Tag Archives: Harold Bloom

Arts & Literature, Essays, Reviews, Theater

Shakespeare’s Stage: When The Mind Overhears Itself

By Michael Cummins, Editor, August 15, 2025

There is a moment in the history of the theater, and indeed in the history of consciousness itself, when the stage ceased to be merely a platform for action and became a vessel for thought. Before this moment, a character might speak their mind to an audience, but the thoughts were settled, the intentions declared. After, the character began to speak to themselves, and in doing so, they changed. They were no longer merely revealing a plan; they were discovering it, recoiling from it, marveling at it, and becoming someone new in the process.

This revolution was the singular invention of William Shakespeare. The literary critic Harold Bloom, who argued it was the pivotal event in Western consciousness, gave it a name: “self-overhearing.” It is the act of a character’s mind becoming its own audience. For Shakespeare, this was not a theory of composition but the very mechanism of being. He placed a theater inside his characters’ minds, and on that internal stage, they overheard the whispers of their own souls.

This interior drama, this process of a consciousness listening to itself, is the molten core of Shakespearean tragedy. It grants his characters a psychological autonomy that feels startlingly, sometimes terrifyingly, modern. While this technique permeates his work, it finds its most potent expression in three of his greatest tragic figures. Through them, Shakespeare presents a triptych of the mind in conflict. In Hamlet, we witness the intellectual paralyzed by the sheer polyphony of his own consciousness. In Iago, we find the chilling opposite: a malevolent artist who overhears his own capacity for evil and gleefully improvises a script of pure destruction. And in Macbeth, we watch a noble soldier become an audience to his own corruption, mesmerized and horrified by the murderous voice his ambition has awakened. Together, these three characters map the frontiers of human consciousness, demonstrating that the most profound tragedies unfold not in castles and on battlefields, but in the silent, echoing theater of the mind.

Hamlet: The Consciousness in Crisis

Hamlet is not merely a character; he is a consciousness. More than any figure in literature, he exists as a mind in perpetual, agonizing conversation with itself. His tragedy is not that he must avenge his father, but that he must first navigate the labyrinth of his own thoughts to do so. His soliloquies are not statements of intent but sprawling, recursive processes of self-interrogation. He is the ultimate self-overhearer, and the voice he listens to is so articulate, philosophically nuanced, and relentlessly self-critical that it becomes a prison.

From his first soliloquy, we see a mind recoiling from a world it cannot stomach. He laments the “unweeded garden” of the world, wishing:

O, that this too too solid flesh would melt,
Thaw and resolve itself into a dew!
— Hamlet, 1.2.129-130

After his encounter with the Ghost, the theater of his mind becomes a chamber of horrors. He overhears not just a command for revenge, but a shattering revelation about the nature of reality itself, concluding that “one may smile, and smile, and be a villain” (Hamlet, 1.5.108). This overheard truth—that appearance is a stage and humanity is a performance—becomes a cornerstone of his own psyche, prompting his decision to put on an “antic disposition.”

Charged with a task demanding bloody action, Hamlet’s consciousness instead turns inward, staging a debate that consumes the play. In his most famous soliloquy, he puts existence itself on trial: “To be, or not to be: that is the question.” This is not a man deciding whether to live or die; it is a mind listening to its own arguments for and against being. He weighs the “slings and arrows of outrageous fortune” against the terrifying uncertainty of “the undiscover’d country from whose bourn / No traveller returns.” The voice of his intellect, he concludes, is what “puzzles the will,” making it so that “conscience does make cowards of us all” (Hamlet, 3.1.56-83). He overhears his own fear and elevates it into a universal principle.

This intellectual paralysis is born of his relentless self-analysis. After watching an actor weep for the fictional Hecuba, Hamlet turns on himself in a fury of self-loathing, beginning with, “O, what a rogue and peasant slave am I!” He overhears his own inaction and is disgusted by it, mocking his tendency to talk instead of act:

Why, what an ass am I! …
That I, the son of a dear father murder’d,
Prompted to my revenge by heaven and hell,
Must, like a whore, unpack my heart with words.
— Hamlet, 2.2.583-586

He is both the speaker and the critic, the actor and the audience, caught in a feedback loop of thought, accusation, and further thought. Hamlet’s mind is a stage where the drama of consciousness perpetually upstages the call to action; the performance is so compelling he cannot bring himself to leave the theater.

Iago: The Playwright of Evil

If Hamlet’s self-overhearing leads to a tragic paralysis, Iago’s is the engine of a terrifying and creative evil. Where Hamlet’s mind is a debating chamber, Iago’s is a workshop. He is Shakespeare’s most chilling villain precisely because his villainy is an act of artistic improvisation. In his soliloquies, we do not witness a man wrestling with his conscience; we witness a playwright brainstorming his plot, listening with detached delight to the diabolical suggestions of his own intellect. He overhears the whispers of a motiveless malignity and, finding them intriguing, decides to write them into being.

