"Personality, in our sense, is a Shakespearean invention, and is not only Shakespeare's greatest originality but also the authentic cause of his perpetual pervasiveness." So Harold Bloom opines in his outrageously ambitious Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human. This is a titanic claim. But then this is a titanic book, wrought by a latter-day critical colossus--and before Bloom is done with us, he has made us wonder whether his vision of Shakespeare's influence on the whole of our lives might not be simply the sober truth. Shakespeare is a feast of arguments and insights, written with engaging frankness and affecting immediacy. Bloom ranges through the Bard's plays in the probable order of their composition, relating play to play and character to character, maintaining all the while a shrewd grasp of Shakespeare's own burgeoning sensibility.

It is a long and fascinating itinerary, and one littered with thousands of sharp insights. Listen to Bloom on Romeo and Juliet: "The Nurse and Mercutio, both of them audience favorites, are nevertheless bad news, in different but complementary ways." On The Merchant of Venice: "To reduce him to contemporary theatrical terms, Shylock would be an Arthur Miller protagonist displaced into a Cole Porter musical, Willy Loman wandering about in Kiss Me Kate." On As You Like It: "Rosalind is unique in Shakespeare, perhaps indeed in Western drama, because it is so difficult to achieve a perspective upon her that she herself does not anticipate and share." Bloom even offers some belated vocational counseling to Falstaff, identifying him as an Elizabethan Mr. Chips: "Falstaff is more than skeptical, but he is too much of a teacher (his true vocation, more than highwayman) to follow skepticism out to its nihilistic borders, as Hamlet does."

In the end, it doesn't matter very much whether we agree with all or any of these ideas. What does matter is that Bloom's capacious book sends us hurrying back to some of the central texts of our civilization. "The ultimate use of Shakespeare," the author asserts, "is to let him teach you to think too well, to whatever truth you can sustain without perishing." Bloom himself has made excellent use of his hero's instruction, and now he teaches us all to do the same. --Daniel Hintzsche


From Publishers Weekly
In some ways the crowning achievement of the controversial Yale critic's career (which has produced The Anxiety of Influence; The Book of J; etc.), this sweeping monograph devotes an essay to each of the plays, emphasizing their originality and their influence on subsequent literature, feeling and thought. The result is a series of brilliant, persuasive, highly idiosyncratic readings punctuated by attacks on current Shakespeare criticism and performance. The ratio of screed to reading is blessedly low; although Bloom has kept his common touch, one feels that he has ceased the play to the peanut gallery that made The Western Canon a cause c?l?bre. The leitmotif of Shakespeare's "invention of the human," i.e., of the changeable, individual human character, is a useful through-line to the essays but never highjacks them as Bloom's critical tropes sometimes do. Other extravagant claimsAthat Shakespeare wrote an early version of Hamlet between 1589 and '93, or that the playwright may have lived in physical terror of his street-tough rival MarloweAmay raise eyebrows, but they will not matter to readers who need this book. Those readers fall into two categories: performers and everyone who studies Shakespeare outside the academy. For the latter, Bloom is an ideal cicerone: a passionate, sensitive reader who tempers his irreverent common sense with an even-more-instructive stance of awe. And no criticAnot even Bloom's masters A.C. Bradley or Harold GoddardAwrites as well for actors and directors, or understands as clearly the performability of the plays. Indeed, it is a great pity that Bloom has not followed the example of Helen Vendler's recent edition of the sonnets and included a recording of his own recitations. BOMC main. Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From Library Journal
All libraries should own this latest work of scholarship by noted critic Bloom (humanities, Yale Univ./NYU), author of The Western Canon (LJ 9/1/94). Here he examines every play by Shakespeare, touching briefly on issues of attribution and chronology and then offering a new thesisAthat Shakespeare invented character and personality. Before Shakespeare, Bloom maintains, literature was full of one-dimensional figuresAthink of Medea and compare her personality and characterization to that of Lady Macbeth. The plays are arranged in groups (the early comedies to the late romances), but each play receives its own in-depth treatment; the argument is strongest in the essays on Hamlet and Falstaff. Bloom's analysis is much more than guidance for the befuddled undergraduate or season ticket holderAreaders will need to be familiar with at least the rough outline of a play in order to follow much of what Bloom argues. This is a challenging, well-argued, and quite entertaining book that will leave readers both agreeing with and arguing against its thesis.ANeal Wyatt, Chesterfield Cty. P.L., VACopyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.


