Shakespeare's Politics (book) - Introduction

Introduction

The work opens with an introduction titled “Political Philosophy and Poetry,” in which Bloom posits a pessimistic diagnosis about the state of contemporary education. According to Bloom, students no longer see works as literature as directly relevant to their lives. Furthermore, nations no longer have a common author or authors whose work provides a standard education for the audience (in the way, for example, that Homer was to Greece or Goethe to Germany). Shakespeare, Bloom argues, could still provide this education for English-speaking peoples on the grounds that his work is "properly read and interpreted." For Bloom, this should not follow the principles of an existing school of criticism, such as New Criticism, but rather should involve students reading Shakespeare "naively." "nly when Shakespeare is taught as though he said something can he regain the influence over this generation which is so needed." Yet there is another problem within Bloom's solution: Shakespeare's plays can only really be understood as their author intended them to be if the "authentic intellectual tradition in which they were written" is recovered. For Bloom, this means knowing how Shakespeare's Renaissance audience would have understood the historical and political context of the plays' settings, as well as understanding that its conception of political life was not the bourgeois, unpoetic subject as modernity understands it, but "the stage on which the broadest, deepest, and noblest passions and virtues could be played, and the political man seemed to be the most interesting theme of poetry." Because the beliefs pervasive during the Renaissance are so different from ours, Bloom's concept of naivete seems to mean open-mindedness; that modern readers who turn to Shakespeare for instruction will not automatically assume that the modern conceptions of man, the state, or poetry are inherently true. For these reasons, Bloom argues, an analytical framework grounded in political philosophy, rather than literary criticism, is the proper beginning for understanding Shakespeare's plays: as professors of political philosophy, Bloom and Jaffa would be adept at this strategy of criticism.