Thoughts on Shakespeare: Adam Kirsch on Harold Bloom
The National Post

Adam Kirsch hits a whole row of nails on the head (The King's Playwright, Feb. 3). He is right, for example, about the mixture of brilliance, arrogance and perversity in Harold Bloom's Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human; the brilliance predominates but I too ploughed through Bloom's rhapsodies on Falstaff -- his favourite character -- wondering when he was going to stop telling us how wonderful the old fat man is and get down to explaining why. (He never does.)

Kirsch is right, too, about the politicized critics whom Bloom amusingly dubbed the School of Resentment: The ones who regard literature as a vast conspiracy against which somebody -- it's never quite clear who -- needs to be protected. They are not, perhaps, quite as monolithic a brigade as either Bloom or Kirsch might suggest.

There are those who would damn Shakespeare for the sin of not being a 20th-century radical; those who praise him for having been one without telling anybody, writing his plays in a secret code that only they have been able to crack; and those -- a large group - - whose position is difficult to make out. This last bunch are so busy executing elaborate dances of disdain in the plays' general vicinity that it's hard to tell what they think; it's as if expressing an opinion about a work -- actually committing yourself to liking or disliking it -- would be unbearably square. Maybe what they truly resent is that Shakespeare can write and they can't.

And Kirsch is right in pointing out that Bloom and, say, the Marxist Terry Eagleton, actually agree with each other in detecting authoritarian sympathies in the plays, the only difference being that Eagleton condemns them while Bloom tries to explain them away, claiming that Shakespeare was really on the side of the rejected Falstaff rather than that of his former pal Henry V, "the mirror of all Christian kings."

What Kirsch doesn't say, though he goes on to demonstrate it, is that he sees these tendencies, too. He agrees with Eagleton, except that what Eagleton denounces Kirsch glorifies; at least, he wants gleefully to rub our noses in it which is, mutatis mutandis, a very Eagletonian position.

And I agree with all of them, but only up to a point. I think the matter is more complicated than any of them admit, though whether Shakespeare inserted the complications accidentally or on purpose I have no idea. Kirsch zeroes in on Henry V, but I think he underrates its complexity and overrates its importance among the complete works.

Henry V is explicitly a war-mongering, king-glorifying play. Shakespeare can often be opaque in his sympathies, but this time he leaves us in no doubt about what to think; in fact he brings on a narrator, the chorus, to tell us, half a dozen times. But this fact in itself should give us pause, because it's the only play in which Shakespeare does it. (Well, there's Pericles, but the chorus in that one is there only to guide us through a tangled picaresque tale.) It's as if he didn't trust himself to stay on the approved rails without subjecting himself to some kind of external restraint.

I have no doubt that Shakespeare, as a good Elizabethan citizen, believed in strong central government or that he got a kick from the idea of an outnumbered English army beating the hell out of the arrogant French; the play was written just 10 years after the defeat of the hulking Spanish Armada by a small, nimble English fleet, and the analogy must have been obvious.

But you can't make a whole play out of political correctness; it doesn't fill the space. I often think that Shakespeare was a more opportunist playwright than theme-hungry critics are inclined to admit; he writes each scene as intensely as possible, identifying with each character and each viewpoint as it comes up. So, as Kirsch says, Shakespeare is fully behind the Duke of Exeter as he threatens the French with extinction, managing to imply that it's their fault even though it's their country; and, no, he probably doesn't have much sympathy for the French when they bluster in reply.

But I think Shakespeare identifies with the French princess Katharine when she asks if it's possible that she should love the enemy of France, and with the Duke of Burgundy when he laments the devastation that has overtaken the land. That doesn't negate the patriotism. It's really the same divided message we're accustomed to in war movies: War is terrible but we want our side to win.

And there's more. Shakespeare famously kept Falstaff, with all his anti-heroic values, out of this episode of the history-cycle, though he had promised at the end of Henry IV Part Two to include him. (The entire Henry sequence is being presented at Stratford this year.) In this play, Falstaff's function is to die off-stage and be mourned in the most moving passage in the play. We know, and Shakespeare must have known, we have lost something. Falstaff's surviving friends tell us, uncontradicted, that "the king hath killed his heart" and they add, in what may be the best summary the play has ever had, that "the king is a good king, but." They then proceed to France, not exactly to subvert the glory, but to remind us that even a military band of brothers has its underside.

The king is a good king, the best in Shakespeare. (Well, look at the competition.) You can make a plausible case for the play as unadulterated hero-worship: Even Henry's toughest decisions redound to his credit and he ends up winning the war and getting the girl. But, seen from that angle, the play keeps including things it doesn't need. It's a big play (too big for its boots, perhaps) but I think it's fair to say that it doesn't show Shakespeare's imagination working at its whitest heat.

He was only half-way through his career when he wrote it. In the plays that follow -- the great tragedies -- the job of successful soldier-politicians like Henry is principally to tidy up the bodies. When generals take centre- stage, it's to disintegrate like Macbeth or be destroyed like Othello or die uncomprehending like Antony or Coriolanus. Lear, the only legitimate king among them, is brought to a ruined realization of the things he has neglected, among them the plight of the homeless. (The play uses that word.)

The heart of these plays is with the losers. And that's about as far from royalist triumphalism as you can get.