Iago’s supposed motives for destroying Othello are flimsy and interchangeable. He first claims to hate the Moor for promoting Cassio. Then, he adds a rumor: “it is thought abroad, that ‘twixt my sheets / He has done my office” (Othello, 1.3.387-388). He presents this not as fact, but as a passing thought he chooses to entertain, a justification he can try on, resolving to act “as if for surety.” Where Hamlet desperately seeks a single, unimpeachable motive to act, Iago casually auditions motives, searching only for one that is dramatically effective. He is listening for a good enough reason, and when he finds one, he seizes it not with conviction but with artistic approval.

His soliloquies are masterclasses in this dark creativity. At the end of Act I, he pauses to admire his burgeoning plot. “How, how? Let’s see,” he muses, like an artist sketching a scene. “After some time, to abuse Othello’s ear / That he is too familiar with his wife.” The plan flows from him, culminating in the famous declaration:

Hell and night
Must bring this monstrous birth to the world’s light.
— Othello, 1.3.409-410

Later, he marvels at the tangible effect of his artistry, watching his poison corrupt Othello’s mind and noting with clinical detachment, “The Moor already changes with my poison: / Dangerous conceits are, in their natures, poisons” (Othello, 3.3.325-326). He is not just the playwright, but the rapt critic of his own unfolding drama. He steps outside of himself to admire his own performance as “honest Iago,” listening with applause to his own deceptive logic. This is the chilling sound of a consciousness with no moral compass, only an aesthetic one. It overhears its own capacity for deception and finds it beautiful. Iago is the playwright within the play, and the voice he hears is that of the void, whose suggestions he finds irresistible.

Macbeth: The Audience to Corruption

In Macbeth, we witness the most visceral and terrifying form of self-overhearing. He is a man who hears two voices within himself—that of the loyal thane and that of a murderous usurper—and the play charts his horrifying decision to listen to the latter. Unlike Hamlet, he is not paralyzed, and unlike Iago, he takes no pleasure in his dark machinations. Macbeth is an unwilling audience to his own ambition. He overhears the prophecy of his own moral decay and, though it terrifies him, cannot bring himself to walk out. His tragedy is that of a man who watches himself become a monster.

Our first glimpse into this internal battle comes after he meets the witches. Their prophecy is a “supernatural soliciting” that he reveals in an aside, a moment of public self-overhearing: “This supernatural soliciting / Cannot be ill, cannot be good” (Macbeth, 1.3.130-131). He listens as his mind debates the proposition. If it’s good, why does he yield to a suggestion:

Whose horrid image doth unfix my hair
And make my seated heart knock at my ribs,
Against the use of nature?
— Macbeth, 1.3.135-137

He is already a spectator to his own treasonous thoughts. The voice of ambition conjures the murder of Duncan, and his body reacts with visceral terror. The most profound moment of this internal drama is the “dagger of the mind” soliloquy. Here, Macbeth is a captive audience to his own murderous intent. “Is this a dagger which I see before me, / The handle toward my hand?” he asks, knowing it is a “dagger of the mind, a false creation, / Proceeding from the heat-oppressed brain” (Macbeth, 2.1.33-39). He is watching his own mind project its bloody purpose into the world; he overhears his own resolve and sees it take physical form.

After the murder, the voice he overheard as temptation becomes an inescapable torment. His consciousness broadcasts its own verdict—“Sleep no more! / Macbeth does murder sleep” (Macbeth, 2.2.35-36)—and he has no choice but to listen. This torment is soon joined by a chilling, logical self-appraisal. He overhears his own entrapment, recognizing that the only path forward is through more violence:

I am in blood
Stepp’d in so far that, should I wade no more,
Returning were as tedious as go o’er.
— Macbeth, 3.4.136-138

His tragedy culminates in his final soliloquy, where, upon hearing of his wife’s death, he overhears the voice of utter despair: “Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow, / Creeps in this petty pace from day to day…” (Macbeth, 5.5.19-20). It is his own soul pronouncing its damnation, the final, devastating judgment on a life spent listening to the wrong voice.

Conclusion

The soliloquy, in Shakespeare’s hands, became more than a dramatic convention; it became a window into the birth of the modern self. Through the radical art of self-overhearing, he transformed characters from archetypes who declared their nature into fluid beings who discovered it, moment by moment, in the echo chamber of their own minds.

Hamlet, Iago, and Macbeth stand as the titanic pillars of this innovation. Hamlet’s mind is a storm of intellectual static, a signal so complex it jams the frequency of action. Iago tunes his ear to a darker station, one that transmits pure malignity, and becomes a gleeful conductor of its chaotic symphony. Macbeth, most tragically, is trapped between stations, hearing both the noble music of his better nature and the siren song of ambition, and makes the fatal choice to listen to the latter until it is the only sound left.

