It should be obvious that Shakespeare wrote great literature. That fact is assumed by the authors of this book. However, Allan Bloom and Harry Jaffa demonstrate a deeper awareness of Shakespeare than one will find in literature departments. Shakespeare combined poetry with an acute knowledge of politics, and these excellent scholars have written a clear and convincing account of some of those facets of political wisdom. Read this fine book and help rescue Shakespeare from political irrelevance.

I am admittedly not too familiar with much of Shakespeare scholarship out there, but I would venture to suggest that (considering the elgance of Bloom's prose as well as the depth of his insights) this work should rank among the finest in Shakespeare scholarship. Such a statement would surely offend the academic snobbery of the Shakespeare scholarship cabal who would reflexively question the authority of one who is not a Shakepeare specialist, in particular, the authority of one who has specialized in expounding the thoughts of Plato and Rosseau. However, I would argue that this is precisely the very reason that elevates Bloom the political philosopher in a privileged position in understanding Shakespeare. The rationale is supplied in the beginning of Bloom's study itself: the great classical dramatists or poets were not proponents of the art for art's sake or creating art for purely aesthetic reasons. Instead, through their art, the great dramatists and poets sought to convey certain timeless truths about human existence, in particular, about political existence, for man is a zoon politikon according to Aristotle. Hence, Bloom's account is a necessary corrective to those language nabobs who would rather prattle about the meters and stanzas and in so doing lose sight of Shakespeares account of the Whole.

It is difficult to convey how wonderful I found this thin little book to be. It is no larger than a slice of rye bread, but the food for thought contained therein could feed a soul for a thousand days. It took me two mesermizing hours to get through the Introduction and Bloom's essay on 'The Merchant of Venice'. At first, I mistrusted my recollection- was there really so much there? Had the dry old play decayed so completely in my estimation, or had Bloom inserted his own opinions? No, after more blissful consternation, I relived what I had long taken for dead. Allan Bloom really sees things. His deft insight makes Shakespeare seem real and urgent again, despite how unfashionable and out of vogue the debate may seem to contemporary minds. The Jewish and the Christian come to light, the entire legacy of each Faith revealed keenly, sharply, and decisively in favour of one higher power. The authority of thought, the power of unaided reason brought to bear nakedly on an eternal, ever-so tender, sore. Bloom's essay on 'Othello' and 'Julius Cesear' prove out this reviewer's intial wonder at the work. To readers familiar with Bloom's other works, I include myself, this book was additionally worthy because it showed that the issue Allan Bloom later became famous for, the decay of education, was already at the forefront of his mind in the early 1960's. He states in the book's introduction and claims it as his motivation for publishing the essay. This was 1964, several years before the signifigant events of the 1960s took full shape and bore full weight on American society. The introduction includes Bloom's stark assessment of Poetry and Philosophy. He quotes Napolean (one of very few direct quotes, the footnotes are rich, but few) to argue for the superiority of poetry over politics and then slyly demostrates the superiority of philosophy, or the philosopher, true and proper, over poetry. This is a book you could own and keep and reread often, even secrete it undercover and carry it across hostile borders, real and imagined.

This book is not objective. Bloom has an axe to grind. Not that there is intrinsically wrong in this, but....Caveat Lector. Just why Bloom developed such a deeply engrained animus to the modern age is impossible to tell and the biographies that are sure to come out in the near future (I don't consider Ravelstein a biography in any sense of the word. Saul Bellow has axes to grind too.) will be interesting reads.-The basic problem I have with the book is this: The type of deep spiritual (Romantic, with a capital R) love that Bloom regards as lost in our society has always been rare. It has been confined to those who have had a cultured upbringing combined with an inborn sensitivity and spirituality. What has happened in our demotic age is that, as Bloom perfectly puts it, "Sure, you can be a romantic today if you so choose, but it is a little like being a virgin in a whorehouse. It just doesn't fit with the temper of the times and gets no support in the current atmosphere." So what? It's still Romantic love. And our age is not alone in this temper. In more or less all ages, the vast majority of the people have regarded this type of love as, well, "silly and immature." Bloom himself admits this in the chapter on Stendhal where he states, "Stendhal appears unable to depict a fully ripe man. Successful maturity is doubtful for him, and he may in this reflect a problem with the Romantic mood altogether." The most clear passage in the book, the one that comes closest to hitting at what Bloom's all about here comes in the chapter on Anna Karenina where Bloom says,"...there is an alien impression...of a gracious, semi-aristocratic civility that is now so far away from anything we can experience or hope to experience in our daily lives. The relationships of love and friendship have a delicacy and involvement with higher concerns that almost seem inauthentic. Rather than a model for our own lives, the social scene seems to be reminiscent of a lost world where people had the leisure to attempt to make works of art of their lives." It is this "lost world" that Bloom hungers for. In other words, Bloom wants us to go back to Queen Victoria and the following Belle Epoque, when the focus of society's lens was on these priveleged few. It is curious that Bloom chooses this attack on the modern world from a book in which the heroine commits suicide by laying herself in the path of an oncoming train bacause of that society's narrow conventions.-But, please don't get me wrong. I actually LIKE this book because it focuses on the most important things in life: spiritual love and friendship. It's just that Bloom expects too much and has somehow deluded himself into thinking that there was a Golden Age when it was the norm. It has always ben rare, and I don't see why Bloom is such a sourpuss about it. One gets the feeling that some deep hurt has been done to him, and now is the time for vindication. For some reason, Bloom wants us to believe that spiritual love is extinct when it is merely out of the limelight, where it is actually more authentic. After all, the most common adjective associated with the Victorian age is "hypocritical." -But the book is interesting, erudite and worth the read. Just don't get the idea that all is lost.-That part is just Bloomean bosh.

