Shakespeare's Politics (book) - Critical Reception

Critical Reception

Shakespeare's Politics was and is largely ignored by the literary establishment. Ronald Berman panned it in the Kenyon Review, taking issue with the Merchant of Venice chapter as " the usual sententiousness about the problem of being Jewish...all of which was pretty well settled some 50 years ago by E.E. Stoll" and with the Othello chapter as "written in virgin ignorance of the massive scholarship." Although Bloom had written in the introduction that he and Jaffa " the competence of our colleagues in the literature departments and are aware of the contributions of recent scholarship," Berman's remarks suggest that Bloom and Jaffa were not familiar with the full breadth of scholarship, perhaps because as the departments grew as separate entities there were too many developments in the scholarship to track, and that their work might be more useful to the discipline of political philosophy than to the discipline of literature or of literary criticism. At the same time, a positive review in Harper's Magazine argues that "the notion that was...a precise and passionate thinker is vigorously defended in " and that Bloom's conclusions in the chapters on Othello and Julius Caesar were strikingly similar to those reached by a contemporary work on Shakespeare (The Shakespearean Imagination, by Norman Holland) that "approaches the plays...in the approved new-critical way." This contradiction among critics confirms the suggestion that the expansion of scholarship had rendered consensus unreachable. Another review notes the influence of Strauss and judges that "much depends on whether one is an admirer of contribution." The lengthiest discussion of the constitutive chapters was an extended argument between Bloom and Sigurd Burckhardt in the pages of the American Political Science Review, where the chapters on Othello and King Lear had first been published.

Even with its detractors in literature departments, the book was a watershed for Straussians and those who sympathize with Strauss's insistence on understanding an author as he understands himself and on assuming that each author has a didactic purpose in his work, even if the teaching is only truly communicated "between the lines." A 1981 collection of essays on Shakespeare's "wisdom concerning political things" admits "a general sympathy with the approach developed in a work that is the nearest progenitor of this book, Shakespeare's Politics, by Allan Bloom with Harry V. Jaffa." Paul Cantor, a professor of English at the University of Virginia, has named the introduction to Shakespeare's Politics as "the classic statement of the importance of the regime in Shakespeare." Cantor's comment both affirms that Shakespeare had a purpose in carefully constructing the political setting of his plays, and suggests that only those outside the discipline of literary criticism can inform those aspects of a literary work that address supra-literary topics. From this it can be inferred that specialists outside of literary studies can enrich the scholarship on a subject as literary as Shakespeare through discipline-specific contributions.