Harold Bloom, Professor of English at New York University and of Humanities at Yale, is an academic institution in the United States. Yet many academics think his ideas are retrograde and defensive, as he clings steadfastly to the notion of a great literary canon and its unquestioned pre-eminence over the philistinism that seeks to subvert it. Bloom's The Western Canon (1994) became a bestseller in presenting such a notion and his latest book is a homage to the man he believes made the Western Canon: Shakespeare.
It takes balls and bombast to title the work, Shakespeare: The Invention Of The Human, and he tries to justify this by arguing: 'After Jesus, Hamlet is the most cited figure in Western consciousness and the worship of Shakespeare ought to be even more a secular religion than it already is . . . He [Shakespeare] is a system of northern lights, an aurora borealis visible where most of us will never go.' Bloom has spent a lifetime trying to get there and evidently thinks he has made it. We are the products of Shakespeare's invention, he reasons, then takes the 35 plays one by one to illustrate - unconvincingly - how. Bloom would have us accept that the notion of a human psyche and all its constituent parts never existed before Shakespeare chose to invent and tell us so.
Any reader of Ovid, Chaucer and Montaigne would protest. Ovid's characters were defined as much by their struggle to invent new languages for representation of inner selves as any Shakespeare ever rendered. And the pilgrims of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales speak in voices echoed by many of the Bard's creations.
Throughout, Bloom makes too many grandiloquent assertions, only to have to back down. Forgetting or ignoring his premise, he later claims that Falstaff is not only the man to whom we owe our ability to laugh at ourselves, but was the Wife of Bath's progeny. Surely, then, Shakespeare must owe her a nod.
Well, yes, says Bloom, it is just that Shakespeare did it better.
It seems he does everything better. If Shakespeare has become, as Bloom repeats, the most accepted mode for representing character and personality in language, it seems peculiar that Bloom avoids the matter of the Bard's language and when he does address it, his critical powers seem embarrassingly feeble.
Rosalind in As You Like It (whom Bloom reckons comes close to Shakespeare's own voice) speaks the lines: 'Men have died from time to time and worms have eaten them, but not for love.' Bloom thinks these both the best starting point to truly apprehend her and the best medicine for all lovesick males.