138 Ideals in the Modern World
and Lear, whom he has sentenced to death; his fi nal breath is, sur-
prisingly to himself and everyone else, a generous one.
Perhaps what Bloom says about self- overhearing and change
is so. Maybe Shakespeare’s characters are, to use Bloom’s idiom,
“strong mis- readers” of themselves. But the most signifi cant truth
about Shakespeare’s “invention of the human” is both simpler and
more complex. Shakespeare does not quite invent the human as we
know it. Rather he makes way for the fl ourishing of a new human
type, a type that he does not especially endorse, or perhaps even
like terribly much. Shakespeare helps create the grounds for the pre-
siding form of modern subjectivity through his acts of de mo li tion
as well as through his acts of repre sen ta tion. He clears the way for
the triumph of the Self. His work helps open a space in which it can
unfold and triumph. In Shakespeare’s world only Self lives on and
thrives— though this fact is no cause for cele bration to him and
surely it shouldn’t be to us. Shakespeare is the fi rst great secularist;
the fi rst au then tic renderer of the marketplace philosophy, pragma-
tism, and the primary artist of life lived exclusively in the sublunary
sphere. Seen from Shakespeare’s vantage, the pragmatic life is
not especially enticing or glorious, but it is all we genuinely have.
Shakespeare is the ultimate poet of worldliness.
What is perhaps the best- known sentence of literary criticism is
devoted, not surprisingly, to Shakespeare— and it is extremely
misleading. The sentence comes from John Keats and deals with a
quality he believes Shakespeare to have possessed more fully than
any other author and, presumably, more than any other man or
woman, negative capability. That is, Keats says, when an individual
is capable of being “in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts without any
irritable reaching after fact and reason.” Keats’s line, which comes
from a letter to his bro th ers Tom and George, has been glossed in
numberless ways. But the most common interpretation is that
Shakespeare, poetic genius that he is, actually holds no perceptible