harold bloom shakespeare the invention of the human

Our minds are, thanks to him, not what they were. ' Bloom takes this and runs with it: Shakespeare is not 'lifelike' because he was a particularly talented writer he is lifelike because Shakespeare has offered us convincing modes of being. Wittgenstein said that life was not like Shakespeare.īloom quotes Owen Barfield's words: 'there is a very real sense, humiliating as it may seem, in which what we generally venture to call our feelings are really Shakespeare's 'meaning'.

We know this not only because he is so quotable but because his characters really do seem to exist in more dimensions than other writers' characters. After Jesus, Hamlet is the most cited figure in Western consciousness no one prays to him, but no one evades him for long either.' Bloom, a gnostic with his own highly idiosyncratic theories about biblical authorship, may shun the idea of prayer to an external entity but, after reading this book, you feel that if he did pray, it would be to Hamlet. His total effect upon the world's culture is incalculable. 'Hamlet is the only secular rival to his greatest precursors in personality. Well, it wasn't my idea: it was Harold Bloom's. You may wonder what I'm doing putting Hamlet and Jesus in the same paragraph. T S Eliot made the point in his 1919 essay on the subject, saying that Hamlet had 'an especial temptation for that most dangerous type of critic: the critic with a mind which is naturally of the creative order, but which through some weakness in creative power exercises itself in criticism instead'. And if they don't do it when they talk about Shakespeare, they do it when they talk about Hamlet. One would hope that Professors of Literature are above making such errors, but you can't help feeling that some of them undergo a similar process of identification when they think, talk, or write about Shakespeare.

Harold bloom shakespeare the invention of the human