PDF Macbeth A Dagger of the Mind Shakespeare Personalities Harold Bloom 9781501164255 Books
Download As PDF : Macbeth A Dagger of the Mind Shakespeare Personalities Harold Bloom 9781501164255 Books
From the greatest Shakespeare scholar of our time, comes a portrait of Macbeth, one of William Shakespeare’s most complex and compelling anti-heroes—the final volume in a series of five short books about the great playwright’s most significant personalities Falstaff, Cleopatra, Lear, Iago, Macbeth.
From the ambitious and mad titular character to his devilish wife Lady Macbeth to the moral and noble Banquo to the mysterious Three Witches, Macbeth is one of William Shakespeare’s more brilliantly populated plays and remains among the most widely read, performed in innovative productions set in a vast array of times and locations, from Nazi Germany to Revolutionary Cuba. Macbeth is a distinguished warrior hero, who over the course of the play, transforms into a brutal, murderous villain and pays an extraordinary price for committing an evil act. A man consumed with ambition and self-doubt, Macbeth is one of Shakespeare’s most vital meditations on the dangerous corners of the human imagination.
Award-winning writer and beloved professor Harold Bloom investigates Macbeth’s interiority and unthinkable actions with razor-sharp insight, agility, and compassion. He also explores his own personal relationship to the character Just as we encounter one Anna Karenina or Jay Gatsby when we are seventeen and another when we are forty, Bloom writes about his shifting understanding—over the course of his own lifetime—of this endlessly compelling figure, so that the book also becomes an extraordinarily moving argument for literature as a path to and a measure of our humanity.
Bloom is mesmerizing in the classroom, wrestling with the often tragic choices Shakespeare’s characters make. He delivers that kind of exhilarating intimacy and clarity in Macbeth, the final book in an essential series.
PDF Macbeth A Dagger of the Mind Shakespeare Personalities Harold Bloom 9781501164255 Books
"If you are acquainted with Harold Bloom and familiar with his usual style, and his often bewildering allusive breadth and depth, I suggest you skip to the next paragraph. To those not as familiar with Bloom, this book is not a brief "introduction to Shakespeare's Macbeth." If that is what you are looking for, I suggest--respectfully--you look somewhere else. If you are not familiar with Bloom but are looking for something more thought-provoking and potentially controversial, you may be in the right place. 138 (short) pages.
At this point Bloom is 88 years old and, in some ways, I see his style in the way of Shakespeare's late style. There is a terseness, a gnarled muscularity in diction, syntax and figure, and a dispensing with whatever isn't essential--to him. I also sense something of a tiredness. While Bloom has praised Hamlet and Falstaff and Cleopatra with verve and joy,, there is a sobriety and an intimacy in his voice in discussing Macbeth that I find in very few other places. (Oddly enough I recently came across this same tone in his section on Hawthorne in his The Daemon Knows.)
In previous writing Bloom has deeply probed the "proleptic imagination" of Macbeth. Here, there is still a great deal of talk about "prolepsis", but there is something else too. If you love to savor Shakespeare and Bloom, this is another great work. Although it certainly rhymes in places with previous writing on Macbeth, Bloom surprises me here with a kind of quietism, almost becoming the transcendent Hamlet of Act 5. Yet instead of pondering consciousness and human existence, Bloom, in almost Borgesian fashion, has finally seen the human imagination for what it is: Macbeth's imagination, Shakespeare's imagination. So there is a "wonder-wounded" quality in Bloom's rumination, spellbound perhaps by the realization that Shakespeare's imagination has been here in plain sight all along, soaked in blood and darkness, yet blazing and visionary.
While this is not Bloom's typical register in writing, it is slightly more common when hearing him speak, which makes me think that this book was dictated, the way Milton dictated Paradise Lost. It feels as though Bloom is right here with us, thumbing through the harrowing play and reflecting on Shakespeare, Macbeth, mortality, humanity and more. He even recounts how when he was a very young man he saw a ghost. I love that.
I have read elsewhere the criticism that Bloom quotes too much of Shakespeare's text, thus deceiving or depriving the buyer or reader of Bloom's own thought. I would only point out that Bloom himself considers Shakespeare to be secular scripture, and that Shakespeare's word itself is the centerpiece; the rest--even Bloom's--is commentary. Furthermore, I would add that it is particularly useful to have long passages quoted (emended by Bloom) in the pages themselves, because it takes some of the burden off of the reader's having to go and look up the parts for closer reading. It's also interesting to read Bloom's literal reading."
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Macbeth A Dagger of the Mind Shakespeare Personalities Harold Bloom 9781501164255 Books Reviews :
Macbeth A Dagger of the Mind Shakespeare Personalities Harold Bloom 9781501164255 Books Reviews
- If you are acquainted with Harold Bloom and familiar with his usual style, and his often bewildering allusive breadth and depth, I suggest you skip to the next paragraph. To those not as familiar with Bloom, this book is not a brief "introduction to Shakespeare's Macbeth." If that is what you are looking for, I suggest--respectfully--you look somewhere else. If you are not familiar with Bloom but are looking for something more thought-provoking and potentially controversial, you may be in the right place. 138 (short) pages.
At this point Bloom is 88 years old and, in some ways, I see his style in the way of Shakespeare's late style. There is a terseness, a gnarled muscularity in diction, syntax and figure, and a dispensing with whatever isn't essential--to him. I also sense something of a tiredness. While Bloom has praised Hamlet and Falstaff and Cleopatra with verve and joy,, there is a sobriety and an intimacy in his voice in discussing Macbeth that I find in very few other places. (Oddly enough I recently came across this same tone in his section on Hawthorne in his The Daemon Knows.)
In previous writing Bloom has deeply probed the "proleptic imagination" of Macbeth. Here, there is still a great deal of talk about "prolepsis", but there is something else too. If you love to savor Shakespeare and Bloom, this is another great work. Although it certainly rhymes in places with previous writing on Macbeth, Bloom surprises me here with a kind of quietism, almost becoming the transcendent Hamlet of Act 5. Yet instead of pondering consciousness and human existence, Bloom, in almost Borgesian fashion, has finally seen the human imagination for what it is Macbeth's imagination, Shakespeare's imagination. So there is a "wonder-wounded" quality in Bloom's rumination, spellbound perhaps by the realization that Shakespeare's imagination has been here in plain sight all along, soaked in blood and darkness, yet blazing and visionary.
While this is not Bloom's typical register in writing, it is slightly more common when hearing him speak, which makes me think that this book was dictated, the way Milton dictated Paradise Lost. It feels as though Bloom is right here with us, thumbing through the harrowing play and reflecting on Shakespeare, Macbeth, mortality, humanity and more. He even recounts how when he was a very young man he saw a ghost. I love that.
I have read elsewhere the criticism that Bloom quotes too much of Shakespeare's text, thus deceiving or depriving the buyer or reader of Bloom's own thought. I would only point out that Bloom himself considers Shakespeare to be secular scripture, and that Shakespeare's word itself is the centerpiece; the rest--even Bloom's--is commentary. Furthermore, I would add that it is particularly useful to have long passages quoted (emended by Bloom) in the pages themselves, because it takes some of the burden off of the reader's having to go and look up the parts for closer reading. It's also interesting to read Bloom's literal reading.
