Synopses & Reviews
In Harold Bloom's New York Times bestseller Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human, the world's foremost literary critic theorized on the authorship of Hamlet. In this engaging new stand-alone work, he offers a full and warmly personal account of the play itself, explores its extraordinary impact throughout history, and seeks to uncover the mystery at its heart.
Review
"An intellectual fireworks display."
San Jose Mercury News "Not perhaps since Samuel Johnson has a critic explained to a general audience as ably as Mr. Bloom does how much Shakespeare matters to our sense of who we are." New York Times
Synopsis
In Harold Bloom's New York Times bestseller Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human, the world's foremost literary critic theorized on the authorship of Hamlet. In this engaging new stand-alone work, he offers a full and warmly personal account of the play itself, explores its extraordinary impact throughout history, and seeks to uncover the mystery at its heart.
About the Author
Harold Bloom is Sterling Professor of Humanities at Yale University, Berg Professor of English at New York University, and a former Charles Eliot Norton Professor at Harvard.
Table of Contents
Hamlet: Poem Unlimited Preface
One: Inferring Hamlet
Two: Horatio
Three: Plays Within Plays Within Plays
Four: Two Soliloquies
Five: Ophelia
Six: Shakespeare to the Players
Seven: The Mousetrap: Contrary Will
Eight: Gertrude
Nine: Claudius
Ten: The Impostume
Eleven: The Grave-Digger
Twelve: Wonder-Wounded Hearers
Thirteen: In My Heart There was a Kind of Fighting
Fourteen: We Defy Augury
Fifteen: Let It Be
Sixteen: Apotheosis and Tragedy
Seventeen: Hamlet and the High Places
Eighteen: Fortinbras
Nineteen: Had I But TimeO, I Could Tell You
Twenty: Annihilation: Hamlet's Wake
Twenty-One: The Fusion of High and Popular Art
Twenty-Two: Hamlet As the Limit of Stage Drama
Twenty-Three: The End of Our Time
Twenty-Four: The Hero of Consciousness
Twenty-Five: Hamlet and No End