Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human by Harold Bloom

Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human Reviews

• 
  Leonard Gaya

  I must humbly confess that I had to stop halfway this heavy slumber-driven brick-book. In the end, I am not sure whether or not Shakespeare did “invent the human” as the title grandiosely seems to claim. However, I am quite sure that, with a few lines, like those spoken by Holofernes in
  Love's Labour's Lost, he did invent Harold Bloom.
• 
  M. D. Hudson

  I dimly remember when this book came out (1998) how big and important and controversial it was supposed to be. Given Harold Bloom’s prodigious reputation, I was afraid of the thing, and so avoided it, figuring it to be fraught with lit theory of the densest sort. A couple years ago I found a copy dirt-cheap at some thrift store or another and its fat binding has glowered at me from the shelves since. A few weeks ago I decided to give it a try and found it to be a piece o’ cake, mostly.
  
  To be fair about it, I am somewhat prejudiced against Bloom. There was always something of the legacy-monger about him, as follows: Once upon a time, an ambitious non-creative man of letters established himself in the literary firmament with a vast and complicated body of theory, the “anxiety of influence,” a quasi-Freudian concept whereby writers are primarily motivated by a frantic, anxious desire to overcome their elders (no doubt I am grossly oversimplifying a theory of terrifying complexity – I spent about seven minutes with the book in question about fifteen years ago, so I do not know much about it). This theory was elaborated from the late-1950s to the early-1970s, when a Freudian reading of literature was pretty much ala mode in American letters. By the 1970s, his “anxiety of influence” theory had made Bloom’s reputation, and Bloom probably thought he had the culture by the balls. But as it turns out, by the 1980s, the French and the feminists and the post-structuralists were deconstructing and whatnot while Freud became increasingly debunked. Bloom had secured Ivy League tenure by then, but intellectually he’d backed the wrong horse – his Freudian reading of literature had about as much relevance as phrenology. Bloom’s “anxiety of influence” had become part of the academic mold from whence sprang far fresher toadstools of theory. Or, to wax Shakespearian, the “anxiety of influence” is but one of lit crit’s “whoreson dead bodies” in the academic graveyard, fit only to be mocked by a clown like me.
  
  Which brings us to Bloom’s sea change: apparently realizing the sterility of a purely academic approach to literature, coupled with the fact his own theory-mongering was no longer of much importance, Bloom decided to try and turn himself into a real man of letters. And to his credit, Bloom resisted the siren wail of the theorists, what he calls The School of Resentment. And yet I find his later man o’ letters manifestations to be suspect. For one thing, in order to stay intellectually spooky, he refers to himself as a “Jewish Gnostic” (according to Wikipedia). I thought this was a little sad, sort of like those Loonie Toons episodes where we see Wile E. Coyote’s mailbox with “GENIUS” scrawled across it. Bloom’s gnosticism gained him some fans, and he even wrote a sci-fi novel along Gnostic lines (again, Wikipedia – I had no idea!). As Robert Frost said, one should never refer to oneself as a “poet,” just as you would never call yourself a “hero.” Other people can call you “poet” or “hero,” but never call yourself those things. Perhaps “Gnostic” should be added to the list.
  
  And yet Harold Bloom is the gnostic professor who came in from the cold: it seems Bloom craved a broad, cultural relevance. My guess is that the other Bloom – Allan – and his c. 1987 astonishing success with “Closing of the American Mind” goaded H. Bloom into engaging directly with America’s “pocky corse” of a decaying culture. His first descent from the skyey firmament academia was his book “The Western Canon” and its controversial list of what books are worth bothering with. A few years later came this book, which tells us how important Shakespeare is in a startling new and exciting way. Now of course Shakespeare has been picked over more than any writer in existence, so Bloom had to come up with an angle. And so Shakespeare is now not only the greatest writer of all time, or even the most remarkable all-round genius, he also actually invented “the human.” Thus the kerfluffles and the tiny furrowed brows of woe that descended upon the culture back in 1998.
  
  ***
  
  Now on to the book. First off, as far as it goes, the title of the book is indeed controversial: to state any writer (or anybody at all) invented “the human” still strikes me as preposterous. As for this being a theory coherently developed by Harold Bloom, Shakespeare’s “invention of the human” consists almost entirely of Harold Bloom telling us, again and again, that, well, Shakespeare invented the human. This passage, from the “Othello” section, is pretty much how it goes, over and over and over:
  
  “A. C. Bradley, an admirable critic always, named Falstaff, Hamlet, Iago, and Cleopatra as Shakespeare’s “most wonderful” characters. If I could add Rosalind and Macbeth to make a sixfold wonder, then I would agree with Bradley, for these are Shakespeare’s greatest inventions, and all of them take human nature to some of its limits, without violating these limits. Falstaff’s wit, Hamlet’s ambivalent yet charismatic intensity, Cleopatra’s mobility of spirit find their rivals in Macbeth’s proleptic imagination, Rosalind’s control of all perspectives, and Iago’s genius for improvisation…” (p. 439)
  
  There it is, most of the Falstaffian bulk of this book, bounded in a nutshell – at least the theoretical part, if this can be called a theory: to suggest Shakespeare took “human nature to some of its limits” is hardly controversial or much beyond a bright eighth-grader’s book report on “Macbeth.” What I thought the book was going to be an elaborate lit crit exercise in proof-mongering is little more than this kind of tub-thumping. Throughout the book you’ll find variations of this passage: the recitation of the “sixfold wonder” and sketchily-supported claims of human nature to “its limits.” A. C. Bradley is frequently invoked with approval, as is Dr. Johnson, Nietzsche and William Hazlett. But T. S. Eliot and G. B. Shaw coming in for periodic drubbings.
  
