Customer Reviews

Shakespeare: the Invention of the Human

5 star:		(44)
4 star:		(24)
3 star:		(20)
2 star:		(14)
1 star:		(14)

 

 

I appreciate all my fellow reviewer's criticisms about the book: yes it's true that Bloom was opinionated, non-politically correct, and a bit of a wacko at times. Still, he's one of the few 20th century critics who has the self confidence not to fall into lit. crit. jargon to express himself -- he manages to avoid the snobbiness that often accompanies Shakespeare studies. The word I would use to describe this work overall is uneven. Some chapters are so insightful that you may ask yourself how you could have ever read the play without reading the essay and still appreciated it. Others are small ruminations on intersting points which are much less earthshattering. Sure, there are much more "scholarly" essays out there on Shakespeare, but these are all READABLE essays, all well-written. I happen to enjoy Bloom's lack of tight structure. It's like sitting down with Bloom at a coffee house or bar and hearing him ramble on about his thoughts and lifetime reflections on Shakespeare.

But remember, Bloom was not just your average guy chewing his cud -- he's probably the most well-read and brilliant reader of our generation. Due to a sleep disorder that he had, he often would stay up all night and would typically consume several volumes of literature in one evening. So, when forced to listen to his musings, there are many kernels of brilliance that make their way to the surface. Many professors have begrudged him his popular success, but by avoiding jargon, Bloom does us all a service by popularizing Shakespeare for everyday readers and making us want to go back and read and reread Shakespeare. At the very least, these chapters will make you run to a bookstore to read more Shakespeare -- how can you criticize anyone who instills a passion for literature? I have read all of Bloom's major works and enjoyed them for many of the same reasons I list above. Buy this one and read a chapter or two at a time along with the plays. It's a book to be savored over a long period of time.

In The Western Canon, Harold Bloom stated that Shakespeare, along with Milton, was the center of Western thought. In Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human, he contends that Shakespeare, alone, "went beyond all precedents (even Chaucer) and invented the human as we continue to know it." Bloom assigns Shakespeare the singular honor of being responsible for our personalities, not just in the Western world, but in all cultures. Falstaff and Hamlet, the central characters of Bloom's discourse are, he says, "the greatest of charismatics" and are "the inauguration of personality as we have come to recognize it."

Naturally, critics of Bloom have taken great exception to sweeping statements such as the above and their general reaction is one of resentment. Individual critical response depends on what particular school of criticism the respondent adheres to, but most often critics and readers alike have simply attacked Bloom, himself. However, even those who denigrate both Bloom and this book have found the time to read and review it to a greater extent, rather than to a lesser.

The book, itself, is made up of three major critical discussions by Bloom combined with brief discussions of each of Shakespeare's thirty-seven plays. Bloom begins by expressing his awe at Shakespeare's ability to create literary characters who epitomize the quintessential nature of humanity itself. In Bloom's opinion, Shakespeare shapes all of humanity, not just the elite literati.

Bloom does acknowledge the fact that great writers existed before Shakespeare and says that, "The idea of Western character" defined as "the self as a moral agent" came from many sources at many different times. Individually, however, Bloom says, Shakespeare's predecessors created nothing more than "cartoons" and "ideograms" rather than fully-developed personalities. "Every other great writer will fall away," he says, but "Shakespeare will abide, even if he were to be expelled by the academics..." And Bloom makes his point so convincingly that even those who cannot abide Shakespeare (or Bloom) will be swayed.

Bloom next turns to short, individual synopses of each play, with each review intended to support Bloom's argument that Shakespeare was truly the inventor of the human. These reviews do bristle with long quotations from the plays themselves but they are always extremely interesting to read.

Bloom, however, is nothing if he is not contentious. In concluding his review of The Taming of the Shrew, he says, "Shakespeare, who clearly preferred his women characters to his men, enlarges the human, from the start, by subtly suggesting that women have the truer sense of reality."

After the individual play reviews, Bloom treats us to a concluding essay entitled, "Coda: The Shakespearean Difference," and says that "Shakespeare, through Hamlet, has made us skeptics in our relationships with anyone, because we have learned to doubt articulateness in the realm of affection." Bloom, himself, identifies most intimately with Falstaff. "What Falstaff teaches us is a comprehensiveness of humor that avoids unnecessary cruelty because it emphasizes instead the vulnerability of every ego, including that of Falstaff himself."

Whatever your feelings about Bloom or Shakespeare, Bloom does take a critical stance that he supports textually. His humor is there but it is, at times, scathing. While no one should take everything Bloom introduces in this book at face value, no one should dismiss it all, either. Both this book, and Bloom, deserve a lot more than that.

