Jonathan O'Neill’s Reviews > Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human > Status Update

Read ‘Midsummer’ Essay

Bloom “rejects the prevailing notion that sexual violence and bestiality are at the centre of this humane and wise drama” and finds the questions of whether or not Bottom was, in fact, the carnal lover of the Fairy Queen, “ambiguous or elliptical” and, in any case, “unimportant compared with Bottom’s uniqueness in the Dream.” [Cont...]

Read ‘Hamlet’ Essay

The crux of the majority of Bloom’s essay surrounds his support of Peter Alexander’s surmise that the Ur-Hamlet, written no later than 1589, was not written, as many believe, by Thomas Kyd, but was indeed perhaps the earliest dramatic effort and failure of a young and inexperienced Shakespeare. {cont...]

Shakespeare perspectivizes his dramas so that, measure for measure, we are judged even as we attempt to judge. If your Falstaff is a roistering coward, a wastrel confidence man, an uncounted jester to Prince Hal, well, then, we know something of you, but we know no more about Falstaff. If your Cleopatra is an aging who're, and her Antony a would-be Alexander in his dotage, then we know a touch [cont...]

[Shakespeare] is a system of northern lights, an aurora borealis visible where most of us will never go. Libraries and playhouses (and cinemas) cannot contain him; he has become a spirit or "spell of light," almost too vast to apprehend. High romantic bardolatry, now so much disdained in our self-defiled academies, is merely the most normative of the faiths that worship him.

That for which we find words is something already dead in our hearts. There is always a kind of contempt in the act of speaking
Nietzsche, The Twilight of the Idols