  To say Shakespeare “invented the human” makes him paradoxically less than human. It reminds me of those people who say Hitler was a “monster.” Adolph Hitler was not a monster, he was a human being, which makes him all that much worse. William Shakespeare was a human being with serious sexual jealousy issues and a real genius for language that developed over the course of his career – which makes him all that much more…human.
  
  ***
  
  Throughout the book are frequent references Bloom’s “anxiety of influence,” although he never quite calls it that. But little reminders of this Bloomsian anxiety are salted throughout the text; you’ll nose them as you go through the book whenever you encounter the adjective “Marlovean,” which refers to Shakespeare’s anxiety and terror of Christopher Marlowe’s reputation; it is only until Shakespeare throws off Marlowe’s influence (around the time of “Romeo and Juliet” or the “Henry IV’s”) that Shakespeare truly becomes Shakespeare, so we’re told, again and again. Although spends considerable time, in fits and starts, on this Marlovean theme, it never really goes anywhere. It's as if Bloom wants to keep a claim staked for his earliest theoretical works without drawing too much attention to its rather creaky claims of Freudian relevance. To further distance himself from his roots, every fifty pages or so he ungraciously mentions Sigmund Freud with arch disapproval.
  
  Sometimes Bloom’s academic roots show; decades of theory-mongering has seemingly warped his prose. When he tries to write like a man o’ letters, his prose is far too pedestrian, while his academic stuff is too academic. To illustrate, here is an academic bit from his “Richard II” discussion:
  
  “Shakespeare did not invent the dignity of men and women, despite Renaissance enhancements, some of them Hermetic, that vision had developed across millennia. But aesthetic dignity, though not itself a Shakespearean phrase, is certainly as Shakespearean invention, as it the double nature of such dignity. It either coheres with human dignity, or survives isolated when the greater dignity is lost… (p. 269)
  
  An example of “Renaissance enhancements” would be helpful, Hermetic or otherwise. We are told Shakespeare invented the human, but not human dignity, which has a double nature of some sort. Perhaps something profound is being said here, but I’ll be buggered if I can figure it out. We are “knock’d about the mazzard with a sexton’s spade” of abstraction, but not provided with enough to incorporate it into the rest of the discussion. You might notice in the passage above, the word “proleptic,” which is one of Bloom’s favorites, and it is used, especially in the “King Lear” section, with alarming, almost Tourette’s Syndromesque, frequency. “Proleptic” means either “the representation or assumption of a future act or development as being presently existing or accomplished” or “a figure by which by which objections are anticipated in order to weaken their force,” or “a conception or belief derived from sense perception and therefore regarded as not necessarily true.” There are a couple other definitions as well; I never was able to tell just which one Bloom had in mind and grew weary, finally, of trying to figure it out. The book is riddled with such theoretical dry rot and proleptic verbal tics.
  
  When he is not formulating academic abstractions, Bloom awkwardly stoops. And so in the stuff he tries to conjure up for us middlebrows, Bloom will toss off stuff like this: “Johnson was massively right; something inhibited Shakespeare.” (p. 115). Here’s another random example, which I found after exactly four seconds of randomly searching for a good example:
  
  “Critics regularly have called Sir John one of the lords of language, which beggars him: he is the veritable monarch of language, unmatched whether elsewhere in Shakespeare or in all of Western literature. His superbly supple and copious prose is astonishingly attractive…” (p. 294).
  
  What serious critic in the past 40 years would call anyone a “lord of language”? This is just silly, and it demonstrates how Bloom always has to have an adversary, and the book is loaded with this kind of huffing and puffing against his dimwitted, often unnamed and perhaps imaginary, adversaries. Then there is the Bloomsian hyperbole – I mean, heck, somebody somewhere might suggest James Joyce or Goethe are “veritable monarchs of language.” Or are they merely “lords of language”? This isn’t literary criticism so much as it is rhetorical afflatus masquerading as criticism and far too much of the book is made up of the stuff. As for “supple and copious prose” I sort of understand the “supple” bit, but “copious” is hardly a virtue. This is blurb-writing, and Shakespeare doesn’t need any blurbs these days. It’s the kind of slack crap found in my Goodreads reviews. Hardly fit stuff for an actual work of criticism from a real critic.
  
  Along the same lines, Bloom’s traumatic theatrical experiences are given a lot of space in this book. He tells us again and again how crushed he is by the thousands of Shakespearean stagings he has seen over the past 60 years – apparently Ralph Richardson’s Falstaff is the only competent Bard on the Boards he has ever seen. As for movie versions, forget it – he hates ‘em all, pretty much. Nowadays, even on stage, Shakespeare is acted and directed so poorly that, alas, Bloom finds it best just to read ‘em on the page. Again and again he tells us this. It is, after all, a very fat book.
  
  Bloom has a few Shakespearean quirks which tend to undermine his authority. He seems to be one of the few people who believe Shakespeare actually wrote the third-rate “A Funeral Elegy for Master William Peter,” the authorship of which was supposedly “proven” by linguistic forensic “scientist” Donald Foster (who apparantly has since rejected his own findings). Bloom also thinks Cormac McCarthy’s character Judge Holden from “Blood Meridian” is the only literary character as terrifying as Iago. See my review of “Blood Meridian” for what I think of that particular bit of nonsense. The theoretical Old Testament writer “J” is constantly brought forth as one of Shakespeare’s few fellow geniuses, this “J” being, of course, the basis of one of Bloom’s books (gotta keep that legacy out there so nobody forgets!). Bloom also believes that the mysterious “Ur-Hamlet” was actually written by Shakespeare (rather than some hack such as Thomas Kyd) – it might perhaps even be Shakespeare’s very first play, a failure which he rewrote (successfully, I might add) some years later. Actually, I find this theory kind of compelling, although as with so many other things in this book, Bloom merely asserts it (over and over again) rather than trying really to prove it. I am happy to report Bloom doesn’t think the Earl of Oxford really wrote the plays.
  
