Phrases like "Oedipus complex" or "Electra Complex" are proof enough of that. Shakespeare was undoubtedly a major source in many of Freud's best essays and in the thinking of modern psychologists, but a source of ultimately less significance than the dramatists of classical Greece. Although he claimed to have unleashed the lower depths in man, he added that what he had to say was really a codification of what had been already suggested, in a more artistic language, by poets. Their readers might have been forgiven for viewing Sigmund Freud rather than Shakespeare as the real theoretical source for Bloom's ideas of personality-in-action.įreud himself had the humility of true genius. Those were studies of the ways in which artists wrestle with the legacy of predecessors in a sort of "family romance". Professor Bloom is, after all, advancing the thesis rather late in a career which has won golden opinions for such elegant books as Yeats (1970) and The Anxiety of Influence (1973). The audacity of such claims is staggering, and open to question.
Other artists merely reported the doings of static characters, he insists, but Shakespeare went beyond mere representation, designing entirely new versions of the person in the process of transformation. The playwright's conception of the rich inner life of personalities like Hamlet or Falstaff was without precedent. Harold Bloom now claims that Shakespeare invented the human personality as we know it today. Shakespeare: the Invention of the Human, By Harold Bloom, Fourth Estate, 745 pp, £25 in UK
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