Shakespeare: The Seven Major Tragedies

14 Lectures Series
Prof. Harold Bloom, Yale University

Shakespeare’s seven great tragedies contain unmistakable elements that set them apart from any other plays ever written. 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.

This series of lectures presents a unique and exciting study of Shakespeare’s seven greatest tragedies from one of the world’s foremost literary critics and authorities on Shakespearean drama.


Professor Harold Bloom, Yale University

Harold Bloom is Sterling Professor of the Humanities and English at Yale University. He was born in New York City, earned his B.A. at Cornell, received his Ph.D. from Yale in 1955, and has been a member of the Yale faculty ever since. He is the author of many books, including Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human , Hamlet: Poem Unlimited, The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages, Agon: Towards a Theory of Revisionism, The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry, Wallace Stevens: The Poems of Our Climate, How to Read and Why, Stories and Poems for Extremely Intelligent Children of All Ages, Genius: A Mosaic of One Hundred Exemplary Creative Minds, and A Map of Misreading.

Course Syllabus