  Far more annoying are those times Bloom insists on telling us how much he suffers for his appreciation of Shakespeare, and how he is assailed by a sea of knuckleheads: “As perhaps the last High Romantic Bardolator…” (p. 79) he’ll say, referring to his beleaguered self, the term “Bardolator” and “Bardolatry” apparently having once struck him as screamingly clever. Here is one that will make you throw up in your mouth a little bit: “As Bloom Brontosaurus Bardolater, an archaic survival among Shakespearean critics, I do not hesitate to find an immense personal bitterness in “Timon of Athens”… (p. 589). These “bardolator” claims struck me as sad, pathetic attempts to establish a legacy for himself as the last of the humanists. Can you imagine Lionel Trilling making such claims? For all of Bloom’s agonies over our debased culture, his own ostensibly high-culture book too often descends to this kind of cheap self-satisfaction and advertising.
  
  “Shakespeare and the Invention of the Human,” despite the bombast of its title, is primarily one of those old-fashioned readers guides to the Bard that used to get issued from the eggheads at the university for the vast Time-magazine-reading middlebrows who once belonged to the Book of the Month Club. It just so happens I came across a copy of one such effort, “Shakespeare” by Mark Van Doren (1939, in a c. 1950s Doubleday Anchor paperback reprint) which is pretty much doing the same thing Bloom is, with more economy. As one of the Last of the Muddled Middlebrows (that’s my legacy!), I appreciate the effort – I love Shakespeare, but often find myself lost or baffled by the language and those awful overly-elaborate plots. And so I unapologetically read footnotes, cribs, guides, etc. Just out of curiosity, I read Bloom on “As You Like It,” then I reread the play itself, then I read Van Doren’s take. Both were competent guides to the overall action and themes of the play. To be sure, Bloom is windier (pp. 202-225) than Van Doren (pp. 127-135). Van Doren had, I thought, more penetrating things to say about Touchstone; Bloom seemed to me rather incoherent on the clown. Van Doren’s prose is old-fashioned and florid (making it an unlikely candidate for a reissue), but Bloom’s regular-guy approach is awkward, often pointlessly prolix when not obfuscated by habitual academic abstractions and blatant advertisements for his own brilliance.
  
  ****
  
  And yet…By the time I got to the end of the book, despite its flaws, I had warmed up to it considerably. For all his self-aggrandizement and academic harrumphing, Bloom’s book does have its virtues. If nothing else, Bloom’s quotes from other sources are generally quite interesting and to-the-point – I especially admired the Hazlett, Dr. Johnson, and Nietzsche quotes (I did not realize Nietzsche took such notice of Shakespeare). To some extent these quotes unintentionally show up the banality of Bloom’s prose, but I am glad for my own edification Bloom included them. Bloom’s love of Shakespeare, despite the fact he feels compelled to explain it to us (okay, okay, you are a Bardolator), is obviously genuine. Bloom is a smart guy who has spent a lot of time with Shakespeare, and much of the book is a competent reader’s guide with a fair amount of competent historical and biographical backgrounding. There are a couple of plays that I either never read or particularly cared for on stage that Bloom changed my mind about (“Richard II” and “Midsummer Night’s Dream” in particular). His take on the late plays (“Corolianus” and “Winter’s Tale” etc.) are sympathetic and convincing (the last sections of the book are less bombastic than the earlier bits).
  
  Still, I wish Bloom were a better writer. For all its Falstaffian bulk, this is a fairly light book and it made me pine for Jarrell, Frank Kermode, Eliot, Trilling and other pre-theory critics of the not-so-distant past. These guys knew how to write! Which is to say that perhaps the most damning thing I can say about it is that I never once felt compelled to single out and save any of Bloom’s passages. Some of his ideas were worth a folded-down corner, and some of the works he quotes, but nothing he actually composed rose to the level of the quotable. My copies of Eliot’s “The Lives of the Poets” and all of Jarrell’s books of criticism, and Trilling’s “The Liberal Imagination” are dogeared and underlined a lot. I think this was supposed to be canonical, or at least the anchor to some future folio called “The Workes of Harold Bloome, Agnostick Doctor,” and although it had potential for such status, given Bloom’s mind and his love for Shakespeare, it doesn’t make it. It is too hasty, too repetitive, too herky-jerky in its academic vs. middelbrow aims. To some extent, Bloom makes the same basic mistake Clive James made with his “Cultural Amnesia” (which I reviewed for GoodReads): he wants to complain about our culture and its declining standards, and yet he does it in a sketchy, poorly-written fashion that leads the reader to wonder if Bloom and James are part of the problem rather than staunch defenders of the faith during the sad dissolution of Western Civ.
  
