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Summary: It's up to BLOOM to remind us to read Shakespeare?
Review: What sort of dolt needs to be reminded to read Shakespeare? Whoever those people are, they aren't the type likely to pick up Bloom's ridiculous tome. His insight, as usual, relies upon overdetermining some paradigm of the Good, attaching it to a text, and then conveniently forgetting that aesthetics, particularly his own, are always political, rather than touchstones to some inevitably capitalized Human truth.
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Summary: Bloom's Triumphant Contribution to the Shakespeare Canon
Review: Ditto to Stuart Whitwell's Booklist review. Bloom situates postmodernist-feminist-postcolonial criticism in its proper place, not through explicit frontal attack, but through the pervasive force of his understanding and authority. A challenging, thought-provoking work of criticism, entirely free of the repressive dicta of the contemporary critical climate.
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Summary: A Matter of Audience
Review: While I share Professor Bloom's resentment for the Scholars of Resentment, I find his work in this book misses the mark. Not so much in the fact that he feels the need to discredit and destory the other readings of Shakespeare that have come before, nor in the fact that his readings are inaccurate (I tend to agree with Bloom that Othello and Desdemona never had sex: read the play don't watch the movie), but that he seems to never make clear who his audience is.Bloom seems to style this book "The Everyperson's Guide to Shakespeare." If, though, he intended to write a book for the "common person," he has included entirely too much scholarly debate and too many references (name-dropping or name-bashing, depending) to other scholars and critics, as these names will mean little or nothing to the general public, and will only serve to confuse the issue. If, however, a more scholarly audience is intended, Bloom should have more carefully referenced his text instead of simply dropping the names in--so that an interested scholar or student could find those works to which he refers. I teach my students in my Freshman Composition classes that knowing one's audience is quite important in the process of writing. As the Distinguished Univeristy Professor of Humanities at Yale University, Bloom ought to know this himself. He seems, however, to have forgotten it in this book.
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Summary: Why is everyone threatened by Harold Bloom?
Review: I've read the book of course, and I've read reviews of the book in various mags and such. I'm astounded by the amount of comments that sound like this: "You don't have to agree with him; what's important is that you go back to the texts", or, "Bloom too often derides political correctness" . . . What's wrong with deriding political correctness? It clearly needs to be derided, and thank God Harold Bloom is here to do it. And, as far as not agreeing with Bloom and simply going back to the plays, I daresay that one needs to read "Invention of the Human" first before reading Shakespeare. In the dreadful cultural climate of 1998, an average reader doubtlessly brings an assortment of wrong-headed baggage to such sublime works of art. Read Bloom's new book: it will not only teach you how to read Shakespeare, but will teach you how to read, period. BTW, for all you defenders of the REAL Western Canon, out there, prepare to rejoice. To paraphrase the Bard: "Now gods, stand up for literary elitists!" --- Genius Rules ---
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Summary: a narcissistic fraud, self-serving and arrogant
Review: I'm afraid I have to rain on the parade. Without notes, bibliography, or index, this overlong book seems like the scarcely edited lecture notes of a teacher who has been saying the same things for too long. Bloom is interested only in character-not in poetry, structure, meaning, drama, or genre. And his account of character consists not of analysis but of tiresomely repeated praise or censure based largely on how much a particular character resembles Bloom. The idea that Shakespeare invented character--really the only idea in 745 pages--ignores Greek drama, Homer, the Old Testament, and the Bard's own contemporaries. For all Bloom's pretence of bold originality, there is hardly an idea that doesn't come from someone else (often credited, just as often not). His contempt for every critical method but his own is mean-spirited. I share some of his prejudices,but in a book of this length I should have liked to see more justification for his position. The formulaic repetition of mantras about the same few charaters, the endlessly repeated account of Bloom's first encountering Ralph Richardson's Falstaff, the refusal to consider anything but character, the reiterated game of putting characters of one play into another, the endlessly recurring glorifications of Hamlet and Falstaff at the expense of virtually everyone else, the faillure to consider major characters like Hotspur, all bespeak lazy thinking and poor editing. A writer with less authority could never have got such a manuscript published. Bloom on Shakespeare is a shocking case of the emperor's new clothes, and I am sorry that so many have been taken in
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Summary: Stick to Shakespeare himself
Review: I have read a few positive reviews of this book, and the other amazon.com readers seemed to have liked it as well. I don't think that Bloom outdid himself in this book; in fact it is a travesty of Shakespeare. The basic thesis, that Shakespeare "invented the human personality" of course suggests that Professor Bloom and the rest of us somehow are fully human in a way that Dante or Homer or Sophocles or Socrates was not, something that I find difficult to see anyone taking seriously. Professor Bloom is more deeply human than Socrates and Homer, who lived before Shakespeare? The specific readings are awful: for example, Professor Bloom surmises, on what ground I don't know, that Brutus reached out to stab Caesar's "private parts." With such interpretations, Bloom is travestying Shakespeare as much as do the scholars who he says form the School of Resentment.
