Harold Bloom is one of the most influential—and controversial—of contemporary Shakespeare critics. These essays examine the sources and impact of his Shakespearean criticism. Through focused and sustained study of this writer as literary icon and his Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human, the essays address a wide range of issues, from the cultural role of Shakespeare to the ethics of literary theory and criticism.

Christy Desmet is Associate Professor of English at the University of Georgia. She is the author of Reading Shakespeare's Characters: Rhetoric, Ethics, and Identity, and co-editor of Shakespeare and Appropriation.

Robert Sawyer is Assistant Professor of English at East Tennessee State University, and co-editor of Shakespeare and Appropriation.

Part I: Bardolatry/ Bardography * Harold Bloom’s Shakespeare—Jay L. Halio * Bloom with a View—Terence Hawkes * The Case for Bardolatry: Harold Bloom Rescues Shakespeare from the Critics—William W. Kerrigan * Power, Pathos, Character—Gary Taylor * Inventing Us—Hugh Kenner * Part II: Reading and Writing Shakespearean Character * Bloom, Bardolatry, and Characterolatry—Richard Levin * On the Value of Being a Cartoon, in Literature and in Life—Sharon O’Dair * Shakespeare: The Orientation of the Human—Mustapha Fahmi * “The play’s the thing”: Shakespeare’s Critique of Character (and Harold Bloom)—William R. Morse * On Harold Bloom's Non-Theatrical Praise for Shakespeare's Lovers: Much Ado About Nothing and Antony and Cleopatra —Herbert Weil * Part III: The Anxieties of Influence * Romanticism Lost: Bloom and the Twilight of Literary Shakespeare—Edward Pechter * Looking for Mr. Goodbard: Swinburne, Resentment Criticism, and the Invention of Harold Bloom--Robert Sawyer * Shakespeare and the Invention of the Humanism: Bloom on Race and Ethnicity—James R. Andreas, Sr. * Shakespeare in Transit: Bloom, Shakespeare, and Contemporary Women’s Writing—Caroline Cakebread * Part IV: Shakespeare as Cultural Capital * Harold Bloom as Shakespearean Pedagogue—Christy Desmet * King Lear in Their Time: On Bloom and Cavell on Shakespeare—Lawrence F. Rhu * “I am sure this Shakespeare will not do”: Anti-Semitism and the Limits of Bardolatry—David M. Schiller * The 2% Solution: What Harold Bloom Forgot—Linda Charnes