Harold Bloom is here.

He is the Sterling professor of humanities at Yale

University and Berg professor of English at New York University. He has
written more than 20 books including the Western Canon, the book of
Jay, and genius. His most recent book is Hamlet Poem Unlimited. I am
pleased to welcome a great friend of this broadcast back to this table.

Welcome, sir. Thank you, Charles. Hamlet for you is what? Well, it is
certainly the most extraordinary, single work of Western literature that I
have ever read in any language that I can read.

Why is that?

It's a kaleidoscope. It's of no genre whatsoever, which is why following

Polonius, I only half ironically subtitled the book Poem Unlimited.

Let me interrupt you by saying this is from Polonius: The best actors in
the world, either for tragedy, comedy, history, pastoral, pastoral,
comical, historical, pastoral, tragical, historical, tragical, comical,
historical, pastoral, seen indivisible indivisible or poem unlimited.

Yes.
That´s from Polonius.

Shakespeare, who is an endless tragic ironist, puts in Polonius's mouth

the whole question of what genre he is writing because this is not
revenge tragedy. It is, as I say in the book, Shakespeare's revenge upon
revenge tragedy. It is a cosmological drama even though its protagonist,
its hero of apotheosis, as I would call him, finally rather than a tragic
figure, seems to resent the play that he's been placed in.

It's as though he demands a cosmological drama from Shakespeare, and

Shakespeare tries to pull away from it. I mean, that was to come, of
course, in King Lear and Macbeth. But in this play, he was doing
something very different, and so far as I can see, endlessly personal. His
son, whose name was Hamnet, a difference between an n and an l in
those days of free orthography, would not have mattered. His son, his
only son was dead a few years before.
His father had just died. When he writes this play and then revises it
somewhat in 1601, first in 1600 and then 1601, he is, I think, this is only
a surmise, but we need to make surmises of this kind. He is searching for
something in himself, something that will suffice perhaps. And what he
comes up with does not altogether make him happy. His protagonist, his
hero as it were, is an amazingly mixed being.

I cannot think of anyone in the entire history of literature just as, you
know, one knows a great many people when one has been teaching for
fifty years. I calculated the other day when I was lying in a hospital bed,
from which I have fortunately been resurrected, that I had by now taught
some 35,000 separate individuals, which is, you know, almost crushing
in a way because when worries come, one really knows so many people.
I have never met a person and never encountered a literary figure who is
able to combine absolute contraries, really contradictions, as Hamlet
does. He is at once more given to theatricality than any other figure, and
yet also given to a sign of terrifying inwardness, which keeps growing
and growing further and further into the deeps, and that's an amazing
combination. How, how can you be totally theatrical and totally inward?

I think you reach a point in this amazing play at the end of the fourth act
where something breaks apart in him. The theatricality goes one way,
the inwardness goes in quite another. And when it shows up again after
a sea-change in act five, quite literally a sea change because it seems to
happen when he's out at sea and prevents being taken off to England for
execution by the order of his ghastly uncle by simply jumping ship,
though taking care of his very dangerous and I think rather nasty way to
see that his old college roommates, as we would say these days, the
wretched and hapless Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, are off to England
to be executed in his place. He is a dangerous figure. He is responsible
before this play is over for eight deaths, including his own. He seems to
be utterly debonair about it. He is almost always misread by our critical
tradition.

He's always misread by our critical tradition?

I think so.

They –meaning a whole series of…?

I'm afraid so.

English speaking critics have failed to get it?

Well, there are honorable partial exceptions like Doctor Johnson,

however, did not like the play and did not like the character. There's
William Hazlitt who said brilliantly, it is we ourselves who are a Hamlet,
but that begs too many questions. Magnificent figure as he is, there was
H. G. Bradley, who wisely said that this fellow was his own Falstaff
Hamlet. I would add he's also his own Iago. He doesn't need an Iago. But
he is a dangerous person. He does not love anyone. He's not capable of
love. That may indeed be why, audiences fall in love with him or why
everyone in the play, even if they dread him or in some strange way, in
love with him. He is a charismatic, but he's a charismatic without
doctrine.

Do we have evidence that Shakespeare considered him his best work,

his best character?

The evidence would seem to indicate the only clear evidence we have
are how many quarters that is a single volume, both authorized and
unauthorized, came out involving a particular play and its protagonist.
The evidence shows that there were more quartos of Henry the fourth
part one totally dominated by one's other hero, Sir John Falstaff and
Hamlet. They indeed seem to have been his most popular plays, but he
was, of course, a great entertainer. It remains a wonderful oddity of
cultural tradition in the broader sense that the world's, so far as I can
tell, certainly the Western world's greatest single writer, someone who in
a sense finally and this is almost impossible. You ought not to be able to
differ in kind from other writers, but pragmatically, there's such a
difference in degree between Shakespeare and even Dante, Cervantes,
Tolstoy, Chaucer, and so on, that pragmatically, he does become
different in kind. That the world's greatest, dramatist, the world's
greatest, thinker, really, I think one would have to say because he
transcends philosophy, transcends Plato, transcends Martin, should also
have been the world's greatest entertainer or as Ralph Waldo Emerson
said of him a little ruefully, the master of the revels to mankind.