  A few stray thoughts on the book’s overall organization and appearance: although the bulk of it is organized in a very straightforward play-by-play manner, on either end there are four separate bits of editorial Bloom: a “To the Reader” and “Shakespeare’s Universalism” at the front, then, after hundreds of pages of play-by-play discussion, two more pieces, “Coda: the Shakespearean Difference” and “A Word at the End: Foregrounding.” Why didn’t Bloom just compose a single large piece on his approach? Beats me, but the way it is here, he’s like a guy on the telephone who can’t quite hang up. It also gave me the impression that this book was, like Gertrude’s wedding, o’er hasty. Furthermore, the fact “Shakespeare and the Invention of the Human” lacks an index is inexcusable given its author’s pretensions. The jacket illustration is Michaelangelo’s “Delphic Sibyl” for reasons I cannot fathom (Renaissance Hermeticism?). Finally, I hated the resolutely non-Renaissance san-serif type, which I found hard to read; I can’t tell you what exactly it is because books don’t carry those little dabs of font information anymore, apparently (“…Buttefucco Bold is based on a late-15th century Renaissance font designed by Josephus Buttefucco for a folio edition of Virgil…”). Whatever it is, it sucks.
  
  Some fifteen years later, is “Shakespeare and the Invention of the Human” still an “important” work? Maybe. Kinda. But probably nah. Which means, I guess, that Harold Bloom should still be anxious.
  
  
  
  
• 
  Roy Lotz

  This book is not quite as absurd as its title would seem to indicate. If anybody worshipped Shakespeare enough to think that the Bard literally did invent humanity, it would be Bloom. But Bloom’s primary thesis is the only slightly less grandiose claim that Shakespeare, by creating the most persuasively realistic mode of representing personality, shaped our ideas of what it means to be human. This at least falls within the realm of physical possibility.
  
  I quite like the idea of approaching Shakespeare this way, since it allows us to integrate literature into intellectual history. Surely, the great innovators in poetry, prose, and drama must have contributed to our understanding of the human psyche. And Shakespeare’s works may, indeed, represent a great leap in this respect. Unfortunately, Bloom—both by background and temper—is not really up to the task of substantiating this claim. A serious inquiry into Shakespeare’s novel modes of portraying the human would require a broad overview of Shakespeare’s predecessors. There is nothing of the kind in this book; Bloom instead gives us a series of commentaries on each of Shakespeare’s plays.
  
  For my part, I do agree with Bloom that Shakespeare’s greatest gift was his ability to endow his characters with startling depth. And if I can judge from my own reading, this was something quite new in the history of literature, though perhaps not quite as unique to Shakespeare as Bloom asserts. Montaigne and Cervantes—two near-contemporaries of Shakespeare—also portrayed shifting and unfolding characters, and by Bloom’s own admission Chaucer had encroached on this territory several hundred years earlier.
  
  In any case, establishing a claim for intellectual priority in inventing the human is not at all what this book is about. Instead, this book is a reader‘s guide, consisting of a close reading of Shakespeare’s 39 plays. The plays are grouped both chronologically and thematically, from the early comedies to the late romances. Bloom’s attention is admittedly uneven. To some of the minor works he devotes some ten pages or so, while Hamlet gets nearly fifty. In his approach, Bloom is a self-professed follower of Samuel Johnson, William Hazlitt, and A.C. Bradley—that is, mainly focusing on the character’s personalities and Shakespeare’s methods of representing them.
  
  As you may know, this approach has been out of intellectual fashion for quite some time. Indeed, in many ways Bloom was a deliberate stick in the mud. He was adamantly opposed to reading any kind of social, political, religious, or other message in the plays, and was mostly uninterested in how Shakespeare’s own historical context shaped the play’s content. He was an old-school champion of the autonomy of the aesthetic, of literary excellence existing in a realm apart from the rest of life. You can imagine that this is not especially popular nowadays, to say the least; and Bloom, never one to mince words, is constantly taking swipes at his fellow academics. For the casual reader, this is mostly just a distraction, since most of us just want to enjoy and understand the plays a little better.
  
  Any critic, however broad, will inevitably have strong and weak sections when dealing with a corpus as vast and varied as Shakespeare’s plays. Bloom is no different. I consistently found Bloom at his worst when he was at his most passionate. That is, whenever he felt called upon to rhapsodize over the Bard’s incomparable genius, the book devolved into a string of superlatives that did little to enrich my reading. Thus, ironically, this book is weakest when Shakespeare is at his strongest—particularly in the chapters on Hamlet, King Lear, and the Henry IV plays. Any attempt to analyze the brooding Prince of Denmark or the fat Sir John Falstaff—the Bard’s two greatest creations, according to Bloom—knocks him off his rocker.
  
  By contrast, many of the shorter chapters on Shakespeare’s slightly less famous works are quite strong. Bloom is at his best when he is doing the work of an uncommonly good common reader—that is, merely picking up the play and noting which sections are strong, weak, moving, interesting, disturbing, etc., and then trying to analyze why. This is basically what all of us try to do here on Goodreads, and it just so happens that Bloom is quite good at it. What he is not good at is moving beyond this close, sympathetic reading to arrive at a more general conclusion.
  
  Insofar as Bloom does have a general insight into Shakespeare’s mode of creating the human, it is the concept of self-overhearing. Unfortunately, Bloom does not elaborate on this idea very much, so it is difficult to know exactly what he means by it. As far as I can tell, the idea is that Shakespeare’s characters are never fully able to articulate what they think or feel, but their words always somehow one step behind their psyches. Put another way, Shakespeare’s characters experience a kind of self-alienation, forever trying and failing to fully articulate their own innermost selves. Thus, overhearing their own failed attempts at articulation cause them to change and grow, as they try to correct their own previous failures at self-revelation.
  
