Harold Bloom as literary criticism's 800-lb. gorilla

I've just begun teaching Hamlet in my Intro. to Lit. class, so when I ran across Harold Bloom's Hamlet: Poem Unlimited (2003) in the Barnes & Noble bargain stacks, I thought, Why not? It's not at all a bad reading of the play, but it's a bit . . . well . . . Well, why don't you just read on a bit, if you care to?
If there's a critic that people outside academe have possibly heard of, it'd have to be Bloom. In the (at least) late autumn of a career that began in the 50's, Bloom is everywhere, it seems, especially since his The Western Canon (1994). And if there's a critic that people IN academe envy, it'd have to be Bloom. You name the sort of critic there is to be/have been, and Bloom is/has been it. That fact is the official reason that those people in the academy who dislike him do so. And when The Western Canon appeared, it must have seemed to many that this champion of deconstructionism, itself a rebuttal of New Criticism, had finally come full circle and begun channelling T. S. Eliot but also going him one better by getting around to actually establishing the Tradition that Eliot seemed to think we'd just sort of "know." No anxiety of influence THERE.
Anyway. Bloom's rep is such that he can do, literally, whatever the hell he pleases as regards his work. Must be nice. But I think that that's the chief problem with his book on Hamlet: he just doesn't have to WORK any more.
In his preface, Bloom says that this book exists because in his Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human he had gotten so wrapped up with the question of this Hamlet's relation to the famous-but-lost "ur-Hamlet" that Shakespeare is said to have based his play on that he ended up not getting a chance to give us a thorough reading of the play. Fine, I say; Hamlet is certainly worth a close, lengthy study, especially by someone who really DOES seem to have read everything and taught most of it. I should say here that I own his book Wallace Stevens: The Poems of Our Climate, and I have to say that I can't think of any single book of criticism that I've learned more from--not just about Stevens himself but about the practice of reading itself, so I was very much looking forward to experiencing something similar with this book.
Well. Even setting aside the fact that Bloom is writing for a general audience, this book seems awfully breezy. He does say, interestingly, that Hamlet (the character) is a sort of meta-conscience, that his problem isn't indecision but, rather, he is TOO detached from Elsinore. That makes sense to me; so, I say, let's see some closer discussion of the text. Sadly, though, Bloom seems too detached from the work of a critic here: too often, he quotes a passage (point A) and then leaps ahead to conclusion C without B's hard work of patiently mucking about in the text. His book, in other words, feels more like a lecture than a piece of scholarship.
Again: my complaint is not with his arguments. I'm no Shakespeare scholar, but I've taught Hamlet my fair share of times, so I feel as though I am pretty good at pointing out the heart of its mystery, if not actually plucking it out. Aside from Bloom's idea of Hamlet as a meta-conscience, nothing in his book struck me as being terribly surprising. And THAT's not bad, either. It's just that I was looking forward to seeing a first-rate critic actually do his thing there on the page, and I feel let down when I see that that's not going to happen.
Bloom has earned the right to coast, Lord knows. I was just hoping that he wouldn't do so in this book about this play. He himself says that Hamlet is a demanding text, but he makes his reading of it look as though it had come easily. Personally, I'd have preferred a more hard-won appearance.

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