A very difficult phenomenon to try to catch up with.

Did after he wrote Hamlet, did he change? Did he …

I think he did. Without Hamlet, you would not have had the really
terrifying succession of plays, almost too painful, to contemplate,
Othello, King Lear, Macbeth, then almost as though with tremendous,
relief and release, he writes Anthony and Cleopatra, but it has all cost
him something.

Cost him what?

Cost him, I think, something of his own capacity for endurance. I think
that the isolation of Hamlet as a figure, and he's absolutely in the end
isolated from everyone else in the play, they're all intensely concerned
about him. The critical tradition says he's in love with his mother – you
know, that's Freud's notion – so much nonsense. Here he is and his poor
mother, just poisoned, is dying and cries out, oh, my dear Hamlet, and
his farewell to her is “Wretched queen, Adieu.” As if to say, “So much for
you, sweetheart.”

This is a ruthless, wretched queen, Adieu.

Yes. To say the one's dying mother.

Well, that doesn't. What does that say to you? Here is that Freudian or
just simply.

No, I don't think it's Freudian at all. Meanness. He's too grand to be
considered in terms, you know, of moral good and evil.

He's too grand to be considered in terms of generosity or meanness.

He's also incredibly generous.

What makes interesting characters is they have within them, you know,
the deepest contradictions, as you said, as well as the tragic flaws that
make them seem that that takes away from their magnanimity.

Yes. And that is well phrased.

He has the greatness that you speak of. The flaws, however, may or may
not be tragic, but they are multiform, and he knows it. But what he has
above everything else is the incredible gift of consciousness. He is more
without being self-conscious, in our terminology, he is more conscious of
his own consciousness and of the problems of consciousness than
anyone else in the entire history of literature. As far as I can tell in life,
setting Shakespeare aside, of personal information about Shakespeare,
of what you might want to call Shakespeare's own inwardness, we know
nothing.

Right. We never will know anything. I don't never have understood why
that was.

I think he

He left no letters. He left no record.

Oh, we have endless legal records. He was a man very quick with
lawsuits in the store. And that that was pure commerce. He was a great
businessman. No.
He, he would not expose his in witness. He seems to have been
someone who kept himself, though a good fellow and getting along with
his fellow dramatists for the most part in the world of actors and theater
people. He seems to have been someone who really kept to himself.

But no diary?

No. No diary. No familiar letters. Yeah. We have some anecdotes that I'm
inclined to believe. The most startling one is the tradition, which for me
holds a great deal of credence.

He had retired from writing, retired from the London theater. The last
almost three years of his life, he lived with his family again in Stratford.
Just before his death at the not very ripe old age of 52, just about the
time of his 52nd birthday.

That's all we've got there.

Yeah.

His old friends, Ben Johnson and Michael Drayton, came up from London
to have a night of serious drinking with him. The next day, they went
back to London as blithe as ever. He took to his sick bed and was dead
within thirty-six hours. What this all means, I don't know. The late, Tony
Burgess, who wrote, I think, in some ways, the best biography of
Shakespeare in a wonderful …

Yes. A wonderful novel called Nothing Like the Sun.

Anthony Burgess?

Yeah. He would always tell me, and it's in his novel also, that he thought
Shakespeare, in the end, died so young because of the consequences of
syphilis.

Really?

Well, it is true that

They seem that's a they seem the tripped syphilis to a lot of historical
characters.

Oh, I know. But in in Timon of Athens, a play that he writes but then, will
not put on, never put it on stage, in fact. In Timon of Athens, there are
tremendous curses, by Timon urging whores, whom he is heaping with
gold.
How old was he?

At that point, just a few years before the end, Perhaps he was 47 or 48
at that point.

Let me bring this back to Hamlet. Hamlet is, some say, a combination of
Prince Hal and Falstaff.

Yeah, I myself have said that, and yet, and yet, and yet, Falstaff is as
witty as Hamlet, but Falstaff, in the end, even if you wouldn't want to
spend the night drinking with him because he would certainly pick your
pocket and who knows what else he would do to you, Falstaff is genial
and benign compared to Hamlet. Prince Hal is neither genial nor benign,
particularly in his incarnation as Henry the fifth.

