by Harold Bloom
““We are so influenced by him that we cannot get outside of him. Criticism necessarily fails when it deludes itself into the smugness of not seeing that we remain enclosed by Shakespeare. The only instruments by which we can examine him were either invented or perfected by Shakespeare himself... The issue is not belief but our human nature, so intensified by Shakespeare as to be his reinvention. How can we historicize Shakespeare if we are children of Shakespeare, mapping our origins and our horizons in his diction, in his astonishing vocabulary of some 22,000 separate words?"”
“We are so influenced by him that we cannot get outside of him. Criticism necessarily fails when it deludes itself into the smugness of not seeing that we remain enclosed by Shakespeare. The only instruments by which we can examine him were either invented or perfected by Shakespeare himself... The issue is not belief but our human nature, so intensified by Shakespeare as to be his reinvention. How can we historicize Shakespeare if we are children of Shakespeare, mapping our origins and our horizons in his diction, in his astonishing vocabulary of some 22,000 separate words?"”
““Historicizing, politicizing, even feminizing Shakespeare—are all redundant operations: Shakespeare always was there before us. He emancipated no one (that we know of) from the power structures of his own day, and cannot liberate us from any societal enclosures in our current squalor. If you query Shakespeare for ultimates, you emerge with nothing, and you are in danger of pragmatically equating him with his own superb nihilists.”
“Historicizing, politicizing, even feminizing Shakespeare—are all redundant operations: Shakespeare always was there before us. He emancipated no one (that we know of) from the power structures of his own day, and cannot liberate us from any societal enclosures in our current squalor. If you query Shakespeare for ultimates, you emerge with nothing, and you are in danger of pragmatically equating him with his own superb nihilists.”
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Oxford University Press
ISBN 10: 0195016130