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Summary: Harold Bloom's new book!
Review: November 2nd, today, I was in the store where I initially picked up The Western Canon so long ago, and I remembered a rumor that Bloom was writing a book on Shakespeare. I read Omens of Millenium to tide me over- Bloom is probably the only writer alive whose new book release I care about. He and perhaps Saul Bellow I consider the only sane men left in literature, let alone academia. As a youth who has actually READ since childhood, in the despair of listening to feminist-ideologues fail me as a propagandist when I desist from embracing communism, I thank God for this book; even as a momento of poetry, that it existed, and that someone else believed it did. It is not even that miraculous of a book, and I don't think it is intended to be. Any intelligent man has read these insights and more into Shakespeare; an educated man has spent some time, his youth or old age, living with Shakespeare. No, this is a guide to Shakespeare for the insane. Was there more sanity, this book would be meaningless. Instead it is everything. Sincerely, William Lyon
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Summary: Fascinating!
Review: Bloom out does himself in what will rank among the best of all critical intepretations of Shakespeare ever. Dizzying and dazzling.
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Summary: A MUST READ BOOK.
Review: Bloom's book is stimulating, more for its verve than for its accuracy (e.g., he somehow finds that Othello and Desdemona never had sex!). Writing on Shakespeare is notoriously difficult, as the critic himself has noted in the past, although this has not kept a great number from trying. And let us remember that even the great Samuel Johnson had some totally off things to say about Macbeth and King Lear. I would ultimately give this book a thumbs-up. What this book does do, and that in a sense is enough when it comes to Shakespeare, is to send us back to the plays themselves with renewed enthusiasm.
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Summary: Idiosyncratic, But Always Fascinating
Review: Harold Bloom's book "Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human" is not a book which carefully follows the plot of each play and delineates the characters. Instead, it represents Bloom's insight into the characters he finds most unique and those with the most complex and changing personalities, or as Bloom says, with the most "inwardness." His mission is to highlight Shakespeare's great accomplishment in the "invention of the human" personality. One does not necessarily have to accept Bloom's belief, as to the degree that Shakespearean literature has made us what we are, to be fascinated by what he says. But, one would have to be brain-dead not to find great insight into the world of Shakespeare from a reading of this work. Bloom will upset those who have attained their understanding of Shakespeare from the School of Resentment, ie, the radical feminists, the pseudo-Marxists, and the followers of Foucault and his ilk as he makes quick work of their absurdities. Bloom shows how Shakespeare's greatest characters "reconceive themselves" through new modes of consciousness and, through his characters, Shakespeare has taught us to understand human nature. He reveals that for "Hamlet, the self is an abyss, the chaos of virtual nothingness. For Falstaff, the self is everything." "Shakespeare teaches us how and what to perceive." Bloom consistently reveals how "the uncanniness of nihilism haunts almost every play" as Shakespeare's characters deal with who they are in a world that threatens us with internal emptiness. Human relationships, familial love, the struggle between the sexes, passion and value systems are all thrown into question. More than any other, Shakespeare has taught us to take a deep look at the human condition. This is the essence of Bloom's thinking. In sum, this is not the "essential" Shakespearean commentary. But, it is a fascinating and insightful work that should be read.
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