Macbeth: A Dagger of the Mind

By: Harold Bloom

Narrated by: Simon Vance

From the ambitious and mad titular character to his devilish wife Lady Macbeth to the moral and noble Banquo to the mysterious Three Witches, Macbeth is one of William Shakespeare's more brilliantly populated plays and remains among the most widely read, performed in innovative productions set in a vast array of times and locations, from Nazi Germany to Revolutionary Cuba. Macbeth is a distinguished warrior hero, who over the course of the play, transforms into a brutal, murderous villain and pays an extraordinary price for committing an evil act. A man consumed with ambition and self-doubt, Macbeth is one of Shakespeare's most vital meditations on the dangerous corners of the human imagination.

Award-winning writer and beloved professor Harold Bloom investigates Macbeth's interiority and unthinkable actions with razor-sharp insight, agility, and compassion. He also explores his own personal relationship to the character: Just as we encounter one Anna Karenina or Jay Gatsby when we are 17 and another when we are 40, Bloom writes about his shifting understanding - over the course of his own lifetime - of this endlessly compelling figure, so that the book also becomes an extraordinarily moving argument for literature as a path to and a measure of our humanity.

©2019 Harold Bloom (P)2019 HighBridge, a division of Recorded Books

Great Companion

Lots to think about here, some helpful definitions of old English words and phrasing. Some intriguing concepts to explore as you read Macbeth with this book.

Not with a Bloom, but a whimper

"Something in us dies with MacBeth: call it ambition or the iniquity of an imagination that does not know how to stop."
- Harold Bloom, MacBeth: A Dagger of the Mind

This is the last of the five books Bloom wrote directly about Shakespeare's big personalities. He wrote five books in his series Shakespeare's Personalities:

Falstaff: Give Me Life (1) ✔
Cleopatra: I Am Fire and Air (2)
Lear: The Great Image of Authority (3) ✔
Iago: The Strategies of Evil (4)
Macbeth: A Dagger of the Mind (5) ✔

I've now read 3/5 and should finish the last two in a few months. In many ways this seems like something Bloom may have intended to write more of. I can't see these as being the only worthy personalities in Shakespeare, but time is fickle, the grave beckons, and Bloom was definitely a man of letters and varied interests.

Jumping back into this series, they also seems a bit weak on Bloom's analysis. There are some charming turns of phrases and some unique insight, but a large section of this small book is basically just defining terms or phrases, giving some background, and quoting the Bard a lot. Which is basically the framework of any good commentary, just not a GREAT commentaries. I'll finish the last two because they don't cost much in time, they are interesting (I didn't feel my time was wasted), and I'm a sucker for completing something I start.

Eruditeness and the actual CORRECT pronunciation

Loved it . Harold Bloom makes Shakespeare accessible and explicable . I will read whatever he puts out

Narrative choices at odds with text

I felt that the narrative choices made didn't match the critical analysis of the text.