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HAMLET: POEM UNLIMITED

Shakespeare criticism that’s big, alive, towering, deep, passionate—in an age that so industriously miniaturizes and demeans...

Bloom says that in Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human (1998), other matters kept him from saying “most of what [he] thought and felt” about Hamlet. A lucky thing, since now the great-hearted critic offers this little gem—deftly snatching Hamlet away from its legions of minor readers and reclaiming it for its major ones.

On the stateliest of notes, Bloom announces that Hamlet is so “unlimited” as to be “of no genre,” its greatness such that “it competes only with the world’s scriptures.” Such extraordinary significance can’t rise from a work that’s “about” the things that its commonly tendentious or politicized readers think—“mourning for the dead father,” say, or “outrage at [the] mother’s sexuality”—and Bloom discards the very notion that “the double shock of his father’s sudden death and his mother’s remarriage has brought about a radial change in” Hamlet. The infinitely greater and more interesting truth is that “Something in Hamlet dies before the play opens” and that the play’s real subject “is Hamlet’s consciousness of his own consciousness, unlimited yet at war with itself.” Only from so enormous a subject, the meaning of self-consciousness itself, and only through so prodigious a character as Hamlet (“he is cleverer than we are, and more dangerous”), does the play achieve its height, depth, and significance. Bloom asks questions that he may not, in so many words, answer—why does Hamlet come back to Elsinore after England? why does Shakespeare “so cheerfully” risk the very “dramatic continuity” of the play? why does he provide for the towering Hamlet so meager, paltry, and “mere” an opponent as Claudius? In every case: because the play, “a cosmological drama,” is so big that it’s bursting its own seams; because it serves simply as an excuse for the demonstration of its own enormity; because Hamlet is a character wrestling with “his desire to come to an end of playacting.”

Shakespeare criticism that’s big, alive, towering, deep, passionate—in an age that so industriously miniaturizes and demeans its literature.

Pub Date: March 10, 2003

ISBN: 1-57322-233-X

Page Count: 176

Publisher: Riverhead

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2003

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NUTCRACKER

This is not the Nutcracker sweet, as passed on by Tchaikovsky and Marius Petipa. No, this is the original Hoffmann tale of 1816, in which the froth of Christmas revelry occasionally parts to let the dark underside of childhood fantasies and fears peek through. The boundaries between dream and reality fade, just as Godfather Drosselmeier, the Nutcracker's creator, is seen as alternately sinister and jolly. And Italian artist Roberto Innocenti gives an errily realistic air to Marie's dreams, in richly detailed illustrations touched by a mysterious light. A beautiful version of this classic tale, which will captivate adults and children alike. (Nutcracker; $35.00; Oct. 28, 1996; 136 pp.; 0-15-100227-4)

Pub Date: Oct. 28, 1996

ISBN: 0-15-100227-4

Page Count: 136

Publisher: Harcourt

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1996

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TO THE ONE I LOVE THE BEST

EPISODES FROM THE LIFE OF LADY MENDL (ELSIE DE WOLFE)

An extravaganza in Bemelmans' inimitable vein, but written almost dead pan, with sly, amusing, sometimes biting undertones, breaking through. For Bemelmans was "the man who came to cocktails". And his hostess was Lady Mendl (Elsie de Wolfe), arbiter of American decorating taste over a generation. Lady Mendl was an incredible person,- self-made in proper American tradition on the one hand, for she had been haunted by the poverty of her childhood, and the years of struggle up from its ugliness,- until she became synonymous with the exotic, exquisite, worshipper at beauty's whrine. Bemelmans draws a portrait in extremes, through apt descriptions, through hilarious anecdote, through surprisingly sympathetic and understanding bits of appreciation. The scene shifts from Hollywood to the home she loved the best in Versailles. One meets in passing a vast roster of famous figures of the international and artistic set. And always one feels Bemelmans, slightly offstage, observing, recording, commenting, illustrated.

Pub Date: Feb. 23, 1955

ISBN: 0670717797

Page Count: -

Publisher: Viking

Review Posted Online: Oct. 25, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1955

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