"...if you want to get any serious drinking done you've got to go to Shakespeare. What Shakespeare offers is cognitive power. For example, Freud's work was the systemisation of what he saw in Shakespeare. Nevertheless, Freud's post-modernist Parisian scions, academic feminism, Marxism, Lacanianism, Foucaultianism, Derrideanism, contribute nothing to a critical appreciation of Shakespeare. I once thought otherwise, but now I rather doubt it (alas, now I am old). What others have called Bardolatry seems to me nothing other than an authentic response to Shakespeare. You know, Charles, you go to Shakespeare for the characters. Of course, in Shakespeare, we come to confront the anxiety of influence. Personality is a Shakespearean invention... One goes to Shakespeare because one doesn't have enough friends..."
2 comments:
Kenneth Burke was one of Bloom's favorite readers of Shakespeare -- Bloom praises his Shakespeare criticism as among "the best modern criticism we have on Shakespeare. Burke, a superb rhetorician, confronts daringly the triple greatness of the greatest of all writers ever: cognitive power, linguistic richness, and a whole cosmos of persuasive women and men made up out of words."
http://www.parlorpress.com/shakespeare.html
Thanks for your comment. I thought Bloom's book about Hamlet ("Poem Unlimited") brilliant. But I hope you see my satiric intent.
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