The New York Times Book Review, James Shapiro
You don't have to swallow Bloom's argument whole ... to value his local insights. The most exhilarating observations ... have the quality of aphorisms.


The Wall Street Journal, Jonathan Bate
It is a huge cloak-bag of ideas, stuffed with true wisdom and false bombast in equal measure. It breaks the rules, but demands to be forgiven because it is alive and full of magnanimity. It is a feast.


The New York Times, Michiko Kakutani
It is a fiercely argued exegesis of Shakespeare's plays in the tradition of Samuel Johnson, Hazlitt and A.C. Bradley, a study that is as passionate as it is erudite, as provocative as it is sometimes perverse.... [I]t's hard not to be impressed by his overall knowledge of and insight into his subject's work.


From Booklist
In The Western Canon (1994), Bloom aired the notion that Shakespeare "invented us." Now he surveys the plays to lay out evidence for that extraordinary claim. He revives a tradition that all but died early in this century: considering the plays' characters as the most fruitful way of reading Shakespeare. What obtains instead these days, and what Bloom occasionally mocks for its faddish inconsequentiality, is the conceit that Shakespeare's characters do not matter and neither, very much, does Shakespeare, who is just a name for a set of forces drawn into a nexus at a particular moment and place. Criticism reflecting that position gushes from academia, whereas a book like Bloom's is rare. Is it convincing? Bloom's thesis is that Shakespeare, who is much greater than any other writer and much more intelligent than any thinker in any discipline, invented what we define as personality by inventing characters of unlimited depth, interiority, and self-creation. Only Chaucer comes close to doing this before Shakespeare, and Shakespeare's contemporaries show nothing of his confounding of art and nature. Freud, in such a view, just plagiarizes Shakespeare, as do we all. Bloom can go on a little too long about Falstaff, whom he admires more than all other Shakespearean characters, but so brilliant, so probing is his criticism that he virtually compels the reader to test his thesis by rereading the plays with equal dedication. This is pure Bloom, delightful and provocative, literary criticism at its very finest--and a Book-of-the-Month Club main selection. Stuart Whitwell


From Kirkus Reviews
A magisterial survey of the Bard's complete dramatic oeuvre by the always stimulating author of The Western Canon (1994). Bloom (Humanities/Yale) accurately describes himself as ``Brontosaurus Bardolater, an archaic survival among Shakespearean critics.'' He unabashedly follows Samuel Johnson, William Hazlitt, and the great writer-critics of English Romanticism in concerning himself primarily with the dramatist as a peerless creator of characters and profound explorer of our deepest existential questions; he decries the ``School of Resentment'' (Bloom's blanket term for feminists, Marxists, deconstructionists, et al.) and high-concept modern directors, all of whom, he argues, interpret the plays in terms of historical particulars instead of universal truths. For Bloom, as the subtitle suggests, Shakespeare's greatest achievement was ``the inauguration of personality as we have come to recognize it . . . [he] will go on explaining us, because in part he invented us.'' This emphasis makes the author an engaging explicator of the comedies, histories, and some aspects of the tragedies, which all feature personalities remarkable for their ``inwardness''; his masterpieces are the discussions of the anguished, antic skeptic Hamlet and the jovial pragmatist Falstaff, whom he claims as ``the fullest representations of human possibility in Shakespeare.'' Bloom is less effective with late works like The Winter's Tale, in which the Bard largely abandoned psychological realism in favor of a visionary mood that seems to make the critic uncomfortable. Philosophically, Bloom stresses the nihilism that animates Shakespearean villains and torments many protagonists; he tends to underrate the moments of hard-won reconciliation that close many of the plays. In short, the author offers a personal view with inevitable omissions and weaknesses (unnecessary repetition and gratuitous polemics against political correctness among them). Nonetheless, this is a splendid book: elegantly written, scholarly yet accessible, radiant with Bloom's love for Shakespeare in particular and literature in general. Less interesting as a salvo in the ongoing culture wars than as an old-fashioned exercise in narrative criticism for the general reader and, as such, very nearly perfect. (Book-of-the-Month Club main selection) -- Copyright ©1998, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.


