shakespeare and the invention of the human

devoted, with an intensity that needs to be called 'holy,' to understanding literature as the human testament, as, however ambiguously, the means to secular salvation. Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human is, simply, the book of a lifetime, the culmination of a career - twenty-two previous books, and countless essays, editions, introductions, etc.

This, in other words, is not an objective review. He was my teacher and my dissertation advisor at Yale a role equivalent to that of 'Godfather' in Mario Puzo's universe - and has continued to be my friend, adversary, rabbi, and counselor. I have to begin by acknowledging that Harold Bloom has been, for almost forty years, a major presence in my life. 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.Harold Bloom Riverhead Books, $35, 768 pp. ’ 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. He knows us better than we do: ‘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. 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? 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. 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.

Shakespeare and the invention of the human