Romanticism Lost: Bloom and the Twilight of Literary Shakespeare

Abstract

Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human is a significant cultural event; its production and reception seem to address (in Arnold’s resonant phrase) “the function of criticism at the present time” (Arnold 1986). I approach this question through Romanticism—the foundation of Bloom’s career and reaffirmed throughout this book, which, by locating Shakespearean “singularity” in the plays’ unparalleled “diversity of persons” and “inner selves,” identifies itself with “Romantic criticism, from Hazlitt through Pater and A. C. Bradley on to Harold Goddard” (Bloom 1998, 1). From this angle, “High Romantic Bardolatry, now so much disdained in our self-defiled academies, is merely the most normative of faiths that worship” Shakespeare (3). Bloom acknowledges the obsolescence of these values, writing as “perhaps the last High Romantic Bardolator” (79), “Bloom Brontosaurus Bardolater [sic], an archaic survival” (589) or “belated representative of that critical tradition” (614), but “still enough of a Late Romantic” (666) to defend the faith against current apostasy: “I commit the Original Sin that all historicists—of all generations—decry, joined by all formalists as well: I exalt Falstaff above his plays. … This sin, like Bardolatry, to me seems salvation” (314).