But maybe, just maybe, the tide is beginning to turn. And Bloom's magisterial new book on the Bard is itself an implicit and valuable answer to the reductivist literary theorists of the academic left. Like the great Shakespearean critics Samuel Johnson, William Hazlitt and A.C. Bradley, Bloom reads Shakespeare from the inside out. He contrasts his traditional approach with that of the now fashionable historicists and social determinists. Social fragment in hand, you move in from outside on the poor play, and find some connection, however established, between your supposed social fact and Shakespeare's words.
Bloom sees fatal flaws in the historicist or determinist approach.
For one thing, it's absurd. Certainly not in the sense they might have wished. Shakespeare, Bloom maintains, is not just the Western tradition's greatest poet, but its greatest thinker also. He had our ideas before we did. Indeed, we have them because he had them first.