As I mentioned in my post on The Merry Wives of Windsor, I’ll be working through Shakespeare’s plays using Harold Bloom’s highly praised book Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human. I’ve just finished reading the introduction. Takeaways below:

• Bloom’s style is excellent: hot takes delivered with exaggerated and vociferous force. He reminds me of what I love best in Sontag–come hard, or don’t come at all. Literary criticism is not a good profession for moderates.
• Accordingly, it is no surprise that his underlying thesis is hard for me to believe. Bloom is asserting that Shakespeare didn’t just change the way personality was conceptualized in literature; he changed how personality is conceptualized in life. This, of course, has to be true at the margins; and I’m willing to accept his influence as greater than any other author. But “inventing the human”? I was not convinced by the introduction.
• As with Sontag in many places, the name dropping is mind numbing. The biggest pain point in literary criticism for me is how self-referential it is. I understand the need to build on existing scholarship, but Bloom seems to take for granted that we’ve read Johnson, Hazlitt, Bradley, Goddard, and many other names that mean very little (if anything) to me.
• Bloom also commits a cardinal sin of academia, which is overrating the reach of literature. He seems convinced that every American has read Shakespeare; I would estimate that less than 25% of my high school graduating class has read any at all, even Romeo and Juliet. It’s fair to say they would still know the basic story, but such sparse impressions can hardly be as influential as he seems keen to claim they are.
• There is an interesting thread of what I will (jokingly) call anti-Woke sentiment in Bloom. He rails against what he calls “Resentment Scholarship” (a heftily Nietzschean term) and “French Shakespeare” (which is clearly just a dig at Foucault). That said, I’m persuaded by the overall argument, which is that one should not come to Shakespeare with a particular “reading” (e.g., Feminist, Marxist, Christian) in mind but rather should remain open to what the play has to offer. Overstated, but fair enough indeed.

Very much looking forward to getting back into the plays, with Much Ado About Nothing next up on the docket.