The cover of Harold Bloom’s ‘Lear’ features Lord Olivier’s Emmy award-winning performance in that role in 1983. He delivers that kind of exhilarating intimacy, pathos, and clarity in Lear. He also explores his own personal relationship to the Just as we encounter one Emma Bovary or Hamlet when we are seventeen and another when we are forty, Bloom writes about his shifting understanding-over the course of his own lifetime-of Lear, so that this book also explores an extraordinarily moving argument for literature as a path to and a measure of our humanity.īloom is mesmerizing in the classroom, wrestling with the often tragic choices Shakespeare’s characters make.

He is widely agreed to be William Shakespeare’s most moving, tragic hero.Īward-winning writer and beloved professor Harold Bloom writes about Lear with wisdom, joy, exuberance, and compassion. The aged, abused monarch-a man in his eighties, like Harold Bloom himself-is at once the consummate figure of authority and the classic example of the fall from majesty. King Lear is perhaps the most poignant character in literature. Harold Bloom, regarded by some as the greatest Shakespeare scholar of our time, presents an intimate, wise, deeply compelling portrait of King Lear-the third in his series of five short books about the great playwright’s most significant personalities, hailed as Bloom’s “last love letter to the shaping spirit of his imagination” on the front page of The New York Times Book Review.

Harold bloom on falstaff