He is a power monger and a great employer of power and of warfare. But

Hamlet is a dramatist. He is a poet. He is to this day our most persuasive
representation in all of literature of what we have learned to call an
intellectual. And, indeed, is the only literary character, and this is
something that has bemused me for years, but I've tried to work it out in
this little book.

He is the only character in all of literature who seems to have an

authorial consciousness all his own, so that you want to quote him on all
sorts of matters the way you would quote Emerson or Montaigne or

The way you would quote authors.

Yes. Yes. In that sense, again, he is a very alarming kind of a figure, and
his play, which is already Shakespeare's longest at 4,000 lines, and his
part is longer than anybody else's part. He speaks fully three lines out of
eight in the course of the play.

Does he where is Shakespeare's voice in this?

Ah! For once you actually do hear Shakespeare's voice when Hamlet is
giving his instructions to the players before they're going to put on his
revised murder of Gonzago, the mouse trap in which he intends to catch
Claudius. He admonishes the players and particularly the player king or
first player, a part that we believe many of us Shakespeare himself
played because it doubles very naturally with the ghost. There is Richard
Burbage, the prime actor of the company for whom Shakespeare wrote,
on stage playing the part of Hamlet, but surely speaking for once in
Shakespeare's own voice when he says, Speak the speech as I have read
it trippingly on the tongue. Do not saw the hands, he says to the actors
with empty gestures, you know, do not, do not make, such a concern of
yourself. Don't get in the way of what I have written.

Exactly.

Surely, for once, in those 38 dramas, we hear the authentic voice of

Shakespeare himself.

Did this play change between its first version and its last? We will never
recover the first version.
Most of critical tradition has insisted, and I think wrongly, that the play
that we don't have I I'm so full of medicines that you can dry mouth.
I'm I'm delighted to be able to provide as much water as we have. I am
pleased.

There was an original Hamlet, the so called oral hamlet. It could have
been as early as 1587 or late as 1589.

Scholars usually attribute it to Thomas Kyd, the author of the Spanish

tragedy. I think they're wholly mistaken. I think it was one of
Shakespeare's first plays Yeah. That he was not happy about it, and that
he finally, goes back to the same subject when he is fully mature, when
he's 37 or 38, 1600 or 1601, and writes Hamlet all over again, probably
with very little reference to the original one, but he never lets it alone
after that. After his death, the First Folio is published.

It has a text of Hamlet lacking a good deal of what is in the authorized

second quartile, but adding a great deal that we don't have so that to
get the complete or 4,000 line uncut Hamlet, you have to make what
scholars call a diplomatic text out of the two, which doesn't really work. I
think Shakespeare, it was his white elephant. I think he he could not get
away from it.

Alright. Your first, I don't wanna ask, shift to productions of Hamlet.

Certainly. Not an actor that I've ever interviewed, and I've interviewed
many of the greats Yes. Has ever said to me has always said to me that
Macbeth is much more difficult to play than Hamlet.

Charlie, you know better than I do that in the world of the actors and
actresses, Macbeth, by tradition, is considered the unluckiest play there
ever was.

I do.
I mean, the famous actor's encouragement break a leg becomes literally
true. People die on the sets of, Macbeth. But I think, Macbeth is a shot
out of hell. It's a great economical drama except for The Comedy of
Errors, it's Shakespeare's shortest play.

But, great as it is, shocking as it is, it doesn't really equal, Hamlet. TS

Eliot in his very worst moment as a literary critic, and he had many
terribly bad moments, once announced in an essay on Hamlet that it
was most certainly an aesthetic failure to which one can only say, if
Hamlet, the play, is an aesthetic failure, there has never been such a
thing as an aesthetic success because this is, I repeat, simply the most
fascinating literary work that any of us will ever know.

Alright. Gielgud was, it was Gielgud’s Hamlet that you first saw.

Yes.

You came because I remember this, and this is all the deeply set in my
mind. You were born yourself. Your parents were Russian immigrants.
Yes. Russian Jewish immigrants. Settled in The Bronx? Yes. And you were
born in The Bronx around 19, what, 30?
1930. Yeah. July 11, 1930. Grew up speaking Yiddish, taught myself
English, which is why to this day, it sounds so odd as George Bernard
Shaw rightly said, the orthography, the spelling of English has nothing to
do with the way it's pronounced.
You then saw Gielgud. I saw Gielgud
as him.
Yes.

In the same year or perhaps the next year, I saw something which
stayed with me longer. Rafe Richardson playing both parts of Henry IV
against Olivier's Hotspur in the afternoon and Olivier's Shallow in the
second part of the evening. But Gielgud remains in terms of the inner
ear, in terms of hearing the way Hamlet should sound, the spookiest and
most remarkable memory that I have, though, in terms of stage
business. But since then, I have seen scores of Hamlets, and one is
never satisfied. And there's no

One is never satisfied after seeing Gielgud or one is never satisfied

because no one can do justice to the play?

