Rating: 
Summary: Praise for Invention of the Human
Review: Harold Bloom's book is a magnificent achievement. It is a pity more Shakepearean scholors do not have the guts to write something like this. I don't agree with everything he has to say, but I enjoy disagreeing with him. More of the same please.
Rating: 
Summary: Tenured Tedium
Review: With professional academics like Bloom festering in the ivory tower, it's no wonder that the American educational establishment is a bloody ruins.
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Summary: Endless encomiums to Falstaff and Hamlet--and Bloom
Review: I at first thought of dipping into chapters of individual plays, but then began at the beginning to trky to understand Bloom's total reading of the plays. It was all too evident from the beginning that Falstaff and Hamlet are preeminent and the only characters that Bloom identifies with. His emphasis on "personality" makes one realize that the real personality in the overly long book is Bloom, who can say that a critic is "always right" which is to say, that critic agrees with me. And when he finally gets to Hamlet he goes on so long and repetitiously that the reader decides to skip over to the next chapter. It seems that he can't resist mentioning falstaff in connection with any of the characters. Having decided that the ur Hamlet was definitely written by a young Shakespeare, he will admit no dissent. There are occasional brilliant insights and memorable lines.
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Summary: An sometimes impressive, knee-deep slog through Shakespeare
Review: Only an ivory tower academic could love Harold Bloom's prose. It's often punchless, with little rhythm, and it rarely varies in tone. His Shakespeare:The Invention Of The Human, culled from decades of writing, teaching, and lecturing, is a knee-deep slog through the Bard's complete dramatic ouevre. Nosonnets, no narrative poems, just one (sometimes endless) chapter devoted to each play. But despite the turgid prose (and the marathon length of 745 pages) the book still aquires a certain fascination because its author is such a perceptive reader. And his insights and analysis lead to some fresh perspectives. He finds Richard III (a perennial fan-favorite) stylistically limited (both overheated and something less than poetic), disparages scholars for assuming that Thomas Kyd's Spanish Tradgedy (a work he finds silly) was a precursor to Hamlet,and untangles the many threads of male sexual jealousy in Othello. When Bloom locks onto a favorite such as MacBeth, his writing gains a clarity, focus, and purpose much of the book's interminable passages lack. Locating MacBeth inside the kenoma, a timeless, placeless, Gnostic wasteland, where humans have been exiled, Bloom characterizes the play as the most ruthless, inexorable death-march in all of Shakespeare. But when he attempts to pin down Hamlet's consciousness, (something he argues his almost infinite) his writing bogs down, repeats ad nauseum, and finally ends up obscuring more than he illuminates. God shows up too. Or doesn't, as the case may be. Having been unable to find God in Shakespeare (true, I think)Bloom creates his own Holy Trinity with the Bard as Father, Hamlet as Son, and Falstaff as the (bawdy) Holy Ghost. At one point Bloom muses that Shakespeare is a "mortal god," something that pushes the book over the edge into hagiography. All in all Shakespeare: The Invention Of The Human is worth reading for its occasional perceptions and its terrific textual analysis. But bewareof an academic with his hard drive stuck in the mud. He can make even the most visionary pronouncements seem like tiresome, windy exhortations. And that's a shame.
Rating:
Summary: The Revenge Of The Bard
Review: Like Bloom, I've sat thorough many productions of Shakespeare's works in which the themes and the characters were distorted, mutilated, or simply ignored. I've wondered if there was anyone in the world who actually read the plays instead of using them as a marketing gimmick to display their own concepts. Fortunately, Bloom shows that he has read the plays.Many of this book's reviewers have focused their energy on whether or not Bloom proves his thesis (which is that Shakespeare "invented" the ways that we define ourselves as humans). Just to put my opinion on it, I don't think he did. Then again, I don't think Bloom thinks he did either, as is evident by his statement in the book's end that Chaucer "invented" the human and Shakespeare perfected it. So, why should a reader invest time in a book where it is questionable whether the author proved the central thesis? Because Bloom does such a wonderful job of dissecting the plays that one gets lost in the nuances that he brings out. His critical analyses of the plays are insightful and provocative. While I might take exception to some of his comments (I don't think Richard III is as weak as Bloom thinks it is), his writing style has conveyed his ideas in such a way that I have to respect his opinions. I was glad that I had read/seen some of the plays so that I could understand the context of Bloom's comments about them. I did feel a little lost when reading his analyses of those plays to which I had not been exposed. Instead of wallowing in the feeling, I wanted to read those plays in order to see if I agreed with his comments. Any critical study that makes one want to return to the original source material to discover if its arguments are valid is a very good study. While I don't believe one should accept Bloom's analyses at face value, his comments provide a solid counterpoint to many of the myths about the plays. I heartily recommend this book to those who want to broaden their perspective on Shakespeare's works.
Rating:
Summary: Privileged Old White Man Claptrap
Review: Bloom is a dinosaur, living in a reactionary sentimental Disneyland. He insists upon seeing what he wants to see in a group of disputed texts from an era radically different from his own, also ignoring the most important fact: these palys were written to be performed and seen, NOT read.
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Summary: Put down the book and see a play
Review: Although Mr. Bloom writes a wonderful book and formulates the interesting and likely hypothesis that Shakespeare invented the human, we must not forget that Shakespeare was a playwright AND an actor (with an emphasis on the later). For example Mr. Bloom derides "Two Gentlemen of Verona" as work lacking any merit at all and I would agree if I only read it, but I have seen wonderful productions of it. Shakespeare wrote for the stage and not for the page. Therefore any book on Shakespeare as literature (like this book) is based on a flawed premise. --- By all means buy the book, read it then put it down and go to your nearest Shakespeare Festival.
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Summary: A greatly troubling book
Review: There are a great many reviews of this book here, so let me just say that by far the biggest problem with it is that Bloom is unable to appreciate the incredible richness and diversity of contemporary feminist discourse, including feminist criticism of Shakespeare. Many feminist scholars are challenging assumptions about white patriarchal hegemony and eurocentrism, and of course they are going to examine Sahkespeare. Mr. Bloom, perhaps you should try doing a bit of reading of feminist critics before you make glib denounciations of them.
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Summary: response to the dublin (i think it was dublin anyway) review
Review: One of Bloom's points is that Shakespeare reads us, we do not read Shakespeare. Of course he talks about himself. He even calls himself a parody of Falstaff. Bloom sums it up well when he says: (paraphrasing)Shakespeare will illuminate whatever we bring to his plays far more than anything we bring to his plays will illuminate Shakespeare. The personal nature of the book does leave a lot of room for argument, but so do non-personal readings. One thing we aught to bring from this book is that all readings are personal on some level, especially readings of Shakespeare.
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Summary: If I could die of nausea
Review: Friends, Romans, Countrymen...This book, ahistorical, amoral, atextual, left me running simultaneously for the Straussian right and the materialist left. Give me a vomit bag, the book a scissors and Bloom a sock to stuff in it. Buy yourself some Leo Strauss, some Raymond Williams and ABOVE ALL some real Shakespeare. Then decide for yourself.
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