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Review
This book, given its author and, needless to say, its subject, will receive a lot of attention both praiseworthy and critical. So let's start slow: Harold Bloom likes Shakespeare. Harold Bloom thinks Shakespeare is an important writer. These are monumental understatements. Bloom, who has been teaching Shakespeare almost daily for the past twelve years, writes with a passionate certainty but always in awe of the playwright's ability to construct and develop his characters. In his address to the reader, Bloom argues that Shakespeare's plays go beyond mere representations of human emotions, feelings, and experience, but instead have invented the human as we understand it today. Bloom writes, "The dominant Shakespearean characters -- Falstaff, Hamlet, Rosalind, Iago, Lear, Macbeth, Cleopatra among them -- are extraordinary instances not only of how meaning gets started, rather than repeated, but also of how new modes of consciousness come into being.[itals. added]" Bloom's bold pronouncements leave little room for second-guessing what Bloom is trying to say (e.g., "Shakespeare is more integral to the secularized consciousness than the Bible"), and his provocative ideas are supplemented by an equally ambitious reading of all of Shakespeare's plays (yes, all). He charts each breakthrough in human characterization starting with Faulconbridge the Bastard in King John, to Mercutio in Romeo in Juliet, and to the later spectacular characters, Iago, Falstaff, Hamlet, etc. Bloom's writing consistently engages, taking different tacts with each play while retaining an emphasis on "the invention of the human." Much like Helen Vendler's work of last year on the Shakespearean sonnets, Bloom's work is sure to influence the way we think about the playwright.
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