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I'm really interested in Shakespeare's writing, so Professor Harold Bloom's highly controversial theory appeals to me, but is his claim valid?: did the introspection of Shakespeare's characters (like Hamlet) lead to a new dawn in human consciousness? Did these inward-looking characters encourage people to reflect deeply on their lives, for the first time in our mutual history? Obviously, we're not lacking in pre-modern literary expressions of deep thought but these are too often founded on religious meditation or, basically, non-personal philosophies. Anyway, here's an introduction to Bloom's book Shakespeare: the Invention of the Human ~
How to understand Shakespeare, whose ability so far exceeds his predecessors and successors, whose genius has defied generations of critics’ explanations, whose work is of greater influence in the modern age even than the Bible? This book is a visionary summation of Harold Bloom’s reading of Shakespeare and in it he expounds a brilliant and far-reaching critical theory: that Shakespeare was, through his dramatic characters, the inventor of human personality as we have come to understand it. In short, Shakespeare invented our understanding of ourselves. He knows us better than we do: ‘The plays remain the outward limit of human achievement: aesthetically, cognitively, in certain ways morally, even spiritually. They abide beyond the end of the mind’s reach; we cannot catch up to them. Shakespeare will go on explaining us in part because he invented us… ’
'Hamlet is the only secular rival to his greatest precursors in personality - Yahweh, Jesus, and Allah - his total effect upon the world's culture is incalculable. After Jesus, Hamlet is the most cited figure in Western consciousness; no one prays to him, but no one evades him for long either.'
Bloom quotes Owen Barfield's words: "There is a very real sense, humiliating as it may seem, in which what we generally venture to call our feelings are really Shakespeare's 'meaning'. " Bloom takes this and runs with it: Shakespeare is not "lifelike" because he was a particularly talented writer; he is lifelike because Shakespeare has offered us convincing modes of being. Our minds are, thanks to him, not what they were. There is something in this, even if we don't in the end have to abide by it or take it seriously; but it does chime in with Bloom's claims for the power of literature - it is not just God we worship in the Bible, he has said, but a particular kind of literary style.