Reviewers ofBloom's book have often compared Bloom to Bradley, not only because they perceive botii scholars as 'character critics,' not only because both have been controversial within the academy and admired, if not beloved, without, but because Bloom has presumptuously (and righdy) presumed that 'one educated man's reading of the text' will interest the common reader. Yet Harold Bloom offers exactlythat in Shakespeare: The Invention oftheHuman, published twenty-sixyears after Cooke's comment. Bradley and his Influence in Twentieth-Century Criticism, 78). Bradley and his landmark 1904 studyShakespearean Tragedy, Katiiarine Cooke commented in 1972 diat'nowa writer would have to have some extrinsic claim to attention in order to be able to write a long critical work on Shakespeare based only on one educated man's reading ofthe text' (?. In the course ofassessing die influence ofA. Harold Bloom's Shakespeare.NewYork: Palgrave,2001. Gregory W Lanier The University ofWest Florida Christy Desmet and Robert Sawyer, eds. a mingled yarn, good and ill togedier our virtues would be proud ifour faults whipp'd them not, and our crimes would despair if they were not cherish'd by our virtues' (All's Well That Ends Well, 4.3.68-71). In the end, Otten's book and method seems very much like Miller's entire tragic corpus, a place where, in Shakespeare's words, life is'. Yet somehow that concept of sin does not fully elucidate the mystery tiiat is at the core of all tragedy, and perhaps especially the tragedy of Arthur Miller. Perhaps no writer in twentieth-century literature has been more certain oforiginal sin than Miller, and more convinced that there is always a price to be paid'(248). Peter's Connections,the last playdiscussed in die book, Otten states diat it is Miller's beliefthat'innocence constitutes die ultimate source ofevil, tiiat it distorts right and wrong and freezes the moral will.

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Bloom shakespeare