Harold Bloom - "Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human"

ELI5/TLDR

Harold Bloom, a famous and famously cranky Yale critic, sits down with Charlie Rose to argue one big idea: Shakespeare didn’t just write great plays, he invented the way we think about being a person. Before Shakespeare, characters in stories changed because their luck or their gods changed. Shakespeare’s characters change because they listen to themselves talk and are surprised by what they hear. Bloom thinks this is close to a miracle and admits, cheerfully, that he can’t explain how one glove-maker’s son from a small English town pulled it off.

The Full Story

The one claim the whole book rests on

Bloom’s thesis sounds grand and a little absurd at first: Shakespeare “invented the human.” He doesn’t mean Shakespeare invented human beings. He means Shakespeare invented our modern idea of personality — the sense that a person has a rich, changing inner life.

To see the difference, think about how characters worked before Shakespeare. In older stories, a person might suffer, grow old, or fall from grace, but the change came from outside — fate turned, a god got angry, fortune’s wheel spun. The person stayed essentially the same; their circumstances moved.

Bloom argues Shakespeare did something new. His characters change from the inside.

They do not change because they overhear themselves and are startled by what they overhear and on that basis undergo extraordinary vicissitudes of mutability.

That phrase — “overhear themselves” — is the whole idea in two words. Hamlet talks, listens to his own talk, and becomes a different person because of what he just learned about himself. Bloom calls this Shakespeare’s “self-same”: a stable identity that nonetheless transforms as it eavesdrops on its own mind. Nobody, he insists, did this before.

Characters over plot, always

A second, quieter claim runs underneath: Shakespeare didn’t care much about plot. He stole his storylines wherever he could find them, “with both hands.” What he actually cared about was people — what they sound like, how they differ from one another.

When he hasn’t got a source, as in The Tempest, you’ve got a plot where nothing happens.

Bloom credits two earlier critics for this insight — Samuel Johnson and William Hazlitt, his “heroic precursors.” Johnson noticed that Shakespeare’s characters all speak differently from each other and from every other character in literature. Hazlitt argued that the plot, the action, even the politics and religion are all secondary; what matters is “the exuberant play of fresh personality.” Bloom is honest that his big thesis is basically theirs, inherited and amplified.

Shakespeare as secular scripture

Bloom keeps reaching for religious language, half-joking, half-not. He calls Shakespeare’s complete works “the secular scripture” and says Hamlet has become “the intellectuals’ Christ.” He even ranks Shakespeare’s strongest characters alongside the great literary figures of religion — the God of the Hebrew Bible, the Jesus of Mark’s gospel, the Allah of the Quran — which he admits is a blasphemous thing to say.

He mocks his own grandiosity with a nickname: “Bloom Brontosaurus Bardolatour” — a dinosaur who worships the Bard. The self-deprecation is real, but so is the conviction. To Bloom, Shakespeare is “the largest single miracle” not just in art but in human consciousness. There is, he says, an “excess” in Shakespeare — an overflow not just of meaning but of being.

The thing he’s furious about

Bloom warns Rose that he’s “permanently furious” on one subject, and then proves it. His enemy is what he calls “politicized” and “historicized” Shakespeare — productions and university courses that treat the plays as vehicles for ideology.

His example: a staging of Richard III where Ian McKellen plays the villain as Oswald Mosley, the British fascist. Bloom wanted to see Richard III, not a lecture about 1930s politics. He has the same complaint about a Tempest where Caliban and Ariel become rebellious black slaves — which, he argues, the text simply doesn’t support (Ariel is an airy spirit who loves Prospero; Caliban is only half-human).

The deeper point: trying to make Shakespeare “relevant” misunderstands him.

It’s rather like saying I’m going to establish the relevance of my own mother and father.

Shakespeare is so foundational, Bloom argues, that he’s already ahead of every new fashion. Borrowing an image from Walt Whitman, he says Shakespeare seems to be telling us: “I stop somewhere waiting for you. It’s your business to somehow catch up to me.”

A despairing streak, and women

Two darker notes. First, Bloom thinks Shakespeare’s work drifts, over time, into bitterness — “a time of great rancidity of spirits” in the problem plays, ending in something close to revulsion from human sexuality. He pairs a line from Nietzsche (“that for which we can find words is something already dead in our hearts”) with Hamlet, suggesting Shakespeare understood that speech always carries a kind of contempt — that even “I love you” is something already dead by the time it’s spoken.

Second, an unfashionable aside: Bloom claims Shakespeare’s women are consistently superior to his men — more mature, more generous, wiser — not because of social convention but, in his words, because “the best among them are better than the best among us.” He notes dryly that this is “hardly a feminist remark” and that he and feminist critics famously do not get along.

Key Takeaways

Bloom’s core thesis: Shakespeare invented the modern concept of personality — the idea of a rich, changing inner self.
Pre-Shakespeare, characters changed because external forces (fate, gods, fortune) changed; Shakespeare’s characters change from internal self-reflection.
The key mechanism is characters who “overhear themselves” — listen to their own speech and are transformed by it (Hamlet is the model).
Shakespeare prioritized character over plot; he borrowed storylines freely and showed little interest in plot construction.
Bloom credits Samuel Johnson and William Hazlitt as his intellectual precursors for the character-first reading.
He treats Shakespeare’s works as “secular scripture” and ranks his strongest characters with the literary figures of major religions.
Bloom’s main grievance is “politicized” and “historicized” Shakespeare — productions and teaching that use the plays as ideological vehicles.
He argues trying to make Shakespeare “relevant” is incoherent because Shakespeare is foundational, perpetually ahead of every new movement.
He sees a turn toward despair and revulsion in the later plays, and argues Shakespeare’s women are written as superior to his men.

Claude’s Take

This is a 1998 Charlie Rose interview, and it’s best understood as Bloom performing Bloom — the grand pronouncements, the worship-language, the self-mocking “brontosaurus” nickname, the calculated fury at academic trends. It’s enormously entertaining and you come away with a clear sense of the man and his big idea.

The central thesis is genuinely interesting and worth holding onto: that interiority-through-self-overhearing is the Shakespearean innovation. But it’s worth knowing that even sympathetic critics treat “Shakespeare invented the human” as provocative overstatement rather than established fact. Bloom half-concedes this himself when Rose points out you don’t have to buy the thesis to enjoy the book. The claim that there’s “no evidence” of personality before Shakespeare is the kind of sweeping line that sounds thrilling in conversation and falls apart the moment you point it at, say, Montaigne or Augustine’s Confessions.

The political-correctness grievances are very much of their late-90s culture-war moment, and Bloom states them as settled truths when they’re really aesthetic preferences dressed as facts — his confident reading of who Ariel and Caliban “really” are is exactly the kind of interpretive certainty he’d resist in someone he disagreed with.

A 7: a sharp, vivid window into one of the great critical personalities and a real idea you can chew on, docked for being more a charismatic monologue than an argument that gets tested.