  I think this is quite an insightful way of looking at Shakespeare’s characters, and it does pinpoint something novel about Shakespeare’s mode of representation. In most fiction, the characters either articulate exactly what they think, or they articulate the exact opposite (when they are lying, or when they are supposed to be self-deluded). But Shakespeare’s characters are far more subtle than simply dishonest or even self-deluded personas. What they say is never exactly right nor exactly wrong, but forever on the cusp, just missing the mark; and this inability to ever get it exactly right drives the kind of verbal excess that marks Shakespeare’s most powerful speeches—poetry pushing toward the ineffable.
  
  And I do think that this captures something essential about us: that we can hardly ever articulate exactly what we think, how we feel, or what we want; and so there seems to be a disconnect between our innermost core and the outward selves we are able to project. Did Shakespeare first have this insight or did he just perfect its use in the theater? That is a question for a different kind of literary critic than Bloom.
  
  I am spending too much time on this issue of character—since it fascinates me—even though the real value of this book does not consist in its philosophical insights. This book is an excellent companion for reading Shakespeare’s plays, since it allows you to read them alongside a very opinionated, highly intelligent, and fiercely individual reader—which is always valuable.
• 
  Bobby Bermea

  Brilliant, infuriating, dazzling, provocative, maddening, thrilling and explosive. This book is not wonderful because Bloom is always right but because he always excites and challenges. Always. Page after page after page he brashly, almost recklessly tosses out hypotheses, makes thundering assertions as though they just came down from Mount Sinai, dismisses entire populations of artists, assumes fantastic responsibilities in society not just for the artist but for the critic and generally makes a nuisance of himself. He's fantastic. You can disagree with him but you'd better bring your A-game because he will be. He forces you to specifically delineate to yourself why you think what you think. His passion for art is palpable, intoxicating. He assigns to it an extraordinary, spiritual place in the human condition. In his view Shakespeare is nothing less than the Moses of a new testament, using poetry and theatre to re-create us in his own image. Bloom's mind, warped by his ego and intransigence is nonetheless exhilarating. If you love art, ideas, discussion, debate, etc., read this book. You'll be up all night arguing with this guy.
• 
  Helena

  I think I like Harold Bloom even more now that you're not supposed to like him because he's a snob/misogynist/old white guy/whatever the reason is you're not supposed to like him, but this was the first book of literary theory I ever read (I was 15), so it holds a special place in my brainheart.
  
  It also holds a special place in my brainheart because Bloom is pretty much right on about everything he's saying in regards to Shahkespeare's invention of modern personality, and because he unabashedly plays favorites with the characters as though he knew them personally. The book reads like a long, deeply enjoyable uninterrupted conversation your irascible old genius grandfather.
  
  and then you pretty much HAVE to play the "Which Shakespeare Character Would I/You/All Our Friends Be" game, which is awesome.
• 
  Manybooks

  I absolutely and generally speaking do not AT ALL appreciate how much of an utter and absolutely horrible academic snob author and Yale professor Harold Bloom ALWAYS AND INCESSANTLY tends to be with regard to both himself and also concerning anything even remotely literature based, and yes, that for ALL of the books from Bloom’s pen I have read to date (two recently, How to Read and Why and The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages, but indeed, I also did try a few horrible Harold Bloom titles at university, during graduate school but do not actually remember anything about them, not even their titles, except that I definitely and vehemently hated the author’s, that I totally despised Harold Bloom’s tone of voice and attitude), well, Professor Bloom’s books on literature, they are basically and generally just so massively full of his literary majesty, of Harold Bloom boasting and pontificating about himself, of somehow considering himself to be the proverbial greatest thing since sliced bread so to speak, that bien sûr, this sure totally does get very tedious and frustrating really and horribly quickly. Therefore, I did not of course expect to in any way enjoy Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human (and indeed, I only considered trying Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human in the first place because it was available on Open Library) and that I have therefore also not been at all surprised to encounter everything in Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human that I tend to generally very much despise about Harold Bloom, namely his intense both personal and academic arrogance, his lack of respect for anyone but him, him, him, a huge amount of conservative pedantry and so on and so on.
  
  But aside from me finding Harold Bloom’s general tone of narrative voice massively pompous and as such also totally offensive to both me as a person and as a reader, a main reason for me rating Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human with only one star is also and equally that I both emotionally and academically think that how Harold Bloom places William Shakespeare in Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human on some kind of unreachable literary throne and pedestal is both intellectually suspect and actually also rather insulting to Shakespeare and his oeuvre. For Harold Bloom’s accolades and his textual insistences in Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human that William Shakespeare should somehow be seen as the centre of ALL so-called Western literature, this does in my humble opinion simply not really make logical and literary sense, and especially so since Shakespeare is basically known only for his plays and for some of his poetry.
  
  However, according to Harold Bloom, William Shakespeare and his influence should somehow also to be seen and encountered in all novels, in biographies etc. and even strangely enough in authors who had in fact come before the Bard of Avon, something that for one is just totally illogical and untrue, and that for two so much renders William Shakespeare into some kind of above and beyond literary icon that honestly, if I had encountered Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human before reading, seeing and then intensely loving William Shakespeare’s comedies, tragedies, romances and histories, I might well have actively shied away from trying Shakespeare’s plays. Because indeed, I might easily have assumed that William Shakespeare’s work and also he himself could perhaps be as arrogant and as holier than thou as Harold Bloom and as Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human (which is simply and of course not true, but yes, this is why I do indeed consider Harold Bloom’s take and his making William Shakespeare appear as some kind of idolised God of literature as being something negative and problematic for in particular the enjoyment of Shakespeare as a dramatist).
• 
  Geoff

