Nor did he just ‘invent’ the English language, while offering insights into human nature which will always remain state of the art. Bloom’s Shakespeare is more than merely ‘the best writer we will ever know’. And in this last testament of a lifetime teaching Shakespeare, Bloom has a typically extravagant point to make.
Bloom has entered the Indian summer of an eminent career in the role of cultural guru, a Lear raging against the changing orthodoxies of a world now beyond his control. ‘It restores the role of literary critic to one of central importance in our culture’, glows the publisher’s jacket blurb, and, for once, they have a point. People (like me) were even seen reading it on aeroplanes.Ī best-selling book about the Bard? Not even an accessible biography, at that, but a systematic survey of his dramatic work, via an examination of the supreme intellect and uniquely humane consciousness informing it. When I visited New York last autumn, this academic panorama of Shakespeare was enjoying a lengthy sojourn in the New York Times’ bestseller list its daunting 750-page bulk was to be found on the coffee tables of those Manhattan hostesses deliciously satirised by Tom Wolfe as ‘X-rays’ and its outspoken, authentically Falstaffian author was being lionised in newspaper interviews and profiles. In Harold Bloom’s native United States, his latest tome has proved something of a publishing phenomenon.
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