Title: Stick to Shakespeare himself
Product review: I have read a few positive reviews of this book, and the other amazon.com readers seemed to have liked it as well. I don't think that Bloom outdid himself in this book; in fact it is a travesty of Shakespeare. The basic thesis, that Shakespeare "invented the human personality" of course suggests that Professor Bloom and the rest of us somehow are fully human in a way that Dante or Homer or Sophocles or Socrates was not, something that I find difficult to see anyone taking seriously. Professor Bloom is more deeply human than Socrates and Homer, who lived before Shakespeare? The specific readings are awful: for example, Professor Bloom surmises, on what ground I don't know, that Brutus reached out to stab Caesar's "private parts." With such interpretations, Bloom is travestying Shakespeare as much as do the scholars who he says form the School of Resentment.
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