  Yes, I'm going to read Harold Bloom's book putting forth the preposterous notion that humanity didn't exist before Shakespeare. Haters gonna hate. What, jealous?
• 
  Dolors

  A work in progress that will probably last several years, but I am quite enjoying Bloom's pompous, sometimes even overblown essays! :)
• 
  John Porter

  Glad it's on my shelf...but depressed about it at the same time. A big hunk of what Bloom is trying pass off as revelatory is more like a response to younger literary critics and their beliefs. (And it's kind of charmingly ironic that Bloom attacks others for their blind devotion to narrow paradigms in a book where he spends a big glob of time psychologically fawning over Falstaff.) It's not really a book about Shakespeare; it's a book about what Harold Bloom wants us to know about Shakespeare and why he thinks we should know it. Which means a lot of the book is really about Harold Bloom; it would be better titled "Harold Bloom's Stentorian Voiceover of Shakespeare (With Added Important Commentary)." But you have to have balls like church bells to even try something so patently self-serving. I'm surprised Stanley Fish didn't get to it first.
• 
  Dan

  The Boston Globe put it accurately: "For all its huge ambition, this book will probably prove most useful as a companion to the plays [and:] may find its longest shelf life in the homes of theatergoers who crave a literate friend who's still awake to chew things over with."
• 
  Marc

  Blooms these is that Shakespeare was unique in intellect, originality and power of creation. He coined the term 'personality' (tension between person and personal ideal). Very vitalistic.
  He was not a Christian, but an adept of universalism, with a nihilist sublahyer. He created a own kind Bible and founded man as we know him now
• 
  Salvatore

  Calling it - too cursory and too much blockquoting; not enough academic commentary that I didn't/couldn't glean for myself from the text.
  
  Read this book if you don't plan on actually reading the plays themselves: Bloom covers plot and middle school level analysis. And he's obsessed with Falstaff. To an unhealthy degree.
  
  It's just lazy writing from an academic.
• 
  T K (on hiatus)

  Bloom is a bit of a funky character to me and I approached this book with plenty of excitement but also plenty of caution. A full 700 pager with 4 essays and one essay per Shakespeare play sounded too good to resist, and I made a purchase in hopes of learning something new. Alas, in this front, I was very much mistaken. What originally began as a project to read all four general essays and each on the plays I am familiar with became a short-lived attempt to scamper my way through the undergrowth of his unedited and unsound writing. He's supposedly a very smart man, and I do appreciate his unique and even controversial stances on that 90s-esque canonical debate, not necessarily because I agree with him, but because I sometimes get the feeling that he was born in the wrong generation or aspires to a type of writing I and frankly most of the academy (I feel) no longer really cares about.
  
  In one of the general essays, he talks about his interest in continuing the critical tradition begun by Sam Johnson, Hazlitt, and even Shaw, although any person trained in the English literatures of today would know that their writing read more like reviews than, well, proper essays on works of literature. Sam Johnson, in particular, I find very unhelpful in his assessments of whether a play (in relation to the Shakespeare we are talking about here) is good or not, or whether it matches up to other plays, or which is better, which is worse, et cetera. Boo hoo. I don't really give two shits. Tell me something interesting about the play and not whether you liked it. You're a literary critic, not Ben Brantley. Tell me something nuanced and unobvious and not smack me on the head with why this character is a failure (or success). In the vein of this Doc Johnson, then, I think Bloom sometimes confuses review for critical essay about literature.
  
  SHAKESPEARE: THE INVENTION OF THE HUMAN, I think, is two vanity projects pushed into one.
  
  The first is, obviously, his massive championing of Shakespeare. I'm all good with this. I suck Shakespeare's dick, I'm a huge fan. But it does get tiring when I read passages like the following:
  
  Our ideas as to what makes the self authentically human owe more to Shakespeare than
  ought to be possible, but then he has also become Scripture, not to be read as many of us
  read the Bible or the Koran … but also not to be read as we read Cervantes or Dickens … I
  have written elsewhere that Shakespeare is not only himself the Western canon; he has
  become the universal canon ….
  
  Um. Okay what exactly are you trying to say? Shakespeare is cool and all, trust me I know and I preach why he is important and why we should read him and perform him. But this linkage to world religion in its own form is a little too kinky for my vanilla literary tastes, I think. And what does it mean that Shakespeare IS the Western canon? The Western canon is a body of work (heckled and demeaned as it is), not one person and one person alone. But okay. I hope the passage above gives you a distilled sense of the eyeroll inducing claim to universal eminence that I felt reading it.
  
  His other vanity project is the vaunting of his favourite characters to almost godlike figures, who, he claims, were the beginning of psychological interiority or some shit. He doesn't seem to realise that these are character to be played, and not demigods upon the earth. It's real funky. Anyway, his favourites are Hamlet and Falstaff, but there are a handful which he will consistently and continually harken back to, even in essays that are not about these plays and characters: Rosalind, Iago, Edmund, Cleopatra. His obsession with Falstaff is particularly gag inducing, and plenty of lines read like, "Cleopatra, indisputably the peer of Falstaff and of Hamlet, is the most vital woman in Shakespeare, surpassing even Rosalind."
  
  …. And? I understand she is a good character, but what am I learning about this character that I would not have known other than you think she's great? Lines like the above consistently arise, in many different iterations, though they all basically say the same thing.
  
