He is selectively “historicist,” when the ideological cause moves him, as it does frequently in his penetrating analysis of The Merchant of Venice, where he declares, “Shylock is the first of Shakespeare’s internalized hero-villains” (11). Of course, Bloom does the same thing on occasion. In so doing, they rob the Bard of his “universal” appeal and “human” content. In the introductory chapter of his best-selling book, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human, Harold Bloom decries the hijacking of “universal” Shakespeare by “French” theorists-presumably New Historicists, feminists, and cultural materialists-who “begin with a political stance,” go on to “locate some marginal bit of English Renaissance social history” to prop up their theory, and then read the ideology back into the play (Bloom 1998, 9).
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