In giving his characters the capacity to listen to themselves, Shakespeare gave them life. He understood that identity is not a fixed point but a constant, fraught negotiation—a dialogue between the self we know and the other voices that whisper of what we might become. By staging this internal drama, he invented a new kind of tragedy, one where the fatal flaw is not a trait, but the very process of thought itself. We return to these plays again and again, not merely as an audience, but to witness the terrifying and beautiful spectacle of a soul becoming an audience to itself.

THIS ESSAY WAS WRITTEN AND EDITED UTILIZING AI

Arts & Literature, Book Reviews, Essays, Literature, Reviews

Moby-Dick, Perpetual Inquiry, and the Sublime

“Call me Ishmael.”

This iconic first line anchors one of the most enduring openings in American literature. Yet before it is spoken, before Ishmael’s voice emerges on the page, we encounter something more unusual: a kind of literary invocation. The opening pages of Moby-Dick—those dense, eclectic “Extracts” quoting scripture, classical literature, scientific treatises, and forgotten travelogues—do not serve as a traditional preface. Instead, they operate like a ritual threshold. They ask us to enter the novel not as a narrative, but as a vast textual cosmos.

Melville’s fictional “sub-sub-librarian” gathers fragments from Job to Shakespeare to obscure whaling reports, assembling a chorus of voices that have, across centuries, spoken of the whale. This pre-narrative collage is more than ornamentation. It proposes a foundational idea: that the whale lives not only in the ocean, but in language. Not only in myth, but in memory. Not only in flesh, but in thought.

Before the Pequod ever sets sail, Melville has already charted his central course—into the ocean of human imagination, where the whale swims through texts, dreams, and questions that refuse easy resolution.

Proof of Two Lives

“There’s something I find strangely moving about the ‘Extracts’ section,” remarks literary critic Wyatt Mason on The World in Time, a podcast hosted by Lewis Lapham. “It’s proof of two kinds of life. The life of the creature itself, and the life of the mind—the attention we pay over time to this creature.”

Mason’s comment offers a keel for the voyage ahead. In Moby-Dick, the whale is not simply an animal or antagonist. It becomes a metaphysical magnet, a mirror for human understanding, a challenge to the limits of knowing. The “Extracts” and “Etymologies,” often dismissed as digressions, are in fact sacred rites—texts that beg to be read with reverence.

In teaching the novel to incarcerated students through the Bard Prison Initiative, Mason and fellow writer Donovan Hohn describe how these obscure, labyrinthine sections are received not as trivia but as scripture. The students descend into the archive as divers into a shipwreck—recovering fragments of forgotten wisdom, learning to breathe in the pressure of incomprehensibility. “The whale,” Mason repeats, “resides or lives in texts.” And what a library it is.

The Whale as Philosophy

“All my means are sane, my motive and my object mad.”

Harold Bloom, the late sage of literary criticism, would have nodded at Mason’s insight. For Bloom, Moby-Dick was not merely a novel, but “a giant Shakespearean prose poem.” Melville, he believed, was a tragedian of the American soul. Captain Ahab, mad with self-reliance, became for Bloom a Promethean figure—bound not by divine punishment, but by his own obsessive will.

In Bloom’s classroom at Yale in 2011, there were no lecture notes. He taught Moby-Dick like a jazz solo—improvised, living, drawn from a lifetime of memory and myth. “It’s very unfair,” he said, reflecting on the whale hunts—great mammals hunted with harpoons and lances. Yet the Pequod’s most moral man, Starbuck, is also its most proficient killer. A Quaker devoted to peace, he is also the ship’s deadliest lance. This contradiction—gentleness and violence braided together—is the essence of Melville’s philosophy.

The whale, in Bloom’s reading, is sublime not because it symbolizes any one thing—God, evil, justice, nature—but because it cannot be pinned down. It is an open question. An unending inquiry. A canvas for paradox. “Heaven help them all,” Bloom said of the Pequod’s doomed crew. “And us.”

Melville the Environmentalist

“There she blows! There she blows! A hump like a snow-hill! It is Moby Dick!”

Where Bloom heard Melville’s music in metaphor and myth, Richard J. King hears it in science. In Ahab’s Rolling Sea: A Natural History of Moby-Dick (2019), King charts a different map—overlaying Melville’s imagined ocean onto real tides, real whales, real voyages. He sails replica whalers, interviews marine biologists, pores over Melville’s notebooks.

His inquiry begins with a straightforward question: could a sperm whale really destroy a ship? Historical records suggest yes. But King doesn’t stop at anatomy. His portrait of Melville reveals a proto-environmentalist, someone who revered the sea not just as symbol but as system. Melville’s whale, King argues, is a creature of wonder and terror, not just prey but presence.

