Hamlet: Poem Unlimited

In Harold Bloom's New York Times bestselling Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human, the world's foremost literary critic theorized on the authorship of the historic play Hamlet. In this engaging new stand-alone work, he offers a full and warmly personal account of the play itself, explores its extraordinary impact throughout the history of western literature, and seeks to uncover the mystery at its heart.Hamlet: Poem UnlimitedPreface

One: Inferring Hamlet
Two: Horatio
Three: Plays Within Plays Within Plays
Four: Two Soliloquies
Five: Ophelia
Six: Shakespeare to the Players
Seven: The Mousetrap: Contrary Will
Eight: Gertrude
Nine: Claudius
Ten: The Impostume
Eleven: The Grave-Digger
Twelve: Wonder-Wounded Hearers
Thirteen: In My Heart There was a Kind of Fighting
Fourteen: We Defy Augury
Fifteen: Let It Be
Sixteen: Apotheosis and Tragedy
Seventeen: Hamlet and the High Places
Eighteen: Fortinbras
Nineteen: Had I But Time—O, I Could Tell You
Twenty: Annihilation: Hamlet's Wake
Twenty-One: The Fusion of High and Popular Art
Twenty-Two: Hamlet As the Limit of Stage Drama
Twenty-Three: The End of Our Time
Twenty-Four: The Hero of Consciousness
Twenty-Five: Hamlet and No End

"An intellectual fireworks display." —San Jose Mercury News

"Not perhaps since Samuel Johnson has a critic explained to a general audience as ably as Mr. Bloom does how much Shakespeare matters to our sense of who we are." —New York Times

Harold Bloom is a Sterling Professor of Humanities at Yale University and a former Charles Eliot Norton Professor at Harvard. As The Paris Review has pointed out, "no critic in the English language since Samuel Johnson has been more prolific." His more than thirty books include The Best Poems of the English Language, The Art of Reading Poetry, and The Book of J. He is a MacArthur Prize Fellow, a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the recipient of many awards and honorary degrees, including the Academy's Gold Medal for Belles Lettres and Criticism, the International Prize of Catalonia, and the Alfonso Reyes Prize of Mexico.

Alfred Kazin has said, "Bloom is all literature, (he) positively lives it," and The New York Times called him "the most original literary critic in America." He lives in New Haven and New York.