The least important thing a great teacher does is the important task of providing the student with good information. The most valuable is to provide the student with sufficient challenge to stimulate passionate thinking so the student develops a framework to use in not only comprehending the topic at hand, but also ready for use in further intellectual development. Even to the point of being able to rebuild the framework itself as life experience stimulates reconsideration.

Bloom is a great teacher and it is hard for me to find the words to explain how grateful I am for this book.

I should start off by saying what it is not. Even though it discusses each of the 39 plays it is not at all a compendium surveying the plays. This is a book with a specific thesis and discusses the plays in terms of that thesis. The idea, if I understand Bloom correctly, is that Shakespeare's understanding of the human creature; the nature of our lives as human creatures, combined with Shakespeare's preternatural artistic gifts has actually changed our understanding of what it is to be human.

Like all truly great artists, what we think of them says nothing about the artist, but everything about us. Shakespeare is such a potent cultural influence that he informs the lives of those who have never heard of him, who have never read his plays, and even those who don't speak a syllable of English.

Bloom has read so widely and so deeply that he has much to share with us. I am glad for his courage to speak against the fashions of our time and to tell the truth about our post-literate stage of thinking. However, feel free to disagree with him (and especially with me). Bloom also is keenly aware of what the great critics have written about Shakespeare and uses that to also explicate his thesis and inform us of the range of understanding and interpretation of this magnificent art.

I won't quibble with those who say that Bloom isn't the greatest prose writer. However, I will say (with some admitted overstatement in the comparison) that many have pointed out the awkwardness of Beethoven's vocal writing. That is to say, the music is so great and so transcendent it is really up to the vocalist to adapt. And while Bloom certainly isn't a Beethoven, he is certainly valuable enough a writer (because he is such a glorious reader) that we should be willing to adapt ourselves to his style and get past the little things that bother us. We don't want to miss the important stuff because of the lint in the creases.

Do I agree with everything Bloom says? Who could? I certainly haven't read enough nor could I pretend to understand enough to talk in terms of disagreement. There are things I would ask about if I were in a class with him. There would be ideas I would challenge with the expectation that he would have a reservoir to call on that could easily drown my questioning. And I would learn. Which is the point after all.

This book will inspire you to more and deeper reading and will provide you foot and hand holds into these plays that you might not have had before (I didn't). There isn't an index because it really isn't needed here. These are really essays about each play in terms of Bloom's larger thesis. It isn't a reference book or a history book about the plays.

I read some other books to get ready to read this book. Of course, there is so much here that no amount of preparation can really provide a complete background. So, I guess my advice is to jump in. The water is deep, but wonderful.

Some readers need to lighten up! Pick from this bountiful and pleasurable book like you would pluck grapes from a bunch, and use it as a springboard to formulating your own responses to Shakespeare, whether in agreement or disagreement with Bloom the Bardolator.

For all you readers who sniff about cant and fret that Professor Bloom ignores agendas dear to you -- I must say that Bloom's thorough zest for his subject completely annihilates your persnicketiness. (The book is neither jargon-laden nor disingenuous; I'm afraid I just don't see where it's cant.) Bloom does just what professors of high standing are best in position to do -- they are ultimately the ones who can relate deep subject matter in their fields to the widest general audiences while fearlessly advancing challenging and counter-trendy ideas.

Obviously it is impossible to agree with everything said in such a book as this. The book needs to be treated like a trove of juicy lecture notes or a compendium of choice commentaries by a lively dinner guest. This is the venerable professor in full Sam Johnson mode -- unrepentantly provocative, with plenty of barbed responses for narrow or doctrinaire alternatives. Like Dr. Johnson, Bloom here is always unabashedly himself, fully aware that he may make certain others all hot and bothered, and always tossing off evidence of the depth of his readings at every turn.

Dive into this one by all means -- get ready to argue with him -- at the very least engage yourself with this explosion of ideas about the Bard's works and for God's sake enjoy yourself!

I have to admit up front that I like reading Harold Bloom. I don't always agree with him and I often find his pronouncements on this, that and the other quite arrogant and short-sighted. On the other hand, his opinions often challenge me to consider my own and I respect his decades of grappling with the Bard and the history of Shakespearean criticism. As a fellow sufferer of Bardolatry, I feel I can sympathize with the man.

And what of this book? Well, it is quite the tome. Containing analysis of each of Shakespeare's plays, it's a test of endurance. Anyone who isn't familiar with the vast majority of Shakespeare's plays would be advised, perhaps, to read the introductory essays and dip into those chapters on the plays he knows.

As for myself, having read and seen most of the plays in the canon, I read the book through. In every chapter I found something valuable and I wouldn't have missed reading it for the world. When he feels a character is interesting or important--Iago, Cleopatra, Rosalind, Lear to name a few--he can wax practically poetic in his insight. The things that don't interest him he dismisses out of hand with a cutting remark or ignores entirely.

