Professor Harold Bloom will not rank among the great epigrammatists of history. His new book on Shakespeare book is prolix, untidy, repetitive, and bloated by self-indulgence.[1] Yet its central proposition is stated (admittedly, not until page 493) with beautiful simplicity: Shakespeare “is what we know because we are what he knew.” Only Chaucer, Bloom maintains, preceded Shakespeare in the creation of a convincing inner self for his characters and Shakespeare surpassed Chaucer. In giving us Iago, Hamlet, Shylock, and a host of others, Shakespeare made us aware of human possibilities to such an extent that our conception of human nature was thereby enlarged. We cannot conceive our world without his terms of reference.

So stated, the argument has a certain plausibility. Shakespeare is undoubtedly able to create as if from within, to interiorize with utter authenticity, more varieties of human behavior than any other writer—so much so that we can scarcely believe that the same person could have imagined all his characters. But he was not a nineteenth-century novelist, and Bloom, like his hero Bradley before him, distorts the plays by importing inappropriate expectations. Characterization is only one aspect of the dramatist’s art. Arguably, it was one Shakespeare learnt comparatively slowly; other, more purely theatrical, skills seem to have come easily to him, prompted by the background presence of Marlowe, Lyly, and Kyd.

For all his theater-going, Bloom is oddly innocent about drama. He has no time for Kyd, whose Spanish Tragedyhe tetchily dismisses (“a