Certainly, one's ear, one's aesthetic apprehension that comes through

the inner ear was more than gratified by John Gielgud. But there are so
many Hamlets that even if 50,000 actors and indeed actresses
occasionally play him, we will not come to the end of him. Almost any
interpretation in some sense is valid because the figure it's like trying to
hold quicksilver, trying to hold on to his consciousness. He leaps
sometimes in three or four lines from the most sublime diction to sort of
lowly diction. He is supposedly overwhelmed by encountering his
father's ghost, but he starts calling him in a moment or two, “old mole”
and “true penny”, or even mockingly refers to him, since he's below
stage at that point of the ghost, as “this fellow in the cellarage.”

There's nothing constant about Hamlet. It is a mind so totally vivacious,

so profoundly vital that it's always at work reinventing itself. So in a
sense, you know, we need we need as many directors and as many
actors, for Hamlet as we can get.

Okay. So Kenneth Branagh did the five-hour version, which is the

complete text.

Certainly courageous on his part. I remarked somewhere in this little

book that finally I think the director and the Hamlet, the actor who plays
Hamlet, have to be at war with one another, that one of them has to
take the part of Shakespeare and the other the part of Hamlet, because I
think that Shakespeare himself is at war with Hamlet by the time he
reaches the fifth act. Shakespeare must have experienced before the
phenomenon of characters just getting away from him, the way, Falstaff
runs away from him, the way Shylock, to some strong extent, runs away
from him. But he cannot have been unaware that Hamlet totally gets
away from him, you know, has a life of his own, as a kind of rival
playwright within the play itself.

That he had created something that went beyond his own character.

Yeah. And though perhaps it is a clue to his character.

You've never bought the idea that Shakespeare did not write.

That is the most insane idea I've ever heard. The so called Oxfordians
hate me deeply.
I get hate mail from them all the time because some years ago when
Louis Lapham was running a symposium in Harper's on the supposed
controversy, I wrote a piece called A Salvo for Lucy Negro, that being the
name by which I mean, nothing invidious by that. She was an East Indian
lady and considered to be the leading whore and madam in
Shakespeare's London. Indeed, in Tony Burgess' novel, Nothing Like the
Sun, she is the dark lady of the sonnets over whom Shakespeare and his
perhaps love of the Earl of Southampton, as it were, competed or rather
for whom they competed, though I must say on the basis of the sonnets,
Shakespeare is remarkably detached in regard to what is going on there.

Tell me this. You actually played Falstaff on stage?

Oh, yes. Three times. Once at full length, thanks to Robert Bruce Dean
and the wonderful director, the character of the rock.
Yale School.
No.

This was at the Harvard repertory Oh. Some years ago. Since then, I've
done a number of scenes and a shorter version, and, again, I've done it
to some extent here with the Shakespeare Society in New York. I have,
however, due to my latest illnesses, already lost some 40 odd pounds
and will hope to lose another 60 in the next year and a half or so. Yes.

I'm afraid I will no longer qualify.

Here's my I should say you had bypass surgery. You're doing okay?

I'm doing fine. Thanks to a very fine doctor at Yale.

Superb doctor.

You can you're going strong teaching at Yale. You're still teaching at NYU?

Yes. You live in New York and you make the journey back and forth?

Live primarily in New Haven and also in New York with my wife. Yes.

The the Shakespeare for a man of your mind and your literary instincts
must have been the greatest thing ever happened to you.

From the time I was a boy, I mean, I started with other poets like William
Blake and Bert Crane, but as soon as I had read Macbeth, as soon as I
had read Romeo and Juliet, as soon as I read, Hamlet and King Lear and,
Othello, it was all over with me. That is to say,

When the love affair began.

When it's totally over with full bloom. The,

is he best at tragedy or comedy? In the Symposium, Socrates is sitting

there after a night of serious drinking, and he is sitting there with, the
dramatist Agathon, and one other fellow is still, has still not fallen
asleep. And Socrates propounds the theory that a great writer for the
stage should be equally good at comedy and tragedy. We have no such
figures, in Athens. We have great tragic writers, Aeschylus and Euripides
and Sophocles. We have Aristophanes, still perhaps the greatest. How
many playwright? Short of Shakespeare we've ever had, but
Shakespeare is unique.

Maurya writes a comedy.

Maurya writes a Maurya writes a Maurya writes . Goes a ……..?????

So you're saying that that you you can't choose, he which is very good at
both.

Twelfth Night is as powerful a drama almost as Hamlet. As You Like It is

as winning a thing as the two parts of Henry the fourth.

This this is the unique figure. It's Hamlet poem unlimited, Harold Bloom.
May you live forever. Thank you for being with us.

May you too live forever, dear fellow.

Thank you.