Volume 46, Number 3 · February 18, 1999
The Last Shakespearean?
By Geoffrey O'Brien
Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human
by Harold Bloom
Riverhead, 745 pp., $35.00
A best seller and finalist for the National Book Award, the object of a full-strength publicity campaign ranging from a profile in People to an appearance on the Charlie Rose show, Harold Bloom's Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human must be considered in part as a publishing phenomenon. Bloom has of course already enjoyed a progression of 'crossover' titles, notably The Book of J (1990) and The Western Canon (1994), and his Shakespeare figures (in marketing terms) as their culmination, the indispensable critic on the indispensable writer. It holds forth the promise of a restoration of the kind of criticism that can speak to the nonspecialist reader, distilling vast reaches of experience and thought into companionable commentary on each of Shakespeare's plays in turn; and, beyond that, the restoration of a world in which such criticism counted for something, a world in which the systematic reading of the plays would be an inevitable pilgrimage for anyone who cared about reading in the first place.
Review, 6661 words
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