Book Description
The New York Times bestseller from Harold Bloom...

A National Book Award Finalist, National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist, a New York Times Notable Book of the Year, and a Publishers Weekly best book of the year.

"The indispensable critic on the indispensable writer."--Geoffrey O'Brien, New York Review of Books

A landmark achievement as expansive, erudite, and passionate as its renowned author, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human is the culmination of a lifetime of reading, writing about, and teaching Shakespeare. Preeminent literary critic Harold Bloom leads us through a comprehensive reading of every one of the dramatist's plays, brilliantly illuminating each work with unrivaled warmth, wit and insight. At the same time, Bloom presents one of the boldest theses of Shakespearean scholarships--that Shakespeare not only invented the English language, but also created human nature as we know it today.

* A New York Times bestseller
* A National Book Award Finalist
* A National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist
* A New York Times Notable Book
* One of Publishers Weekly's Best Books of the Year
* A Main Selection of the Book-of-the-Month Club
* An ALA Booklist Editors Choice for 1998
* The culmination of Bloom's celebrated career--a long-awaited, complete assessment of his most beloved subject
* Includes in-depth readings of every Shakespeare play
* An essential reference volume for every home and school library

"A huge cloak-bag of ideas...It is a feast."--Wall Street Journal

"An enraptured, incantatory epic...dazzling...You could hardly ask for a more capacious and beneficent work than Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human."--The New Yorker

"A fiercely argued exegesis of Shakespeare's plays in the tradition of Samuel Johnson, Hazlitt, and A.C. Bradley, a study that is as passionate as it is erudite." --Michiko Kakutani, New York Times

"Bloom has given us the crowning achievement of his career...If any piece of literary criticism can have a practical effect--on our stage and imaginations--this is the one."--Salon

"Should this be the one book you read if you're going to read one book about Shakespeare? Yes."--The New York Observer

"Bloom...is a master entertainer." --Newsweek

"Very nearly perfect."--Kirkus


Card catalog description
Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human is an analysis of the central work of the Western canon, and of the playwright who not only invented the English language, but also, as Bloom argues, created human nature as we know it today. Before Shakespeare there was characterization; after Shakespeare, there were characters, men and women capable of change, with highly individual personalities. Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human is a companion to Shakespeare's work, and just as much an inquiry into what it means to be human. It explains why Shakespeare has remained our most popular and universal dramatist for more than four centuries, and in helping us to better understand ourselves through Shakespeare, it restores the role of the literary critic to one of central importance in our culture.


About the Author
Harold Bloom is Sterling Professor of Humanities at Yale University, Berg professor of English at New York University, and a former Charles Eliot Norton Professor at Harvard. The author of more than twenty books, including the bestselling The Western Canon, Omens of Millennium, and The Book of J, he is a MacArthur Prize fellow, a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the recipient of many awards and honorary degrees.

The New York Times has called him "Man of the Millennium."

FROM OUR EDITORS

The Shakespearean Canon

Where do personality and character come from? You may think they come from your parents, or you may think they come from God. If you belong to the "School of Resentment" Harold Bloom loves to deride, you may imagine character traits to be determined by one's location on the matrix of race, class, and gender. Whatever your position, chances are that you're wrong: Neither God nor family nor society invented you, but one William Shakespeare, "the man from Stratford." Such at least is the argument that literary critic Harold Bloom propounds in his typically audacious new book, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human.

