"Personality, in our sense, is a Shakespearean invention, and is not only Shakespeare's greatest originality but also the authentic cause of his perpetual pervasiveness." So Harold Bloom opines in his outrageously ambitious Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human. This is a titanic claim. But then this is a titanic book, wrought by a latter-day critical colossus--and before Bloom is done with us, he has made us wonder whether his vision of Shakespeare's influence on the whole of our lives might not be simply the sober truth. Shakespeare is a feast of arguments and insights, written with engaging frankness and affecting immediacy. Bloom ranges through the Bard's plays in the probable order of their composition, relating play to play and character to character, maintaining all the while a shrewd grasp of Shakespeare's own burgeoning sensibility. It is a long and fascinating itinerary, and one littered with thousands of sharp insights. Listen to Bloom on Romeo and Juliet: "The Nurse and Mercutio, both of them audience favorites, are nevertheless bad news, in different but complementary ways." On The Merchant of Venice: "To reduce him to contemporary theatrical terms, Shylock would be an Arthur Miller protagonist displaced into a Cole Porter musical, Willy Loman wandering about in Kiss Me Kate." On As You Like It: "Rosalind is unique in Shakespeare, perhaps indeed in Western drama, because it is so difficult to achieve a perspective upon her that she herself does not anticipate and share." Bloom even offers some belated vocational counseling to Falstaff, identifying him as an Elizabethan Mr. Chips: "Falstaff is more than skeptical, but he is too much of a teacher (his true vocation, more than highwayman) to follow skepticism out to its nihilistic borders, as Hamlet does."
In the end, it doesn't matter very much whether we agree with all or any of these ideas. What does matter is that Bloom's capacious book sends us hurrying back to some of the central texts of our civilization. "The ultimate use of Shakespeare," the author asserts, "is to let him teach you to think too well, to whatever truth you can sustain without perishing." Bloom himself has made excellent use of his hero's instruction, and now he teaches us all to do the same. --Daniel Hintzsche
From Library Journal
All libraries should own this latest work of scholarship by noted critic Bloom (humanities, Yale Univ./NYU), author of The Western Canon (LJ 9/1/94). Here he examines every play by Shakespeare, touching briefly on issues of attribution and chronology and then offering a new thesisAthat Shakespeare invented character and personality. Before Shakespeare, Bloom maintains, literature was full of one-dimensional figuresAthink of Medea and compare her personality and characterization to that of Lady Macbeth. The plays are arranged in groups (the early comedies to the late romances), but each play receives its own in-depth treatment; the argument is strongest in the essays on Hamlet and Falstaff. Bloom's analysis is much more than guidance for the befuddled undergraduate or season ticket holderAreaders will need to be familiar with at least the rough outline of a play in order to follow much of what Bloom argues. This is a challenging, well-argued, and quite entertaining book that will leave readers both agreeing with and arguing against its thesis.ANeal Wyatt, Chesterfield Cty. P.L., VA
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.
In The Western Canon (1994), Bloom aired the notion that Shakespeare "invented us." Now he surveys the plays to lay out evidence for that extraordinary claim. He revives a tradition that all but died early in this century: considering the plays' characters as the most fruitful way of reading Shakespeare. What obtains instead these days, and what Bloom occasionally mocks for its faddish inconsequentiality, is the conceit that Shakespeare's characters do not matter and neither, very much, does Shakespeare, who is just a name for a set of forces drawn into a nexus at a particular moment and place. Criticism reflecting that position gushes from academia, whereas a book like Bloom's is rare. Is it convincing? Bloom's thesis is that Shakespeare, who is much greater than any other writer and much more intelligent than any thinker in any discipline, invented what we define as personality by inventing characters of unlimited depth, interiority, and self-creation. Only Chaucer comes close to doing this before Shakespeare, and Shakespeare's contemporaries show nothing of his confounding of art and nature. Freud, in such a view, just plagiarizes Shakespeare, as do we all. Bloom can go on a little too long about Falstaff, whom he admires more than all other Shakespearean characters, but so brilliant, so probing is his criticism that he virtually compels the reader to test his thesis by rereading the plays with equal dedication. This is pure Bloom, delightful and provocative, literary criticism at its very finest--and a Book-of-the-Month Club main selection. Stuart Whitwell
From Kirkus Reviews
A magisterial survey of the Bard's complete dramatic oeuvre by the always stimulating author of The Western Canon (1994). Bloom (Humanities/Yale) accurately describes himself as ``Brontosaurus Bardolater, an archaic survival among Shakespearean critics.'' He unabashedly follows Samuel Johnson, William Hazlitt, and the great writer-critics of English Romanticism in concerning himself primarily with the dramatist as a peerless creator of characters and profound explorer of our deepest existential questions; he decries the ``School of Resentment'' (Bloom's blanket term for feminists, Marxists, deconstructionists, et al.) and high-concept modern directors, all of whom, he argues, interpret the plays in terms of historical particulars instead of universal truths. For Bloom, as the subtitle suggests, Shakespeare's greatest achievement was ``the inauguration of personality as we have come to recognize it . . . [he] will go on explaining us, because in part he invented us.'' This emphasis makes the author an engaging explicator of the comedies, histories, and some aspects of the tragedies, which all feature personalities remarkable for their ``inwardness''; his masterpieces are the discussions of the anguished, antic skeptic Hamlet and the jovial pragmatist Falstaff, whom he claims as ``the fullest representations of human possibility in Shakespeare.'' Bloom is less effective with late works like The Winter's Tale, in which the Bard largely abandoned psychological realism in favor of a visionary mood that seems to make the critic uncomfortable. Philosophically, Bloom stresses the nihilism that animates Shakespearean villains and torments many protagonists; he tends to underrate the moments of hard-won reconciliation that close many of the plays. In short, the author offers a personal view with inevitable omissions and weaknesses (unnecessary repetition and gratuitous polemics against political correctness among them). Nonetheless, this is a splendid book: elegantly written, scholarly yet accessible, radiant with Bloom's love for Shakespeare in particular and literature in general. Less interesting as a salvo in the ongoing culture wars than as an old-fashioned exercise in narrative criticism for the general reader and, as such, very nearly perfect. (Book-of-the-Month Club main selection) -- Copyright ©1998, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
Review
It is a fiercely argued exegesis of Shakespeare's plays in the tradition of Samuel Johnson, Hazlitt and A.C. Bradley, a study that is as passionate as it is erudite, as provocative as it is sometimes perverse.... [I]t's hard not to be impressed by his overall knowledge of and insight into his subject's work. -- The New York Times, Michiko Kakutani
It is a huge cloak-bag of ideas, stuffed with true wisdom and false bombast in equal measure. It breaks the rules, but demands to be forgiven because it is alive and full of magnanimity. It is a feast. -- The Wall Street Journal, Jonathan Bate
You don't have to swallow Bloom's argument whole ... to value his local insights. The most exhilarating observations ... have the quality of aphorisms. -- The New York Times Book Review, James Shapiro
