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Logos: A Journal of Catholic Thought and Culture 4.3 (2001) 108-114



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Shakespeare's Secular Bible: A Modern Commentary

Peter Milward, S.J.


"As passionate as it is erudite . . ." "a landmark achievement . . ." "an enraptured, incantatory epic . . ." "magnificent and heartening . . ." "engaging, honest and moving . . ." "most exhilarating." Such are some of the epithets employed by rave reviewers of Harold Bloom's recent commentary 1 on what has come to be accepted by not a few Shakespeare scholars as a "secular Bible." It is what he himself prefers to term a philosophy of "a purely secular transcendence." Bloom is, as he engagingly describes himself, "a heretical transcendentalist, gnostic in orientation," and as such he emphasizes his unique differentiation "from nearly all current Shakespearean criticism, whether academic, journalistic or theatrical." Yet so far from suffering the traditional fate of heretics, at least in having his book burnt at a metaphorical stake, he is acclaimed by the majority of self-respecting academics, journalists, and professionals of the theatre in the terms listed above; and his best-selling book has been "a main selection of the Book-of-the-Month Club." No, not just book of the month; but if Shakespeare himself has been voted, at least by British voters, "Man of the Millennium," Bloom is now honored as "the indispensable critic on [End Page 108] the indispensable writer," or (to vary the phrase) "if Shakespeare's drama is secular scripture, Bloom offers himself as its high priest"--or, as he would prefer to say, secular commentator.

Though he never quotes him, Bloom's book reads like an extended sermon on the text provided by Matthew Arnold in his poetic apostrophe of the Bard: "Others abide our question. Thou art free. We ask and ask: Thou smilest, and art still, out-topping knowledge." Arnold in turn echoes what Coleridge says, as it were in the person of Nature--that Nature of which Shakespeare has been seen by all the great critics from Dryden downwards as the great priest and prophet: "it behoves thee not to disquiet me with interrogatories, but to understand in silence, even as I am silent, and work without words." Only Bloom, like his admired Coleridge, and his even more admired Hamlet, cannot remain silent, nor can he desist from insistent interrogatories of play after play of Shakespeare's. So he pursues answer after answer, in chapter after chapter, on play after play, from The Comedy of Errors to The Two Noble Kinsmen, beginning with an introductory consideration of "Shakespeare's universalism" and ending with a concluding coda on "The Shakespearean Difference," which he might rather have named "The Shakespearean Indifference." Yet even this coda is not enough for him, even after 735 pages; he must needs add another ten pages for "A Word at the End" before, like Hamlet, he accepts the constitution of silence.

All the same, for all his resolute agnosticism, which verges at times on an all but Nietzschean nihilism, there is one thing about Shakespeare on which Bloom seems to claim for himself an absolute certitude. This is the one thing to which he recurs again and again, as if it is the one thing on his brain and that he can never sufficiently exorcize from his thoughts. Of Shakespeare, for example, he confesses that "his politics, like his religion, evades me"; "I suspect that he had no politics and no religion"; "Shakespeare seems too wise to believe anything"; "I don't think Shakespeare wrote Christian plays, or un-Christian ones either"; "Shakespeare declines moralism"; [End Page 109] "Shakespeare seems to go beyond Christian belief into a purely secular transcendence"; "I am baffled when critics argue as to whether Shakespeare was Protestant or Catholic, since the plays are neither"; "Shakespeare would never commit himself to specifically Christian terms"; "Shakespeare neither challenges nor endorses your hopes for a personal resurrection"; "it seems likely that no one will ever establish Shakespeare's religious sentiments"; "Shakespeare always evades both faith and doubt"; "Shakespeare intentionally evades (or even blurs) Christian categories throughout his work"; "I find nothing in...

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