Shakespeare's plays remain, for Bloom, "the fixed center of the Western canon" because "their influence upon life has been nearly as enormous as their effect upon post-Shakespearean literature." Not only literary characters but we ourselves derive from Shakespeare: "Had Shakespeare been murdered at twenty-nine, like Christopher Marlowe...we all of us might be gamboling about, but without mature Shakespeare we would be very different, because we would think and feel and speak differently." Certainly some of Shakespeare's figures are mere caricatures, but as Bloom traces Shakespeare's career, moving more or less chronologically through each of the 39 plays and infusing literary criticism with an unusual narrative force, we see the playwright progressing from such two-dimensional screens of inspired rhetoric as Richard III, who "has no inwardness," to the solidity of A Midsummer Night's Dream's Bottom the Weaver, and finally to the run of bottomlessly real and living characters that commences with Falstaff in Henry IV, Part One and concludes with the eponymous principals of Antony and Cleopatra. After the astonishing 14 consecutive months in which he composed King Lear, Macbeth, and Antony and Cleopatra, even Shakespeare, Bloom suggests, "was wary of further quests into the interior." Shakespeare depicts and creates the "interior" of the great characters through what Bloom calls their "self-overhearing," their self-conscious monitoring of the always-shifting relationship between what they say and what they do and are. "Iago and Edmund [the villains of Othello and King Lear, respectively] are the most Shakespearean characters because in them, and by them, the radical gap between words and actions is most fully exploited." Into this gap rushes meaning, and personality.

"The dominant Shakespearean characters," Bloom insists, "are extraordinary instances not only of how meaning gets started, rather than repeated, but also of how new modes of consciousness come into being." Whatever our own mode of consciousness, it was probably inaugurated by Shakespeare. Shakespeare thus turns out to have invented, say, Newt Gingrich or Harold Bloom: "Newt is a parody of Gratiano in The Merchant of Venice and Bloom a parody of Falstaff." This must surprise the Speaker of the House; it delights Bloom, and probably seems to him an instance of innocent Falstaffian self-love, for Falstaff is Bloom's favorite character in all Shakespeare. Even the extravagance of these somewhat silly claims can be seen in terms of Falstaffian exuberance.

Since Bloom approaches Shakespeare's work through character, his account of each play naturally centers on that play's most vivid personage. A Midsummer Night's Dream becomes Bottom's play; As You Like It would be better termed, to Bloom's mind, "As Rosalind Likes It"; and the Henry IV plays belong, of course, to Bloom's beloved Falstaff, the fat, jesting, impossibly intelligent knight. Falstaff is "a great vitalist," teaching us "the perfection and virtual divinity of knowing how to enjoy our being rightfully." Fat Jack refuses to grow old and insists that, for all his white hair and rolls of fat, he has not aged a day in his life: "My lord, I was born about three of the clock in the afternoon, with a white head, and something of a round belly." Bloom refuses to see such a figure as mere words upon a page. Falstaff creates us, not we him. And so real is Falstaff to Bloom that Prince Hal's rejection of the fat knight seems to grieve deeply the literature professor.

Still, for all Bloom's emphasis on "the invention of the human," his insights are not exclusively characterological. And despite his own preference for Falstaffian gusto, Bloom does not shy away from recognizing the darkness of so much of Shakespeare. "The authentic Shakespearean litany," Bloom observes, "chants variations on the word 'nothing,' and the uncanniness of nihilism haunts almost every play, even the great, relatively unmixed comedies." Bloom's last big book, The Western Canon, was joyously received by cultural conservatives, but his account in the new book of King Lear can hardly give comfort to trumpeters of "family values": "Shakespeare's intimation is that the only authentic love is between parents and children, yet the prime consequence of such love is only devastation." For Bloom, the reason to read Shakespeare is not that he will make us happy or wise. We must read Shakespeare because he has already made us, just as we are.

