Bloom on Shakespeare Redux

I have never regarded Shakespeare as the ne plus ultra of human genius, which both Oscar Wilde and Harold Bloom would no doubt characterize as Caliban's rage at not seeing his face in the glass.  Whether I can name a greater is less significant than that the quest for the lapis philosophorum of a superior mind continues, in all likelihood until Mistress Quickly reports upon my own final curtain.

Bloom's Bardolatry rankles, not because I can cite a figure outside of the Anglo-American literary tradition greater than Shakespeare, but because I am, vividly, well into the second volume of the Victorian novel which will prove to have been my life with only the barest acquaintance with the humane letters of every culture that lies beyond that narrowly circumscribed and constantly stifling tradition.  It is just barely possible that the greatest writer of all human history composed in my language, but what are the odds that this is not merely another instance of Anglo-American exceptionalism and triumphalism masquerading as impartial criticism?  Would Shakespeare remain the paragon of great literature if his parent civilization were no more politically and socio-economically important than that of, say, the Tuareg or the Xhosa?

Bloom is fond of proclaiming that the major Shakespearian characters seem more real to him than many of the people he knows.  He goes further:  "Barnardine, in Measure for Measure, speaks only five times, and for a total of seven sentences, and yet we know him completely."  My instinctive misanthropy cries out to agree with Bloom that the inventions of great literature outpace the shoddy human products of mere pedestrian existence, but even with my overarching contempt for the ubiquitous dross that comprises humanity, I cannot doubt that there exists a kernel of the heroic lying dormant in practically every person, submerged under countless layers of materialist conformity, lazy irrationalism, vacuous pieties, habitual mediocrity, and soul-killing ennui.

Bloom and I are considerably more in tune when he assails the ongoing decline of American universities.  Whereas my contempt for the contemporary Academy is instinctive and largely based upon rumors and legends, Bloom has been at the heart of the struggle against intellectual mediocrity for nearly half a century:  if he says things are terrible and getting worse, his reports from the trenches I take as authoritative in a manner which his aesthetic and critical judgements manifestly fail to merit.

(And no, I didn't understand "The Anxiety of Influence".)