Hamlet : poem unlimited /
Material type: TextPublication details: New York : Riverhead Books, 2003.Description: 154 p. ; 20 cmISBN:- 157322233X (acidfree paper)
- 822.3/3 21
- PR2807 .B617 2003
Item type | Current library | Home library | Collection | Call number | Copy number | Status | Date due | Barcode | Item holds | |
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Standard Loan | Hayden Library Adult Nonfiction | Hayden Library | Book | 822.33/BLOOM (Browse shelf(Opens below)) | 1 | Available | 50610015593143 |
Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:
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. Every reader of Shakespeare will delight in this step-by-step analysis by our most beloved critic.
Table of contents provided by Syndetics
- Preface (p. 1)
- 1 Inferring Hamlet (p. 3)
- 2 Horatio (p. 13)
- 3 Plays Within Plays Within Plays (p. 19)
- 4 Two Soliloquies (p. 29)
- 5 Ophelia (p. 37)
- 6 Shakespeare to the Players (p. 45)
- 7 The Mousetrap: Contrary Will (p. 51)
- 8 Gertrude (p. 57)
- 9 Claudius (p. 61)
- 10 The Impostume (p. 67)
- 11 The Grave - Digger (p. 73)
- 12 Wonder - Wounded Hearers (p. 79)
- 13 In My Heart There Was a Kind of Fighting (p. 83)
- 14 We Defy Augury (p. 87)
- 15 Let It Be (p. 91)
- 16 Apotheosis and Tragedy (p. 95)
- 17 Hamlet and the High Places (p. 101)
- 18 Fortinbras (p. 107)
- 19 Had I But Time--O, I Could Tell You (p. 111)
- 20 Annihilation: Hamlet's Wake (p. 119)
- 21 The Fusion of High and Popular Art (p. 125)
- 22 Hamlet as the Limit of Stage Drama (p. 131)
- 23 The End of Our Time (p. 139)
- 24 The Hero of Consciousness (p. 145)
- 25 Hamlet and No End (p. 151)
Excerpt provided by Syndetics
Reviews provided by Syndetics
Library Journal Review
One of our great Shakespeare scholars investigates one the Bard's greatest characters. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.Publishers Weekly Review
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. (Mar.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reservedBooklist Review
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. Donna SeamanKirkus Book Review
Bloom says that in Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human (1998), other matters kept him from saying "most of what [he] thought and felt" about Hamlet. A lucky thing, since now the great-hearted critic offers this little gem--deftly snatching Hamlet away from its legions of minor readers and reclaiming it for its major ones. On the stateliest of notes, Bloom announces that Hamlet is so "unlimited" as to be "of no genre," its greatness such that "it competes only with the world's scriptures." Such extraordinary significance can't rise from a work that's "about" the things that its commonly tendentious or politicized readers think--"mourning for the dead father," say, or "outrage at [the] mother's sexuality"--and Bloom discards the very notion that "the double shock of his father's sudden death and his mother's remarriage has brought about a radial change in" Hamlet. The infinitely greater and more interesting truth is that "Something in Hamlet dies before the play opens" and that the play's real subject "is Hamlet's consciousness of his own consciousness, unlimited yet at war with itself." Only from so enormous a subject, the meaning of self-consciousness itself, and only through so prodigious a character as Hamlet ("he is cleverer than we are, and more dangerous"), does the play achieve its height, depth, and significance. Bloom asks questions that he may not, in so many words, answer--why does Hamlet come back to Elsinore after England? why does Shakespeare "so cheerfully" risk the very "dramatic continuity" of the play? why does he provide for the towering Hamlet so meager, paltry, and "mere" an opponent as Claudius? In every case: because the play, "a cosmological drama," is so big that it's bursting its own seams; because it serves simply as an excuse for the demonstration of its own enormity; because Hamlet is a character wrestling with "his desire to come to an end of playacting." Shakespeare criticism that's big, alive, towering, deep, passionate--in an age that so industriously miniaturizes and demeans its literature. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.Author notes provided by Syndetics
Harold Bloom was born on July 11, 1930 in New York City. He earned his Bachelor of Arts from Cornell in 1951 and his Doctorate from Yale in 1955.After graduating from Yale, Bloom remained there as a teacher, and was made Sterling Professor of Humanities in 1983. Bloom's theories have changed the way that critics think of literary tradition and has also focused his attentions on history and the Bible. He has written over twenty books and edited countless others. He is one of the most famous critics in the world and considered an expert in many fields. In 2010 he became a founding patron of Ralston College, a new institution in Savannah, Georgia, that focuses on primary texts.
His works include Fallen Angels, Till I End My Song: A Gathering of Last Poems, Anatomy of Influence: Literature as a Way of Life and The Shadow of a Great Rock: A Literary Appreciation of The King James Bible.
Harold Bloom passed away on October 14, 2019 in New Haven, at the age of 89.
(Bowker Author Biography)
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