Listen to Bloom on Romeo and Juliet: 'The Nurse and Mercutio, both of them audience favorites, are nevertheless bad news, in different but complementary ways.' On The Merchant of Venice: 'To reduce him to contemporary theatrical terms, Shylock would be an Arthur Miller protagonist displaced into a Cole Porter musical, Willy Loman wandering about in Kiss Me Kate.' On As You Like It: 'Rosalind is unique in Shakespeare, perhaps indeed in Western drama, because it is so difficult to achieve a perspective upon her that she herself does not anticipate and share.' Bloom even offers some belated vocational counseling to Falstaff, identifying him as an Elizabethan Mr. It is a long and fascinating itinerary, and one littered with thousands of sharp insights. Bloom ranges through the Bard's plays in the probable order of their composition, relating play to play and character to character, maintaining all the while a shrewd grasp of Shakespeare's own burgeoning sensibility. Shakespeare is a feast of arguments and insights, written with engaging frankness and affecting immediacy. But then this is a titanic book, wrought by a latter-day critical colossus-and before Bloom is done with us, he has made us wonder whether his vision of Shakespeare's influence on the whole of our lives might not be simply the sober truth. 'Personality, in our sense, is a Shakespearean invention, and is not only Shakespeare's greatest originality but also the authentic cause of his perpetual pervasiveness.' So Harold Bloom opines in his outrageously ambitious Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human.

Bloom invention of the human