Introduction

Abstract

Harold Bloom’s Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human has exasperated scholars, who have ignored it, complained about it, and written copious reviews. But the book has been generally well received, both by the general public and by the wider literary world. Shakespeare was a New York Times bestseller, and a finalist for the National Book Award and for the National Book Critics Circle Award; it was a main selection for the Book-of-the-Month Club. Reviews from the New York Times, the Wall Street foumal, and Newsweek were equally ecstatic; even The New Yorker declared that “[y]ou could hardly ask for a more capacious and beneficent work than Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human” (Lane 1998, 86). Available in hardback, paperback, and audiocassette, the book was ranked 4,253 by on-line bookseller Amazon.com on June 29, 2000. By contrast, on that same day, Helen Vendler’s The Art of Shakespeares Sonnets, another widely reviewed and appreciated book by an academic critic, was ranked 42,355. Park Honan’s Shakespeare: A Life, which Amazon.com recommends to readers of Bloom, clocked in at number 67,618. Jonathan Bate’s The Genius of Shakespeare, a book that covers ideological ground similar to that covered in Shakespeare, is aimed at a generalist audience, and was published in the same year, was ranked 79,327 (Vendler 1997; Honan 1998; Bate 1998).