The Prince of Denmark, argues the eminent Bloom, was not much loved by his father the warrior king or by his mother, Queen Gertrude. Developing themes from his Shakespeare: Invention of the Human, Bloom adds that Hamlet was instead rather detached, moving through life rather like the lead in his own personal drama, giving a theatrical flair to moments such as the death of Polonius and aptly choosing a play to "catch the conscience of the king." The closest thing he ever had to a parent was Yorick the Jester, and his confrontation with Yorick's skull followed shortly by his attending Ophelia's funeral dealt a serious double blow to his indifference. It was then that he moves grimly toward the climax and his own death. Bloom generates any number of provocative themes, such as Hamlet's notions about plays and acting as reflecting Shakespeare's own rivalries with Ben Jonson, and that the prince never loved Ophelia. Some of the chapters are really too short to do justice to their topics, raising more questions than answers. Nor is the last third of the book, on the play's place in our cultural heritage, up to the parts that focus on its contents, though it features fewer off-putting attacks on political correctness than Bloom's more polemical works. Still, this is not a tyro's book; Bloom makes no concessions to readers who lack a deep familiarity with the play. Nor is it for any reader with a thin skin about Bloom's assumptions about the Anglo-European literary legacy. Short, sophisticated and opinionated, this is a thorny goodie for Bardolators and Bloomians.

Hard on the heels of his grand artistic survey, Genius: A Mosaic of One Hundred Exemplary Creative Minds [BKL S 1 02], Bloom returns to what he does best, the art of close reading, and offers a heartfelt and expert interpretation of Hamlet, Shakespeare's longest and most enigmatic play. Bloom, who unabashedly describes Shakespeare as his "mortal god," became dissatisfied with his treatment of Hamlet in his best-selling Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human (1998), hence this follow-up treatise devoted entirely to a work Bloom describes thusly: "Of all poems it is the most unlimited. As a meditation upon human fragility in confrontation with death, it competes only with the world's scriptures." A provocative and extravagant claim to be sure, one Bloom energetically and entertainingly substantiates in his lucid explication of the curious structure of this "overtly audience-aware" work and in his analysis of Hamlet himself, his oceanic consciousness, profound ambivalence, keen irony, and terrible psychic isolation. As Bloom parses this indelible creation, icon and "disturbance," he shares his exaltation, once again, over Shakespeare's genius and timeless vision.

Published in 1999, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human provided a mammoth capstone to the career of one of the most important literary critics of our era. Though the book was called by some the most significant contribution to Shakespeare scholarship since the time of Dr. Johnson, Harold Bloom remained unsatisfied. He had devoted far too much of the chapter about the Bard's greatest work to questions regarding the play's origin, and "ruefully realized only later that most of what I thought and felt about Hamlet remained unsaid." Hamlet: Poem Unlimited, which he calls a "postlude" to Shakespeare, is an attempt to rectify this error. He sells himself short. A "postlude" sounds like a chatty wrap up, or a glorified appendix. Whereas here Bloom has distilled a life's passion for the centerpiece of his "secular scripture." "What was it in Shakespeare," an awestruck Bloom asks, "that broke free in Hamlet and in Hamlet?" Of course, there is no clear answer. But in Hamlet: Poem Unlimited Bloom, nonetheless, celebrates the question.

In his New York Times bestseller Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human, Harold Bloom showed us how Shakespeare shaped human consciousness and addressed the question of authorship in Hamlet. In Hamlet: Poem Unlimited, our most celebrated critic turns his attention to a reading of the play itself and to Shakespeare's most enigmatic and memorable character.

Hamlet: Poem Unlimited is Bloom's attempt to uncover the mystery of both Prince Hamlet and the play itself, how both prince and drama are able to break through the conventions of theatrical mimesis and the representation of character, making us question the very nature of theatrical illusion. In twenty-five brief chapters, Bloom takes us through the major soliloquies, scenes, characters, and action of the play, to explore the enigma at the heart of the drama, that is central to its universal appeal.

Table of Contents

1.1.Inferring Hamlet

2.2.Horatio

3.3.Plays within plays within plays

4.4.Two soliloquies

5.5.Ophelia

6.6.Shakespeare to the players

7.7. Themousetrap : contrary will

8.8.Gertrude

9.9.Claudius

10.10. Theimpostume

11.11. Thegrave-digger

12.12.Wonder-wounded hearers

13.13.In my heart there was a kind of fighting

14.14.We defy augury

15.15.Let it be

16.16.Apotheosis and tragedy

17.17.Hamlet and the high places

18.18.Fortinbras

19.19.Had I but time, o, I could tell you

20.20.Annihilation : Hamlet's wake

21.21. Thefusion of high and popular art

22.22.Hamlet as the limit of stage drama

23.23. Theend of our time

24.24. Thehero of consciousness

25.25.Hamlet and no end.