Still, to be frank, reading too much of this at once can be tiresome. In large doses it is like listening to the grumblings of an old man who feels his time is past and he doesn't get the respect he deserves anymore. He hasn't seen a performance of Shakespeare he's liked in thirty or more years. He rejects all modern forms of criticism and interpretation. His obsession with Hamlet and, in particular, Falstaff, finds its way into the discussion of practically every play. I love Hamlet almost as much as Bloom but even I got tired of him as he appeared time and again. As for Falstaff: there can be no doubt he is a great character; however I think it takes a man of Bloom's age to rate him so far above many of the other Shakespearean characters.

And as for Bloom's assertion that Shakespeare invented the human as we know it? Well, that may be pushing it a bit far for my taste but I take his point. The introspective nature and universality of Shakespeare's greatest characters was revolutionary. Certainly many important thinkers after him have found in Shakespeare the inspiration for ideas that have impacted our world. Our world--and most definitely our theater--would be different had Shakespeare never written. Still, would the nature of human beings be so very different? I remain unconvinced.

Ah, but Bloom makes it easy to argue with him. He invites it. And I enjoy the debate. If one can ignore the provocative prose and rake for the gems, these are pages worth mining. I, for one, am glad I did.

As a professor myself I know the problem... having lectured on the same topic for 30 years, you are no longer quite aware of what you are saying... or that you just said it 15 minutes before. Harold Bloom has talked about Shakespeare so long to classes that his book is as maddeningly repetitive as Chinese water torture, and as rambling and disorganized as can be. And if I see the word "rancid" (generally used several times per page, and always inappropriately) again after reading this book, I shall scream. But I know of no other book like this, a meditation on Shakespeare's plays, characters and artistic aims that brings you back to the plays with a whole new alertness. Instead of reading the book from cover to cover as I did, it is probably best just to dip into it from time to time as you want background on some specific play or character. Then the author's crotchets and mannerisms will not be so annoying. I did find some of his judgements imbecilic. For instance, saying that it is impossible to perform MERCHANT OF VENICE after WWII is like saying it is impossible to perform RICHARD III since people in the audience may have birth defects! Lordy, lordy.

Outside university English departments, devotion to the Bard is a lonely avocation. We read these great works and tend to carry our own thoughts and reactions to them inside us. We commit passages to memory because we want to own these words, to be a part of the Great Chain of the English Language, a transgenerational community joined in a common appreciation of the finest, most universal written English yet wrought.

But what we really crave is conversation, with a sharing, perceptive interlocutor, with whom we might swap enthusiasms, probe ambiguities, repeat the words, declaim, expound, enact, react. In the end, we remain for the most part solitary enthusiasts. Hence the great and enduring value of the formidable critics and commentators: Johnson, Hazlitt, Pollard, Bradley, Van Doren, Goddard, Mack, Rowse, and, now, Harold Bloom.

Of all these, none has provided greater pleasure, or more illuminating argumentation, or profound, quirky observations than Bloom, whom I've come to think of as my wise old Uncle Harold. I go directly from the play to Bloom's Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human, for literary companionship. Taking his leads from Johnson, for whom Shakespeare is the great writer of human nature, and Hegel, who saw Shakespeare's characters as "free artists of themselves," Bloom's central teaching is that Shakespeare not only shows us, but literally invents our template for, what it means to be human. He mines this theme throughout, pausing long at the central characters--Falstaff, Rosalind, and Hamlet--who epitomize the lesson. In touching on each of the works, sometimes only briefly but never simply dutifully, Bloom invariably opens up new vistas, adds context, begs controversy, settles old scores and manufactures new ones, leads the reader back to the works for fresh consideration in new dimensions--and all in an avuncular, colloquial voice that I for one find wholly delightful and attractive. The professional lit-crit crowd doesn't share this view--which "populizers" has it ever easily credited?--but for me, having Bloom on my desk is roughly akin to having the erstwhile "brightest grad fellow ever" of the most formidable English Department at my beck and call, always willing and ready to sit up late in the Common Room for endless conversations over coffee and cigarettes, until exhaustion sets in, the sun rises, or the tobacco runs out.

For all these things and for much else, Bloom's hefty volume joins Schoenbaum's sumptuous, long out of print Documentary Life, Dobson and Wells' Oxford Companion to Shakespeare, and Spevak's similarly OOP Concordance (as well as--pick 'em--your favorite edition of Complete Works: I like the Riverside but am open to other suggestions) on my short desert island shelf, which would occupy me for a lifetime on some God-forsaken atoll. Indeed, I love this indispensable, inexhaustible book and puzzle over those who cannot.

