Hamlet: Poem Unlimited

It is not often that one reads a book about a Shakespeare play and needs about half a dozen other books - including a dictionary - nearby for reference. But it is absolutely worth the effort - reading this book is an education.

Hamlet, a play within a play within a play, plays out as pure deception. In this respect Harold comes close to the mark by saying it is "unlimited." It allows scholars to keep asking the ever puzzling and vexing questions... ensuring more debate and questions in return. In other words, Hamlet is a universe of ever expanding possibilities because, as literature and fiction, it is never grounded in reality. We don't have the letters of the real Hamlet, we don't have anything written about him by his family or friends that would give us an insight into his true actions and character. Everything is fiction and speculation and could be argued indefinitely. In point of fact, the play itself contains the more questions asked by its characters than any other Shakespearean play -- and if the characters in the play don't know much, how can we? Harold has given us his surmises about this hollow universe that expands into the unknown. One important thing he tells us is that Hamlet is acting from the start. I would say that almost everybody is acting or is disingenuous right from the start. If deception is par for the course at Elsinore then it is perfectly natural that Hamlet should act as well. Even the last scene of sword fighting involves deadly deception from this family of actors. If deception and uncertainty are the royal stamps in Denmark, then I would take it farther and argue that the biggest deception of all was perpetrated by Fortinbras. I propose a new theory: Fortinbras had Claudius commit the fratricide and then he had Reynardo the spy act as the Ghost to incite Hamlet to kill Claudius. This would constitute Fortinbras' revenge against King Hamlet for killing his father and leaves him in a nice situation to take over the kingdom, which he eventually does. Fortinbras is then by far the greatest Machiavellian of the lot. Now I can back this theory up and it is as valid as any other out there. In other words, there is no ground floor of truth in Hamlet. But Harold should be glad if he gets people thinking - if Hamlet is acting right from the start, perhaps so is the Ghost -- and, in time, who knows what imaginative theories scholars will come up with and how perverse Hamlet could become!

In response to negative reviews a defense of Bloom must be proffered. The genius of Hamlet is dark, capricious, spurring, somewhat mystical, and surpasses our own in each cognition. Where some have argued that Bloom's treatise of the poem unlimited is brief, I argue that prolix erudition is not what we need in regards to Hamlet. He is a professor par excellance in creativity and the commentarys we don't need on his genius are those of the ominous tomes of Henry James and the like. We likewise can do without a pithy take-home message that utterly misses the heart of the play and it's protagonist. Bloom's musings, like the divine criticisms of Dr. Johnson, go strait through the heart of Hamlet giving us an aesthetic mosaic of it's best parts for us to taste. Other oposing views are without a doubt concievable, but what Bloom gives us is one of the most lively, and sober readings of the most easily misread piece of literature in the english language. Bloom is a masterful laureate of critics.

Bloom says that he wrote this book as a postlude to "Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human". It is a short book, but it is not a slight one. There is a lot here to meditate over, read again, and argue over. Bloom certainly didn't write this expecting anyone to agree with everything he writes. In fact, a teacher is poorly served by his students if they simply accept what he says as if it were scripture. If the student doesn't understand or isn't persuaded, he must question. If he disagrees, he must argue. If he agrees, he must take what the teacher gave him and take it further. Don't think that because this book quotes extensively from the play and is only 154 small pages long that you won't have a lot given you.I enjoyed Bloom's "Invention of the Human" a great deal, but I am glad that he has given us more of his insights into Hamlet. Bloom's thoughts about how the play should be presented, what other critics have written, how his own perspectives have changed over the years, what it means to have a play within a play within a play. I also found his discussion of which verse is archaic and which is written to be understood as bad verse quite illuminating. Since my ear cannot hear the shades of Elizabethan English quite so clearly I have to admit that I didn't pick up that the slaughter of Priam was supposed to be taken as awful. I will have to work on hearing the language in all its varieties within this play and the others.I think it is vital to remember that works like this provide their greatest value by giving us a path to further thought, study, and deeper reading. We waste them by either accepting or rejecting their arguments at face value. This is a book that everyone who loves Shakespeare and Hamlet should read and then make their own judgments. I found this a very valuable book.

Professor Bloom (THE WESTERN CANON) knows his Shakespeare. In HAMLET: POEM UNLIMITED, he enthusiastically shows why D. H. Lawrence was correct in his observation that "the soliloquies of Hamlet are as deep as the soul of man can go . . . and as sincere as the Holy Spirit itself in their essence" (p. 9). "Of all poems," Bloom writes, HAMLET "is the most unlimited. As a meditation upon human fragility in confrontation with death, it competes only with the world's scriptures" (p. 3).Bloom wrote this 154-page commentary on Shakespeare's four-thousand line play as a "postlude" to SHAKESPEARE: THE INVENTION OF THE HUMAN(1998), and he assumes his reader already has an in-depth familiarity with the play (my only real criticism of the book, albeit a small criticism). He presents Hamlet as the "neglected child" of a warrior-king father and a "sexual magnate" mother (pp. 4-5), influenced more by the royal court jester, Yorick, than anyone, and ultimately at war with himself. In his lively, opionated style, Bloom cautions us not to "condescend" to the Prince of Denmark, for Hamlet, we are instructed, "is more intelligent than you are, whoever you are" (p. 86). In his short book, which reads like a series of lecture notes, Bloom not only triumphs in teaching us who Hamlet is, but he successfully illuminates the secret of his subject's "charismatic eminence" (p. 109). Bardolators will not be disappointed. G. Merritt