Shakespeare: The Inventionof the Human is a delightfully against-the-grain book. It revives the Great Man Theory of History while at the same time dispensing with any notion of literature's moral usefulness. In an age in which few people have time for poetry, it flouts Auden's claim that "poetry makes nothing happen." Poetry, it turns out, can make everything happen.

—Benjamin Kunkel

FROM THE PUBLISHER

The New York Times bestseller from Harold Bloom...

A National Book Award Finalist, National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist, a New York Times Notable Book of the Year, and a Publishers Weekly best book of the year.

"The indispensable critic on the indispensable writer."--Geoffrey O'Brien, New York Review of Books

A landmark achievement as expansive, erudite, and passionate as its renowned author, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human is the culmination of a lifetime of reading, writing about, and teaching Shakespeare. Preeminent literary critic Harold Bloom leads us through a comprehensive reading of every one of the dramatist's plays, brilliantly illuminating each work with unrivaled warmth, wit and insight. At the same time, Bloom presents one of the boldest theses of Shakespearean scholarships--that Shakespeare not only invented the English language, but also created human nature as we know it today.

* A New York Times bestseller
* A National Book Award Finalist
* A National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist
* A New York Times Notable Book
* One of Publishers Weekly's Best Books of the Year
* A Main Selection of the Book-of-the-Month Club
* An ALA Booklist Editors Choice for 1998
* The culmination of Bloom's celebrated career--a long-awaited, complete assessment of his most beloved subject
* Includes in-depth readings of every Shakespeare play
* An essential reference volume for every home and school library

"A huge cloak-bag of ideas...It is a feast."--Wall Street Journal

"An enraptured, incantatory epic...dazzling...You could hardly ask for a more capacious and beneficent work than Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human."--The New Yorker

"A fiercely argued exegesis of Shakespeare's plays in the tradition of Samuel Johnson, Hazlitt, and A.C. Bradley, a study that is as passionate as it is erudite." --Michiko Kakutani, New York Times

"Bloom has given us the crowning achievement of his career...If any piece of literary criticism can have a practical effect--on our stage and imaginations--this is the one."--Salon

"Should this be the one book you read if you're going to read one book about Shakespeare? Yes."--The New York Observer

"Bloom...is a master entertainer." --Newsweek

"Very nearly perfect."--Kirkus

SYNOPSIS

Remember the controversy attending the publication of The Western Canon? Well, hold on to your mortarboards -- critic, scholar, and Falstaffian gadfly Harold Bloom returns with his magnum opus, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human. Whether deriding the tenets of the so-called "School of Resentment" or trumpeting the 39 plays of William Shakespeare as "the fixed center of the Western canon," Bloom is here at his audacious best, offering a passionate analysis of the ways Shakespeare not only represented human nature as we know it today but actually created it. Infusing literary criticism with an unusual narrative force, Bloom helps us to understand ourselves through literature, revealing "not only of how meaning gets started...but also of how new modes of consciousness come into being."

FROM THE CRITICS

Newsweek

Bloom..is a master entertainer and proselytizer....We get a thrill of recognition when Bloom articulates what we hadn't quite known we'd known.

Jodie Morse - Time Magazine

Bloom may feel spent after 745 pages, but his essays will energize readers to go right out and pick up -- or see -- a play.

James Wood - The New Republic

...[A]n excellent work of popular criticism, overflowing with Bloom's personality, and often acute about Shakespeare's art.

Michiko Kakutani - The New York Times

. . .[B]est read as an old-fashioned humanistic commentary . ..that gives us a renewed appreciation of the playwright's staggering achievement. . .[and] points up limitations. . . .It is . . .a study that is as passionate as it is erudite, as provocative as it is perverse.

James Shapiro - The New York Times Book Review

Had Bloom, one of the most gifted of contemporary critics, stuck to the plays and characters that he deeply understands, this book would have been a third as long and far more compelling. Read all 13 "From The Critics" >

WHAT PEOPLE ARE SAYING

Harold Bloom