Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human was published by Riverhead in 1998 and is Bloom’s most ambitious critical work — a study of all thirty-eight of Shakespeare’s plays (plus the Sonnets) organized around the thesis that Shakespeare did not merely represent human nature but invented it. Before Shakespeare, Bloom argues, literary characters did not change through self-overhearing — they did not listen to themselves speaking and discover new truths about themselves in the process. After Shakespeare, this became the fundamental mechanism of fictional (and real) consciousness.
The thesis is deliberately provocative: Bloom does not mean that human beings did not exist before Shakespeare, but that our experience of interiority — the sense of a rich, contradictory, self-aware inner life — is something Shakespeare taught us through characters like Hamlet, Falstaff, and Cleopatra. We model our self-understanding on Shakespearean characters, Bloom argues, whether we know it or not.
The individual play readings are uneven — some are brilliant (the Hamlet chapter, the Falstaff essay covering both Henry IV plays and Merry Wives, the Iago analysis) and some are perfunctory (the minor comedies, the late romances). But the best essays represent Bloom at his most incandescent: a reader of extraordinary sensitivity responding to the greatest writer in the language with a passion and intelligence that make the plays come alive on the page.
Collecting Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human
First edition (Riverhead, New York, 1998): Cloth binding, dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition in dust jacket: $20–$50
- Signed copies: $75–$200