
The Modern Scholar
Shakespeare: The Seven Major Tragedies
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Narrated by:
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Professor Harold Bloom
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 BooksListeners also enjoyed...












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The expert
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Lowest WPM Ever
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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.
Half Lecture, Half Performance
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Bloom always blooming
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Best Shakespeare insights
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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.
This was terrible.
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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.
Epic Disappointment
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