  Even worse are the plays where his favourites do not appear. It is very weird, for example, to be reading, say, an essay about Julius Caesar (a play I obviously know very well) but continually - and annoyingly! - get consistent comparisons to Hamlet where it is not needed! "Brutus is such a puzzle that he is wonderfully interesting," Bloom begins, only to immediately say, "to call Brutus a sketch for Hamlet destroys poor Brutus: he hasn't a trace of wit, insouciance, or charisma, though everyone within the play clearly regards him as the Roman charismatic, after Caesar." I can imagine my high school lit teacher writing, "So?" next to this sentence, which, again, doesn't teach us anything except he prefers Hamlet to Brutus, in an essay that is supposed to be about a play in which Brutus is the lead.
  
  Yes, so if everyone in the play sees Brutus as the charismatic, should we not as audiences be led to believe it? The comparison to Hamlet in terms of charisma is pointless in the Doc Johnsonian sense: it is unliterary and frankly unhelpful to me, a reader trying to learn something interesting about this play, to see you put down Brutus in favour of a character who isn't even there, with no proper actual sense of comparison. It's one thing to make a case for their similarity (in a Julius Caesar essay, but bear with me), and say, "Well, both Brutus and Hamlet spend much of their plays considering killing a national leader, one an uncle and one a good friend, from which we can deduce x." instead of saying, in pretty language, "Hamlet is cooler/smarter than Brutus." He does this in other plays too. He claims Rosalind has a "lighter touch" than Beatrice, who "anticipates Rosalind in her realism," and calls Richard II is a "proleptic parody" of Hamlet.
  
  Therefore, I am judging Bloom to be an armchair critic and deeply moved by his personal preferences and beliefs. He is boorish, heavy handed, and his essays frankly go nowhere. There is very little by way of argumentation, and very little by way of structure and diction. The only reason this receives two stars (instead of one) is that even if he is insufferable, he can be quite entertaining at points. Unfortunately, not entertaining enough for me to read the entire mess of a book. Don't waste your time on this.
• 
  J. Alfred

  Bloom classifies himself as a High Romantic Bardoloter, claiming that Shakespeare is not just smarter than all of us, he has actually invented us-- that we could not be human, at least in the way we have become accustomed to thinking about humans, without his influence. It's a remarkable argument, intended as a deliberate thumbing the nose at all academics, directors, and lazy readers whose literary theories allow them to feel superior to the greatest writer in the Western tradition. Bloom calls all these theorists members of the School of Resentment.
  This book is a long labor of love. It will make you more interested in Shakespeare and better prepared to think about the plays. If you are of Bloom's worshipful persuasion, it will make you a better adorer of the plays. I think he intends this as not an exaggeration. It takes all sorts, you know?
• 
  Jorge Morcillo

  Otro libro de Bloom que resulta imprescindible. Centrándose en los personajes de las obras teatrales nos intenta adentrar en las profundidades shakesperianas. Si bien, como el propio Bloom indica, Shakespeare resulta infinito.
  
  A mayor conocimiento de las obras de Shakespeare mayor disfrute de esta obra.
• 
  sara

  Read only the chapters relevant for my research, but *thumbs up emoji*
  
  • The answer to the question “Why Shakespeare?” must be “Who else is there?”
• 
  William

  I read Bloom's book as I made my way through the plays, then went back and finished the introductory and coda sections.
  
  This is an often brilliant, infuriating book - penetrating at times, and absolutely hamhanded. Bloom cannot, CANNOT, get through any of the plays without bringing up the character of Falstaff, and comparing any character represented to him. But it is not Falstaff as he is on the page, but the Falstaff that Bloom carries in his head, as much embodied by Ralph Richardson and enlivened by Bloom's imagination. And this is the central problem of the book - Bloom does not write as a scholar or even lover of Shakespeare, offering theories. He is writing as a tyrannical prophet of Shakespeare, demanding that his Gospel of the Bard is the only religion. His Shakespeare is often absolutely secular without an ounce of belief, intellectual without a trace of warmth, sexual without the romantic blush. Bloom's judgments are unequivocal where there is no supporting evidence other than his overstuffed faith.
  
  What this book gets right often is the nuances of Shakespeare's language, and his artistic ambition. I do not for one moment think that Shakespeare invented personality, the sort of idea that only an intellectual divorced from meaningful human contact could entertain. Shakespeare was remarkable at using language to convey personality on characters that dramatists didn't usually bother with, giving depth to even gravediggers that more accurately reflected life, enlivening the plays and allowing them to endure. He also managed the one trick of great fiction - to show that human beings' actions are often in direct contradiction to the words, or even their dearest expressed ideals. But he was not even the first at this.
  
  Bloom was a good companion through the plays, as often agreed with as infuriating. He is never muddled. And he made the trip worth taking. I don't think his Shakespeare is real though, or even human. He reads Shakespeare, as we all do, in light of the Western tradition that followed him, which imposes much and erases the very real man, scribbling on deadline, trying to avoid putting those particular lines in the mouth of an actor he knows cannot say that, mindful of the last night's intake, knowing that the groundlings are impatient. For that man, what we thought of his writing may not have entered into his mind. But we want him to have cared, which shows how much he matters to us, still.
• 
  s.a.k

  A transcript from a conversation that occurred on 25/08/2022:
  
  Me:
  ACTUALLY, YOU SHOULD TRY AND GET HAROLD BLOOM'S SHAKESPEARE ESSAY THING
  
  Nia:
  WAIT WHICH ONE
  WHICH ESSAY
  THE INVENTION OF THE HUMAN?
  
