While this timeless approach to Shakespeare has become deeply unfashionable in recent years, riding over the horizon to rescue the Bard from the fiendish clutches of political correctness comes Harold Bloom, fresh from defending and defining The Western Canon back in 1994. "synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.īen Jonson claimed of his great rival Shakespeare that his art was not of an age but for all time. They represent the apogee of Shakespeare’s art, that art which is Britain’s most powerful and dominant cultural contribution to the world, here vividly recovered by an inspired and wise scholar at the height of his powers. In a chronological survey of each of the plays, Bloom explores the supra-human personalities of Shakespeare’s great protagonists: Hamlet, Lear, Falstaff, Rosalind, Juliet. Shakespeare will go on explaining us in part because he invented us. They abide beyond the end of the mind’s reach we cannot catch up to them. ’The plays remain the outward limit of human achievement: aesthetically, cognitively, in certain ways morally, even spiritually. In short, Shakespeare invented our understanding of ourselves. This book is a visionary summation of Harold Bloom’s reading of Shakespeare and in it he expounds a brilliant and far-reaching critical theory: that Shakespeare was, through his dramatic characters, the inventor of human personality as we have come to understand it. How to understand Shakespeare, whose ability so far exceeds his predecessors and successors, whose genius has defied generations of critics’ explanations, whose work is of greater influence in the modern age even than the Bible?
In this magisterial interpretation, Bloom explains Shakespeare’s genius in a radical and provocative re-reading of the plays. Harold Bloom, the doyen of American literary critics and author of The Western Canon, has spent a professional lifetime reading, writing about and teaching Shakespeare.
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