Education Quote by Harold Bloom

Bloom’s genius and his blind spot are both on display here: the swaggering certainty that a single word can re-key two towering canons, and the almost gleeful refusal to qualify it. “Contamination” is doing double duty. In Freud, it suggests psychic spillover: desires and traumas that won’t stay in their assigned compartments, the way an unconscious fixation infects a symptom, a dream, a family romance. Bloom’s move is to treat that not as a clinical discovery but as a literary inheritance. Freud didn’t invent the mess; he theorized a mess Shakespeare already staged.

The subtext is Bloom’s favorite argument in miniature: Shakespeare as the source code of modern interiority. Bloom is less interested in influence as citation than as atmosphere. Shakespeare “contaminates” because his plays let motives crossbreed and rot: love curdles into domination, piety into violence, politics into bedroom farce. Characters are porous to language and to one another; they catch ideas like diseases. Think of Iago’s insinuations that spread through Othello, or Hamlet’s disgust that metastasizes into a worldview. Freud’s interpretive method looks cleaner by comparison, but Bloom insists its very premise is Shakespearean: the mind is not sovereign; it’s leaky.

The context matters: Bloom spent a career elevating Shakespeare to an almost theological centrality, often against academic fashions that preferred systems over genius. Calling Shakespeare “about nothing but contamination” is provocation, not taxonomy. He’s defending a reading practice that prizes entanglement over purity: no stable self, no uncontaminated motive, no interpretation untouched by earlier language. It’s also a backhanded jab at Freud’s originality myth. Bloom wants the credit to flow upstream, to the playwright who made impurity feel like fate.