Harold Bloom Interprets 'Hamlet': Author Discusses Shakespeare Classic at Library

摘要

Shakespeare's "Hamlet," "after four centuries, is still the most experimental play ever written," literary critic and Yale University professor Harold Bloom argued before a capacity Library audience in March. "We read to reflect and to be reflected. ... You can make of the play 'Hamlet' and the protagonist pretty much what you will, whether you are playgoer or reader, critic or director, actor or ideologue; push any stance or quest into it and the drama will illuminate what you have brought with you," Bloom said. Prosser Gifford, director of the Library's Office of Scholarly Programs, introduced Bloom as "a force of nature, a storm of intellectual activity, whose commentaries are, in the words of Mike Abrams of Cornell, like reading classical authors by flashes of lightning." Bloom is Sterling Professor of Humanities at Yale University and Berg Professor of English at New York University. The winner of a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship in 1985 and an American Academy of Arts and Letters Gold Medal for Criticism in 1999, he is the author of more than 20 books.