shakespeare and the invention of the human

It cries, in the words of Richard III, that it is 'deform'd, unfinish'd, sent before my time into this breathing world, scarce half made up.' It is with the careless composition of his book. And Shakespeare did not invent it.īut my distress with Bloom is not here. Indeed, the modern expository intellect simply did not exist in the Elizabethan period. He is a superb playwright, but not a great physicist, philosopher, or historian, certainly not a person capable of the extended exposition of organized thought which characterizes such minds.

Shakespeare is not Albert Einstein he is not Alfred North Whitehead, nor Arnold Toynbee. Nor can Bloom make good his claim for Shakespeare or his stand-in Hamlet of a universal intellectuality. But does it make any sense to say he invented 'the human?' Is not 'the human' continually being invented or reinvented? Yes, Shakespeare created fully self-conscious characters for the first time in European literature. There is certainly a difference here from Shakespeare's characters, a continuum of development which is not retrogression. What about Stendhal's Julien Sorel, Dostoevski's Raskolnikov, James' Isabel Archer or Woolf's Mrs. Nor does Bloom deal in any adequate way with the difference between Shakespeare's depiction of character in theater and its portrayal in modern fiction.

A vehicle is not a person if there is a vast area left undefined in the theatrical character, there is such an area in the person. We have no choice but to permit Shakespeare, and his Hamlet, everything, because neither has a rival.' This is an argument, and a brilliant one, of why Hamlet is a great theatrical figure, but it is also why he is not entirely real. Permit this dramatist a concourse of contraries, and he will show us everybody and nobody, all at once. The chapter is full of dazzling insight, but no passage is more telling about the theatricality of Hamlet than this one: 'There is no 'real' Hamlet as there is no 'real' Shakespeare: the character, like the writer, is a reflecting pool, a spacious mirror in which we need must see ourselves. Bloom's other great love is Hamlet, about whom he supplies a wealth of scholarly detail, including a running, highly speculative argument that Shakespeare himself was the author of the 'Ur-Hamlet' of 1589.

Shakespeare and the invention of the human