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THREE-WAY SEX WITH DEATH | PAGE 1, 2
Dear Camille:
Please share your view of Harold Bloom's "Shakespeare: The Invention of
the Human." As a longtime subscriber to the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, I
laugh Falstaff-like at the irony of the gift shop pages of their Web site
now featuring Bloom's book, while his pages blast their style of
academic/political stagecraft that, for example, casts female actors in male
roles, and vice versa, to raise the gender consciousness of their audience.
These opinions of Bloom's match yours on postmodern humanities professors. I
know, from your writings, something of the role that he's played in your own
career. And he does mention you in his new bestselling book. Do you agree that Shakespeare created human nature as we perceive it today? What are your favorite
Shakespearean plays, characters, actors, directors and theaters? While
you're at it, what's your review of the movie "Shakespeare in Love"?
Richard Tracey
Dear Mr. Tracey: What a kick it is to see my learned mentor Harold Bloom getting the full-scale star treatment -- not just in glossy magazines like Newsweek but in gossip guru Liz Smith's column! Some radical cultural shift is at work: America is plainly in need of a philosopher-king, an empathic enthusiast who will reconnect intellect and emotion and reestablish the primacy and prestige of art. Bloom can thunder like Moses or charm like Zero Mostel: As a scholar, critic and personality, he dwarfs the shrill yuppies of the current academic elite, with their tiresome poststructuralist, postmodernist, New Historicist clichés. That Bloom's thick "Shakespeare" tome has astonishingly sold over 100,000 copies in hardback shows that people are hungry for artistic sustenance. Shelley's "Ozymandias," one of the canonical texts of Romantic poetry (a field where the young Bloom made his pioneering reputation), rightly asserts that art transcends politics: Art is the only thing that lasts, amid the great swirl of nature. Though he despairs about the state of the humanities, Bloom is a major force in the growing campaign to restore respect for art to American education. As a proponent of Egyptian and Greco-Roman studies, I do have some quarrel with Great Bloom's theory about Shakespeare's "invention of the human." Bloom has long professed his preference for the Bible over Homer. I would cite as inventors of the human not only Homer and the Greek tragedians but Archilochus, Sappho, Alcaeus and Ibycus and the other lyric poets of the Archaic age, whose incandescent work has survived in fragmentary form. My favorite Shakespeare play is "Antony and Cleopatra," which I have analyzed in detail, along with "As You Like It," in "Sexual Personae." (My material on Shakespeare's transvestite comedies dates from work I was already doing on sexually heterodox themes in college in the mid-1960s.) While Bloom and I share a psychoanalytic orientation, I am probably more interested in the historical and political context of Shakespeare's plays than he is. "Hamlet," for example, fascinates me not just for its unsurpassed characterizations but for its richly metaphorical commentary on hierarchy and government. As for "Shakespeare in Love," as a regular teacher of the Shakespeare course at my university, I know I must see that film eventually, but I am dreading it: My dislike of Gwyneth Paltrow (goony, gangly Streep Jr. on sugar pills) and of the entire callow, weasel-faced Fiennes family (Joseph and Ralph) has kept me away. The many clips I've seen on TV haven't impressed me -- except for the Elizabethan costume design. And I'm no fan of the screenplay writer, playwright Tom Stoppard, with his smarmy Beckett ironies. Joseph L. Mankiewicz, who wrote and directed the brilliantly witty "All About Eve" (1950), is my idea of a true movie artist. Films on major historical figures or events are to be welcomed and encouraged, since they broaden the perspective of the mass audience in this era of shoddy public education. But the real-life William Shakespeare, if we can extrapolate from his sonnets, was a far more complex character than what "Shakespeare in Love" seems to show. He was phlegmatic, depressive, richly observant, yet worldly-wise. He had British Foreign Secretary Robin Cook's fierce, shrewd eyes; the young Orson Welles' precocious prodigality; Dirk Bogarde or Kevin Spacey's simmering sexual ambivalence; and the detached, brooding pride yet contained sensuality of Claude Rains in "Notorious" (1946), James Mason in "North by Northwest" (1959) and Peter Finch in "Sunday, Bloody Sunday" (1971). Aspiring screenplay writers, think bigger and better! Postscript: Amid the post-impeachment wreckage, I am thanking almighty Zeus for our deliverance from the daily media infliction of that seedy, lumbering lard pot Henry Hyde (doesn't he ever shampoo his hair?) and that bawling, petulant persimmon Barney Frank, two of the most blindly partisan hatchet weevils of the U.S. House of Representatives. The piquant surprise of the closing chapter of this soggy year-long soap opera is that Monica Lewinsky, under videotaped questioning by the clumsily inept House manager, has exactly the same adolescent, Daddy-baiting vocal mannerisms and skittish eye movements as Madonna! My partner, Alison, spotted this first; we were in stitches as we watched Monica and Madonna morph into one another -- just like the split-screen S&M climax of Ingmar Bergman's "Persona" (1966), where Liv Ullmann and Bibi Andersson mind-meld.
My forecast for the post-White House Clintons: How about Hillary scrapping
Bill and eloping with Queen Noor? Did you catch kissy-kissy Hillary leaping
into Noor's arms at King Hussein's funeral? Now those two gals would make a
fab power couple for the 21st century. New York Senate seat be damned:
Hillary's running for Red Queen of the World!
Are you a casualty of the culture war? Ask Camille
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