Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-7c8c6479df-5xszh Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-03-29T09:11:38.281Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

The Year's Contributions to Shakespearian Study 1 - Critical Studies

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 March 2007

Peter Holland
Affiliation:
Shakespeare Institute, University of Birmingham
Get access

Summary

The most significant publication in this year’s critical archive is Harold Bloom’s Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human, though as a cultural event rather than a book. Its central claim – that Shakespeare’s characters furnish the self-reflexive models by which we acquire a self to reflect on – is less developed in coherent argument than asserted in a repetitive polemic. Bloom projects himself as a voice in the wilderness, warning the children of literature against the strange, resentful gods of history and politics. This amusing self-dramatization soon wears thin and detracts from the basic claim, which is neither eccentric nor new. The idea that Shakespeare invented the human was itself invented by the Romantics, whose powerful criticism contributed substantially to developing the institutional apparatus within which we still function. But simply to repeat the claims of Hazlitt, Lamb, Emerson, Herder, et al. sounds like parody (think of Bizet’s Classical Symphony). Bloom does not explain why most Shakespearian work is no longer sustained by the Romantics, just inveighs against apostasy. The invective has secured him a middlebrow celebrity, but the academic excoriation may be more worrisome. Every Shakespeare session I visited at the 1998 MLA included insouciant dismissals of Bloom, ‘not that I’ve read him’, as one speaker said, and audiences responded on cue with derisive laughter, though they probably had not read him either.

Type
Chapter
Information
Shakespeare Survey
An Annual Survey of Shakespeare Studies and Production
, pp. 287 - 317
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2000

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure coreplatform@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

  • Critical Studies
  • Edited by Peter Holland, Shakespeare Institute, University of Birmingham
  • Book: Shakespeare Survey
  • Online publication: 28 March 2007
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CCOL0521781140.022
Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

  • Critical Studies
  • Edited by Peter Holland, Shakespeare Institute, University of Birmingham
  • Book: Shakespeare Survey
  • Online publication: 28 March 2007
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CCOL0521781140.022
Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

  • Critical Studies
  • Edited by Peter Holland, Shakespeare Institute, University of Birmingham
  • Book: Shakespeare Survey
  • Online publication: 28 March 2007
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CCOL0521781140.022
Available formats
×