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 ---

There are few books that are willing to speak to us groundlings who love Shakespeare for reasons we cannot really articulate, except perhaps to say, "I laughed so hard I thought I would wet myself" or "Oh, my God. Oh, my God." The dearth of kind unfolding of thought in doses of scholarship that are accessible to those of us who merely trudge reminds me of Biblical scholarship which either addresses the *hang hog* debates which are quite beyond modest believers or else demands adherance to fundamentals or dogmas that stand in the way of dialogue, inquiry, and devotion.

I grew up in Appalachia, and on those mountains where I grew up most families, poor or not, had a bible and a Collected Works of Shakespeare, even if they didn't have Dickens. Often the Shakespeare was a set of individual volumes. No TV. We couldn't get reception.

By hazard I picked up Romeo and Juliet when I was nine. I couldn't put it down. I had no idea most of the time what I was reading, but the language was intoxicating, and the occasional glimpse of dreadful, lyrical beauty life-shattering and life-saving.

How many people have I encountered on the ground or in the stratosphere of scholarship that are willing to fall flat on their faces for the mere privilege of being able to read and to discuss Shakespeare? No one, but no one, who has any feeling for the plays at all will tell you that he or she has finally got it right and here it is. But the man who won't speak his mind about he actually thinks today of his love and her/his beauty on this summer's day is a stingy man indeed.

One reviewer compared Bloom's ego to his belly. I would compare his ego to his heart--if only on the basis that I was able to read every single page in the presence of someone who loved Shakespeare as much as I did on that first West Virginia day that summer of 1961.

I am willing to read a book of this size, compare it to belly, heart, ego, what you will--to learn one little idea that will help carry me along this journey of reading the plays and living, by snapping fits and starts, in the world of the mind of the man who made them. If there are scholars who believe they are closer to the man's mind because they have never labored outside of their minds till even this day, they must possess too fragile to be as big as any scholar of Shakespeare requires.

Bloom has provided me with at least thirty good ideas. I defy you Gods of criticism and scholarship to do the same. What Bloom lacks is cynicism, which may keep a scholar safe (in it's guise of skepticism). But if a scholar would debate the nature of Bloom's critiques seriously, I'd have to say the way we might at home that she's too smart to eat tomatoes.

Can you imagine Will himself talking to Shakespeare scholars, the ones whose quips and quiddities must be measured in dreadful spoonfuls and consequently will always be unsavory? I can't. I can, however, imagine Will watching a good performance of Hamlet and being as awed by the Prince as we all are. Bloom simply gave me many news ways to keep being awed and avoid getting on top of the plays and looking down at them.

I think that is what I learned from reading this book: that when the play holds the mirror up to nature, nature reflects the play as well; if substantiation of phrases, versions, comparisons to arguments of the day and imposition of theoretical constructs upon the globe itself are what you find in Shakespeare, then that is what you will reflect of the play, because it is your nature, and it is what you are. If you find preposterous, outrageous joy, infinite brooding, and the wit of Socrates (that constant unsmiled grin one senses must be hidden with every question he asks in the Republic mixed with the deviousness of his speech about Diotima in the Symposium), in this glass and globe, you will reflect it back.

I teach Shakespeare despite not having studied literature or English in college. I find several books very useful to me, this one among them. If you're reading Shakespeare for pleasure, you've almost got to use this as a companion to the plays. Bloom is a critic and commentator you should not miss, perhaps destined to be remembered in the same class as Samuel Johnson. His take on the plays is generally idiosyncratic and always thought-provoking and insightful.

On the other hand, this should not be your only companion to Shakespeare. If you're only going to have one--and why would you?--I think you'd have to choose Marjorie Garber's "Shakespeare After All." I always consult that one before Bloom, because she offers a more fundamental analysis, while Bloom jumps right into his opinions. It is almost true to say that Bloom's book is as much about Bloom as it is about Shakespeare, and if that sounds critical, then for the record Bloom is one who can pull that off.

If you are an undergraduate and especially if you are a high school student, you won't go wrong with Garber, though Bloom alone might lead you astray. If you can read both, great; if not, Garber. I also commend Cliffs Notes to any student who struggles with line-by-line comprehension. (I know that other teachers don't do that, and I think they're really just being snobs. Really, Shakespeare is great fun if you understand, and if not, then you've got to do something, haven't you?)

Finally, if you want a deeper discussion of various issues (history, religion, interpretation, staging etc...), the Cambridge Companions are excellent.

Incidently, the subtitle is misleading. Bloom's "invention" thesis is hardly the subject matter of the book. He spends maybe 3 pages on it, not doing the historical analysis such a thesis would require, but merely heaping hyperbole upon hyperbole in praise of Shakespeare. We don't read Shakespeare, Shakespeare reads us... and so on. It's simply an excuse, as if he needed one, to publish his thoughts on all of Shakespeare's plays.