Shakespeare : the invention of the human

How can we 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 than even the Bible?

This book is a visionary summation of Harold Bloom's reading of Shakespeare, in which he expounds a seminal critical theory: that Shakespeare was, through his dramatic characters, the inventor of human personality as we have to come understand it.

In short, Shakespeare invented our understanding of ourselves. In a chronological survey of each of the plays, Bloom explores the supra-human personalities of Shakespeare's great protagonists: Hamlet, Lear, Falstaff, Rosalind, Juliet.

He argues that they represent the apogee of Shakespeare's art, and that his plays "remain the outward limit of human acheivement: 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..."