critic. His
favourite assertions about Hamlet are below:-

(a) Hamlet is the freest artist of himself. 18

(b) Hamlet is the master over hearer and we

cannot think 'ourselves' as separate selves
without thinking about Hamlet. 19
 [8]

(c) Shakespeare created Hamlet as a dialectic

of antithetical qualities, unresolved by the
hero's death. 20

(d) Bloom's obsession reaches to the peak when

he exuberantly declares that the "lost Ur-
Hamlet was doubtless a Shakespearean
revenge tragedy. Without any sufficient
proof Bloom says that there is no Ur-Hamlet
by Thomas Kyd. 21

Bloom's obsession leads him to write an entire book, to

prove these points, entitled as Hamlet: The Poem Unlimited
(2003), (the till is from Polonius Act - II). The book is born
out of Bloom's dissatisfaction with his own 1998 work
Shakespeare. In fact this act should be seen as another step
to refute Eliot's critical parameter in his essay "Hamlet and
his Problem" (1919) the Hamlet is a failure since he fails to
achieve objective correlative. 22
Bloom constantly argues for
universal standards of excellence or aesthetic value. Yet,
ironically, he never stops to examine the way he defines his
antithetical universe which begins against Eliot and
culminates against the School of Resentment. In fact
sometimes the offers his own limitation's Focusing so
exclusively on the creation of a handful of characters as the
key to Shakespeare's genius puts Bloom in an odd position
of deciding what to do with the many plays that come
before and after. In Shakespeare early comedies, histories,
tragedies and the last plays get dismissed as relative
failures or faintly praised for anticipating the fully realized
personalities that are to follow. In his chapter on Coriolanus
he asks, "in fourteen consecutive months Shakespeare has
 [9]

created Lear and the Fool, Edgar and Edmund, Macbeth and
Lady Macbeth, and Antony and Cleopetra. Compared with
that eightfold, in personality or in character Caius Martius
scarcely exists. Had Shakespeare wearied of labour of
inventing the human, at least in the tragic mode?" 23

Cymbeline, Henry VIII, The Tempest and other plays

are approached by Bloom in the same narrow fashion. In
fact Bloom goes to the extent of being elegiac. For example,
he writes about The Two Noble Kinsman "a new
Shakespeare, who chose to abandon writing after touching
and transgressing, the limits of art, and perhaps also of
thought . . . he abandons his career long concern with
character and personality and presents a darker more
remote or estranged vision of human life than ever
before". 24
No doubt Bloom feels the ultimate vision of life
presented by Shakespeare in the highest poetic mode but
perhaps Bloom does not want to cope up with
Shakespeare's vision; Bloom ignores that Shakespeare's
power of seeing life steadily and seeing it whole almost finds
its finest expression in his last plays and at its most
beautifully in The Tempest.

Joseph Epstein in his article on Bloom writes, "Much of

the greater part of Bloom's book on Shakespeare is a great
ramble, play by play, in which Bloom puts opinionation upon
opinionation arguing with this critic, arguing with that,
inserting bits of quite uninteresting academic
autobiography, establishing his own superiority, providing as
heavy breathing a solipsistic performance". 25

Joseph Epstein is right but to a certain limit. Most

probably Bloom intends to pursue the reader, since he is a
 [ 10 ]

solitary soul to experience Shakespeare on the basis of his

own intrinsic vision rather than extrinsic criteria. Despite of
all the minor ambivalences Bloom serves a noble purpose of
reading.

What emerges from the entire discussion is that a

Canon is a set of reading practices. Bloom involves the
bringing-to-consciousness and articulation of his reading
practice of Shakespeare. His reading makes a unique and
compelling contribution to the vast line of Shakespearean
criticism. He offers a totality of the vision through which one
can perceive the strength of Shakespeare's plays. Along
with it when the contemporary theory is obsessed to
formulate the vision of Shakespeare into several isms,
Bloom comes as a fresh wind free of all these isms. His
experience of deep reading of Shakespeare is his authority
and his teaching experience is his voice. Thus his deep
reading of Shakespeare canonizes him not only as a great
reader but also a great experiential critic.

Notes:

1. Michael Foucault, in the three volumes of History of

Sexuality, dislocates the construct of "Power/
Knowledge" which, according to him, aims to justify
the gender inequality and is repressive to power
structure. Jonathan Culler puts it thus: "Power for
Foucault is not something some one wields but
'power/knowledge': power is the form of knowledge or
knowledge as power. What we think about the world-
the conceptual framework in which we are brought to
think about the world- experiences great Power.
 [ 11 ]

Power/Knowledge has produced for example, the

situation where you are defined by your Sex".

- Jonathan Culler, Theory (London: Oxford paper

back ed. 2000), p. 8.

2. Harold Bloom. The Western Canon: The Books and

School of The Ages . (London: MacMillion, 1994), See
pp. 2, 24, 46, & 175.

See also Harold Bloom, Shakespeare: The Invention of

Human (New York: Riverhood Books, 1998), p. 716.

Hereinafter I shall use Shakespeare .

3. The Western Canon, p. 283.

In simple terms New-Historicism is a method of the

parallel reading of literary and non-literary texts,
usually of the same historical period. It refuses to give
a privileged status to the literary text; rather literary
texts are read in the light of non-literary texts. Louis A.
Montrose defines it as a combined interest in the
'textuality of history, and historicity of texts'.

See - Louis A. Montrose "Professing the Renaissance:

The Poetics and Politics of Culture". Literary Theory:
An Anthology . Eds. Julie Rivikin and Michael Ryan
(Massachusetts: Black well 2002), p. 81.

4. Harold Bloom, Genius: A Mosaic of One Hundred

Exemplary Creative Minds (New York: Warner Books,
2002), p. 18. Hereinafter I shall use Genius.

5. The Western Canon , p. 47.

 [ 12 ]

6. Harold Bloom. "The Analysis of Character", Sir John

Falstaff . Ed. Harold Bloom. (Philadelphia: Chalsea
House Publication, 2004), pp. VII-X.

7. The Western Canon , p. 72. See also Genius , p. 27.

8. The Western Canon, p. 64. See also Shakespeare ,

p. 716.

9. The Western Canon, p. 25.

10. Ibid., p. 40. See also Shakespeare , pp. 405, 717 &
725.

11. The Western Canon, p. 179 see also Shakespeare,

p. 741.

12. Genius , pp. 26 & 30.

13. The Western Canon , pp. 3 & 52.

14. Ibid., pp.51-52.

15. Ibid., p. 10 and Shakespeare , pp. 7-20.

16. Genius , p. 18.

17. Shakespeare , p. 725.

18. The Western Canon , p. 72 and Genius , p. 27.

19. Shakespeare , p. 405 and Genius , p. 27.

20. Shakespeare , p. 406.

21. Ibid., pp. 405 & 738. See also Harold Bloom, Hamlet:
The Poem Unlimited . (New York: Riverhead Books
2003), pp. 1-10.
 [ 13 ]

22. William K. Wimsatt (Jr), and Cleanth Brooks. Literary

Criticism: A Short History , (New Delhi: Oxford & I B.H.
1957, p. 667.

23. Shakespeare , p. 578.

24. Ibid, p. 693.

25. Joseph Epstein, "Bloom's Genius". The Hudson Review.

Vol. LV, No. 2 (Summer 2002).

References:

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