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Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human

by Harold Bloom

With most of the plays, I have attempted to e as straightforward as the oddities of my own consciousness allowed, within the limits of strongly favoring character over action, and of emphasizing what I call 'foregrounding" in preference to the backgrounding of historicists old and new. The concluding section, "Foregrounding," is meant to be read in connection with any of the plays whatsoever, and could be printed at any point in this book. I cannot assert that I am straightfoward upon the two parts of Henry IV, where I have centered obsessively upon Falstaff, the mortal god of my imaginings. In writing about Hamlet, I have experimented by emplying a circling procedure, testing the mysteries of the play and its protagonist by returning always to my hypothesis (following the late Peter Alexander) that the young Shakespeare himself, and not Thomas Kyd, wrote the earlier version of Hamlet that existed more than a decade before the Hamlet we know. With King Lear, I have traced the fortunes of the four most disturbing figures --- the Fool, Edmund, Edgar, and Lear himself --- in order to track the tragedy of this most tragic of all tragedies.

Hamlet, Freud's mentor, goes about including all he encounters to reveal themselves, while the prince (like Freud) evades his biograpers. what Hamlet exerts upon his fellow characters is an epitome of the effect of Shakespeare's plays upon their critics. I have struggled, to talk about Shakespeare and not about myself, but I am certain that the plays have flooded my consciousness, and that the plays read me better than I read them. I once wrote that Falstaff would not accept being bored by us, if he was to deign to represent us. That applies also to Falstaff's peers, whether benign like Rosalind and Edgar, frighteningly malign like Iago and Edmund, or transcending us utterly, like Hamlet, Macbeth, and Cleopatra. We are lived by drives we cannot command, and we are read by works we cannot resist. We need to exert ourselves and read Shakespeare as strenously as we can, while knowing that his plays will read us more energetically still. They read us definitively.