Bloom uses the term eros broadly, to cover all forms of the longing for completion--from the love of a beautiful beloved to the love of wisdom. Ranging broadly over the history of Western literature and philosophy, he also goes deep. For each book he covers, he provides a detailed summary that effectively introduces the book to the new reader, along with commentary that illuminates the book's contribution to our ideas of love, friendship, and what they and we can be at our best. I have reservations about Bloom's treatment of Nietzsche, whom he discusses briefly here and there. But having read almost all of the books he covers in full-length chapters, I find those chapters faithful to their spirit. The section on Shakespeare has been published separately, but the others are equally good. The concluding chapters on Montaigne and Plato are especially striking in the clarity and force with which they present these authors' challenge to conventional notions about living well.

Are the folks at Kirkus really suggesting that good things necessarily last forever? Are the poor stewardship of following generations and the sad inevitable decay of all things, good and bad, entirely unimportant? In the same way that a dish of my favorite ice cream will surely melt, so will Rome fall eventually. But what does that have to do with anything? As Whit Stillman has indicated in "Metropolitan", ceasing to exist is not evidence of failure - we all cease to exist, but we are not all failures. Bloom's books (and the books of his fellow "Straussians") are, in this reader's opinion, the closest thing to clarity we have in books these days. Intelligent, elegant, romantic, penetrating. If Kirkus has a better suggestion for remedying the "contractual" nature of relationships (which IS out there - take a sympathetic look), I await it with anticipation. Bloom's commentaries on Tolstoy, Shakespeare et al are clear and free of abstraction - the antidote to the glut of theoretical (read: unerotic) drudgery that exists out there on the subject of love. Perhaps Bloom doesn't say it all, but he shows a filial loyalty to those who have come close, which is surely more than we expect nowadays.

While not as good as, say, Shakespeare's Politics or Shakespeare as a Political Thinker, this book is quite fine and analyzes a few of the plays in the Shakespeare cannon. Especially good is the analysis of Propero, Romeo & Juliet, and Antony and Cleopatra. The short final chapter on Hal and Falstaff is quite interesting as well. This book makes a fine read, even if it is not as good as some of the other books on Shakespeare's deep thinking.

Chicago has published the Shakespeare part of _Love and Friendship_ separately. Not knowing the play, I had to skip the chapter on Measure for Measure, but found the interpretations of Hal and Falstaff, Romeo and Juliet, Antony and Cleopatra, and the Winter's Tale intriguing. They seem to me to be a little long on plot detail, particularly in the last instance, but what Bloom wrote about Ulysses, Hector, Antony, Falstaff, Mercurtio, Romeo, Friar Laurance, and Prospero is at least tenable. And he is particularly acute about Juliet, Prospero, Octavius, Achilles, and Falstaff.

I am not convinced that Shakepeare was so conscious a political theorist as Bloom supposes, systematically surveying different kinds of political communities. (That was Aristotle!). or illustrating Machiavelli (that was Leo Strauss and his students such as Bloom) Shakespeare certainly portrayed a range of human relationships, though with some more reucrrent patterns than one would guess from reading Bloom.

In particular, I think that Bloom fails to examine the generally one-way erotics of many friends disappointed by being abandoned for wedlock. There is very little representation of what happens after the weddings which are the "happy endings" for some youth, while disasters flow from established marital and quasi-marital relationships in Macbeth, Antony and Cleopatra, Hamlet, Othello, and even Romeo and Juliet, including the deaths of all the title characters in these plays.

Bloom's notion that Rome's imperial expansion was over by the time Octavius defeated Antony is very peculiar. Is it that there is no great literature about Trajan than makes Bloom ignore the later imperial growth? There was no "end of politics" or shortage of enemies, internal or external, for later emperors to contend against.

As an introduction to Bloom's values and ways of thinking about canonical texts, this volume is far superior to Saul Bellow's fictionalized memoir, _Ravelstein_. _Shakespeare's Politics_ is even better an introduction.

Though not as tight as Shakespeare's Politics, this group of essay's by Bloom is the fruitful result of many years of careful study. Of particular interest is the section on Hal and Falstaff. More clearly than ever before, Bloom discusses the pleasure and ambiguity of the highest sort of friendship. Philosophy and Falstaff are congruent but not equal....they both hover just outside of the city and must remain there except in the case of friendship.

Cosimo Rucellai