  Me:
  YES
  <3 love
  
  Nia:
  HAROLD BLOOM AND I DO NOT AGREE ON MANY THINGS
  HE SAID DESDEMONA WAS 14-
  LIKE F*** OFF HAROLD BLOOM
  I HAVE THAT BOOk THOUGH
  
  Me:
  his ideas are good
  
  Nia:
  some
  a few
  
  Upon further examination, Bloom's ideas seem to have little merit. He makes broad assumptions, and formal citations are found only in the acknowledgements. He worships characters (Falstaff) as deities, deems them infallible and examines scenes through a rose-tinted lens. In a way, the essay seems reductive; it glosses over the achievements and incredible literary ideas brought forward by other authors and discussed throughout various literary movements. Harold Bloom naively declares the Shakespearean canon the outer limit of human achievement and constantly refers to the use of rhetoric in different plays. Did he ever familiarise himself with deconstruction, for example? Does he understand poetic meter, and if so, why doesn't he mention it? Each hypothesis is vague and poorly researched.
  
  Despite their lack of merit, his ideas have promise, and that makes the essay impressive. It is a brilliant guide to connecting with Shakespeare. It helps to highlight ambiguities in the text, where Bloom proposes questions. His failure to answer these questions gives the reader a glorious opportunity to conduct their research and form a relationship with Shakespeare. The Invention of the Human is a perfect text to debate and discuss, which is arguably the best it could offer.
  
  To quote Nia, a few of his ideas are good. I think I loved the essay because it was one of my first experiences with Shakespeare critics. It's an apt introduction to literary criticism. It does help you justify some of your own wildly absurd ideas. However, it isn't the best text you can use to approach Shakespeare.
• 
  Stephanie

  I feel like we as a species have moved past Harold Bloom
• 
  Steve

  I read to Othello in 1998, then picked it up recently as I was reading through Shakespeare. Can't remember 1998 much, but it's been brilliant since I picked it back up. Feel like I'll read the chapter on whatever play I read in the future, for a while.
• 
  Jorge

  Bueno pues este libro habla sobre Shakespeare, Shakespeare y Shakespeare. El autor Harold Bloom es un reconocido crítico literario y profesor en Yale y guarda una especial veneración hacia el gran autor inglés. El libro analiza todas o casi todas las obras de Shakespeare desde su punto de vista, para mi gusto un poco exagerado ya que como dije venera e idolatra a Shakespeare. Lo que me pareció más interesante es su concepto de lo que significa Shakespeare para el mundo y lo ilustra perfectamente en el propio título de su libro: "La Invención de lo Humano" y lo explica en el texto introductorio; creo que con esto Bloom nos quiere decir que muchos comportamientos, actitudes, reacciones, pensamientos, humanos fueron "inventados" por Shakespeare o dicho más propiamente estos personajes permearon el imaginario humano de tal forma que ahora nos comportamos como esos personajes de las obras del gran bardo de Stratford upon Avon. Creo que es un tema que da qué pensar.
• 
  Jim Leckband

  I mark this as read, though it is continuously being re-read as I continue to re-read the plays. I have no problem with his "Invention of the Human" shtick. What I do like is that he is a tremendous font of things to think about after I've read the plays and he is tremendously fair-minded in his interpretations. I don't always agree with him and the Falstaff crush does get a little old, but hey, that's the price to pay when reading someone's opinions.
• 
  John Pistelli

  Mostly read late 1990s, consulted often thereafter.
• 
  La Central

  "En estas fechas que nos llaman a pasar largas tardes bajo la manta, acurrucados en el sofá mientras la locura navideña inunda las calles de luces centelleantes, compradores compulsivos y papel brillante para envolver regalos de última hora, ¿qué mejor que dejarse acompañar por la pluma de quien tantas otras plumas ha inspirado con su legado?
  La editorial Anagrama reedita el estudio sobre William Shakespeare escrito magistralmente por el crítico norteamericano Harold Bloom, Shakespeare. La invención de lo humano, uno de los más famosos ensayos sobre la obra del bardo.
  Alejado de las miles de teorías sobre la identidad del dramaturgo y poeta inglés por excelencia, y obviando cualquier intento de comprender a Shakespeare en su contexto histórico, Bloom –Shakespeareadicto confeso– nos ofrece un minucioso estudio de las obras del bardo, desde las primeras comedias a las grandes tragedias, sin olvidar los dramas históricos o lo que llamará las «tragedias de aprendizaje» o las «obras problema». El estudio de Bloom se centra en analizar hasta el más mínimo detalle aquellos personajes que el crítico considera paradigmáticos de nuestra naturaleza humana –Hamlet, Falstaff, Lear, Macbeth o Cleopatra–. La tesis que hilvana este leviatán de la crítica shakespeariana, no exenta de controversia, es la afirmación de que, a través de sus personajes, Shakespeare inventó la personalidad humana; así, Bloom defiende a capa y espada que nuestro lenguaje, nuestra psicología y nuestros mitos derivan de la escritura secular del genio de Stratford.
  Tanto si estamos de acuerdo como si no con el crítico neoyorquino, su hiperbólica escritura y su amplísimo conocimiento del dramaturgo inglés devienen un agradable paisaje en el que perderse en las frías tardes de invierno y una fantástica invitación a revisitar las palabras de Shakespeare." Eli Massana
• 
  Lewis

  Overwritten, repetitive, disorganized, eyeroll-inducing, and borderline illegible in some places, but brilliantly smart and charmingly earnest. Don’t read it as a book; read one essay after an interaction with the corresponding play.
• 
  Jossalyn

  a very dense and complicated series of essays on each play.
  9/18- Othello
• 
  Kathleen M

  You may be too busy to read him right now but he's worth the wait