We have no choice but to permit Shakespeare, and his Hamlet, everything, because neither has a rival." This is an argument, and a brilliant one, of why Hamlet is a great theatrical figure, but it is also why he is not entirely real. Permit this dramatist a concourse of contraries, and he will show us everybody and nobody, all at once. The chapter is full of dazzling insight, but no passage is more telling about the theatricality of Hamlet than this one: "There is no 'real' Hamlet as there is no 'real' Shakespeare: the character, like the writer, is a reflecting pool, a spacious mirror in which we need must see ourselves. Bloom's other great love is Hamlet, about whom he supplies a wealth of scholarly detail, including a running, highly speculative argument that Shakespeare himself was the author of the "Ur-Hamlet" of 1589.
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