The Modern Scholar

Shakespeare: The Seven Major Tragedies

By: Professor Harold Bloom

Narrated by: Professor Harold Bloom

Length: 8 hrs and 10 mins

Publisher's summary

Shakespeare's seven great tragedies contain unmistakable elements that set them apart from any other plays ever written.

In Romeo and Juliet, Shakespeare embodied in the character of Juliet the world's most impressive representation ever of a woman in love. With Julius Caesar, the great playwright produced a drama of astonishing and perpetual relevance. In Hamlet, Shakespeare created a character with the most brilliant mind in all of literature. And the character of Iago in Othello has been the very archetype of the villain ever since. King Lear presents audiences with unparalleled emotional and intellectual demands. Macbeth is a play of ruthless economy in which Shakespeare forces his audience into intimate sympathy with a man not far from being a mass murderer. Finally, in Antony and Cleopatra, Shakespeare created something entirely new: a vast political and historical conspectus involving the whole world.

Download the accompanying reference guide.

©2005 Harold Bloom (P)2005 Recorded Books

The expert

Prof. Bloom is the leading expert on Shakespeare. This lecture series is based on his book "Shakespeare, The Invention of the Human", and gives a deeper insight into the characters that are the icons of Western literature.

Half Lecture, Half Performance

Bloom does a good job summarizing and analyzing Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, Julius Caesar, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth, and Antony and Cleopatra. While he doesn't offer anything new or profound, there's enough here to make it a worthwhile listen.

Regarding the narration, Bloom speaks with a New York accent, which is fine, but it feels like half the lectures are him performing passages from the plays. He's actually not bad, but it's obvious he's not classically trained and, frankly, unless one is, I don't want to hear him do Shakespeare.

Bloom always blooming

How magnificent a spirit! What manner, this mind and this man that we have seen appear among us. This is a great investigation into Shakespeare’s most noted work. May he rest in peace and fire the imaginations of new readers of the bard.

Lowest WPM Ever

I, in the late middle ages, have taken up a new appreciation of Shakespeare. He, of course, has influenced Western Thought for centuries. Dr. Bloom is clearly one of the rare Americans who can "bill" themselves as "Shakespearean Expert". I thoroughly loved the material presented BUT he has made the unfortunate decision of narating his own wonderfully insightful book. If you count (who would, but just "if you did get bored") words-per-minute, this product would win the award hands-down. Thankfully, on Dr. Bloom's "History of the Western Canon", he used a reader. A+ on content; C- on presentation.

This was terrible.

Harold has an unhealthy infatuation with Shakespeare (and I would be willing to bet that he has heard that sentiment voiced more than once in his life). It became quite clear while listening to him speak about Juliet that Harold had some childhood crush who either fell out of love with him, or never loved him at all. Regardless, he seems to have consoled himself by dedicating his heart to an idolized version of Juliet, and his soul to the worship of her creator. It's really creepy. He then clearly failed as an actor, and decided that maybe he was called instead to be an evangelist for the Church of Shakespeare rather than a member of its clergy.
One glaringly obvious culprit for his failures in acting is his bizarre ever-revolving accented pronunciation and awkward speech pattern. It sounds like he is a New York Jew from Brooklyn who was raised in New Jersey, then moved to London to rub elbows with the aristocracy (or to try to), and clearly attempted to sound like he belonged...and failed dramatically (that, or he has watched a lot of Monty-Python and lamely attempts to copy their accents).
As if that were not bad enough I finally had to stop listening shortly after he bragged about "sitting with audiences from around the world, and all over the world". I could get past the braggadocia, but the way he put on airs to clearly and definitively separate himself from the peasants attending Shakespeare Masses was just too much to take.

Epic Disappointment

I was so excited to get this series of fourteen lectures from noted scholar Harold Bloom that I ignored a few tepid reviews. Boy, should I have heeded them. Bloom labors through these lectures which even if you speed up the audio as I did are painfully slow. Also, Bloom really gives few insights, indeed, most of the lectures consist of him reading enormous chunks of text and end with him saying something like "This is where Shakespeare makes his greatest and most profound...". Oddly enough, it seems that to Bloom every single play is the greatest literary achievement and will never be surpassed. However, to be fair, I did enjoy the pair of lectures on Macbeth but again, there are precious few true insights (though his insight into the sexual tensions of the Macbeth marriage was interesting).

I think the problem that I had with these lectures are as follows: a. Bloom's delivery is ponderous and unpleasant, b. the lectures are repetitive, and c. there is very little analysis beyond saying how great, brilliant, and incomparable the plays are.

Save your credits and your time. Only their brevity made this tolerable.