Bloom Says Shakespeare Surpasses Chaucer, Bible

Shakespeare radically changed the way people understand the world and surpassed even Chaucer and the author of the Bible as a poet, Yale Sterling Professor of Humanities Harold Bloom told a packed Sanders Theater audience last night.

Bloom, in his third of six Charles Eliot Norton lectures, said that Shakespeare portrayed characters like Hamlet, Lear and Falstaff so realistically that he forever altered the expectations of readers and play audiences.

"The tragic hero in Shakespeare, at its best in Hamlet, is a representation so original that conceptually he contains us and has fashioned our psychology of motives ever since," he said.

According to Bloom, Shakespeare, following Chaucer's lead, used his creative genius to show the psychological change of characters as they become more self-reflecting.

In presenting characters, Shakespeare anticipated his audience's expectations and used his mastery of diction and inference to remain ahead of his readers, Bloom said.

"Shakespeare is always there before you. He possesses cultural history...He thinks better than everyone else," Bloom said.

The result of Shakespeare's brilliant representation of characters is that many of the playwright's creations are fully implanted in modern notions, including the ideal of the Freudian parental authority in Lear, the disinterested seer and truth-finder in Hamlet, and the totally free man or superego in Falstaff.

As 1987-'88 Norton Professor of Poetry, Bloom will give three more talks next spring under the general heading of "Poetry and Belief." Topics so far have included Dante, Homer, Vergil and the Hebrew Bible.