I’m reclassifying all the Shakespeare (he’s the only author in Dewey who has a special set of sub-classification letters: B for Biography, D for Critical appraisal, a code for each play and criticism of that play, etc.), and came across Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human, by Harold Bloom. The front flap claims that Shakespeare “…not only invented the English language, but also, as Bloom argues, created human nature as we know it today.”
He’s a god, people! A superhero! Creating whole languages out of nothing and shaping the human being in a single bound! In a much more awesome-looking book, The Friendly Shakespeare: A Thoroughly Painless Guide to the Best of the Bard, by Norrie Epstein, Epstein states that, “According to Sam Schoenbaum, one nineteenth-century bardolater [hee!] even claimed that God speeded up the gestation process for his favorite son [to explain how Shakespeare's first child could possibly have been born only 6 months after his marriage]” (p. 27). Apparently, while he was at it, God gave Will some omnipotence, too. Good grief.
7 responses so far ↓
1 anna // Apr 6, 2007 at 10:45 am
i like shakespeare our contemporary. brilliant perspective.
2 Martha // Apr 6, 2007 at 10:56 am
Heh. That even beats my favorite Cold Mountain jacket blurb:
“This novel is so magnificent—in every conceivable aspect, and others previously unimagined—that it has occurred to me that the shadow of this book, and the joy I received in reading it, will fall over every other book I ever read. It seems even possible to never want to read another book, so wonderful is this one. Cold Mountain is one of the great accomplishments in American literature.” – Rick Bass
3 Sara // Apr 6, 2007 at 11:31 am
The best Shakespeare book I’ve read is Anthony Burgess’s Shakespeare.
The whole “invention of the human” thing annoys me, and I’m a huge Shakespeare fangirl. Bloom’s full of it.
4 Tom // Apr 6, 2007 at 6:46 pm
Yeah, Harold Bloom’s a prick (the man wrote a book called How to Read and Why for god’s sake) and Shakespeare is by far the most overrated writer who ever lived (not that he’s not great, but no single writer is that great).
5 Jeff // Apr 6, 2007 at 6:56 pm
What Tom said. This guy makes his living making outrageous statements like that; he’s the Bill Donohue of lit crit. (The latest one I recall was that the popularity of the Harry Potter books represents “the world’s descent into subliteracy.”)
6 Andy // Apr 9, 2007 at 2:43 pm
“..not only invented the English language…”
Damn. So his actors had to learn their lines phonetically, like Sammo Hung speaking English? And it must have been especially frustrating for the first few hundred performances, before any of the audience spoke English either!
7 Sebbo // Apr 9, 2007 at 11:18 pm
I noticed at the Harvard Coop that only author appears to have the distinction of his own section.
…wait for it…
Tolkien.
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