In an age of ecological crisis, King reframes Moby-Dick as a book not just of metaphor but of environmental ethics. Ishmael’s meandering digressions become meditations on the ocean as moral agent—an entity capable of sustaining and destroying. The sea is no backdrop; it is a character, a god, an intelligence. Melville’s ocean, King suggests, humbles the hubris of Ahab and calls readers to ecological humility.

Rediscovery in Dark Times

“Strike through the mask! How can the prisoner reach outside except by thrusting through the wall?”

Aaron Sachs, in Up From the Depths: Herman Melville, Lewis Mumford, and Rediscovery in Dark Times (2022), picks up the whale’s trail in the 20th century. In 1929, as the world plunged into the Great Depression, the writer and historian Lewis Mumford resurrected Melville from literary oblivion. His biography of the long-forgotten author recast Melville not as a failure, but as a visionary.

For Mumford, Melville was a kindred spirit—a man who, long before the term “modernity” took hold, had already seen its psychic cost. As Mumford watched the rise of industry, mass production, and spiritual exhaustion, he found in Melville a dark prophet. Ahab’s fury was not personal—it was civilizational.

Critics have praised Sachs’s biography as timely and thoughtful. Its thesis is clear: in times of disorientation, literature does more than reflect the world—it refracts it. It preserves vital truths, repurposing them when our present crises demand older insights.

In Sachs’s telling, Moby-Dick is not just a classic; it’s a living text. A lighthouse in the storm. A warning bell. A whale-shaped mirror reflecting our fears, failures, and persistent hope.

The Whale in the Classroom

“Ignorance is the parent of fear.”

The classroom, as Sachs and Mason both suggest, becomes a site of literary resurrection. In prison education programs, students discover themselves in the “Extracts”—not despite their difficulty, but because of it. The very act of grappling with Melville’s arcane references, strange structures, and encyclopedic digressions becomes an act of reclamation.

To teach Moby-Dick in a prison is to raise a sunken ship. Its sentences, like salvaged artifacts, reveal new meaning. Forgotten knowledge becomes fuel for rediscovery. Students, many of whom have been dismissed by society, see in Melville’s endless inquiry a validation of their own intelligence and complexity.

Harold Bloom taught Moby-Dick the same way. Every reading was new. No fixed script, only the swell of thought. He modeled Melville’s method: trust the reader, trust the text, trust the mystery.

The whale resists capture—literal and interpretive. It is not a symbol with a key, but a question without an answer. That resistance is what makes Moby-Dick enduring. It insists on being re-read. Re-thought. Re-discovered.

The Archive That Breathes

“It is not down in any map; true places never are.”

Taken together, the voices of Wyatt Mason, Harold Bloom, Richard J. King, and Aaron Sachs reveal Moby-Dick as something more than literature. It is a breathing archive—a repository of imagination, inquiry, and paradox.

Within its pages dwell theologies and taxonomies, drama and digression, sermons and sea shanties. It houses the ethical weight of ecology, the fury of Ahab, the wonder of Ishmael, and the ghosts of Melville’s century. It defies genre, resists reduction, and insists on complexity.

Melville did not write to close arguments but to open them. He did not believe in neat endings. His whale is the quintessential “true place”: uncapturable, immeasurable, endlessly sublime.

And yet we return. We keep hunting—not with harpoons, but with attention. With interpretation. With awe.

A Final Breach

What, then, do we do with Moby-Dick in the twenty-first century? How do we reconcile Ahab’s consuming fury with Ishmael’s contemplative awe? How do we carry Bloom’s Prometheus, King’s Leviathan, Sachs’s resurrected Melville, and Mason’s classroom in a single imagination?

We read. We reread. We become “sub-sub-librarians”—archivists of ambiguity, curators of complexity. We do not read Moby-Dick for closure. We read it to learn how to remain open—to contradiction, to paradox, to mystery.

But what if we, like Captain Ahab, set off to find Moby Dick and never found the whale?

What if all our intellectual harpoons missed their mark? What if the whale was never there to begin with—not as symbol, not as certainty, not as prize?

Would we call that failure?

Or might we discover, like Ishmael adrift on the coffin-raft, that survival is not about conquest, but endurance? That truth lives not in the kill, but in the quest?

Perhaps Melville’s greatest lesson is that the whale must never be caught. Its sublimity lies in its elusiveness—in its capacity to remain just beyond the reach of definition, control, and meaning. It breaches in metaphor. It disappears in digression. It waits—not to be captured, but to be considered.

We will never catch it. But we must keep following.

For in the following, we become something more than readers.
We become seekers.

THIS ESSAY WAS WRITTEN BY INTELLICUREAN UTILIZING AI