This book on Shakespeare's plays, focusing on the characters, is fascinating but uneven. His analysis of the motivation of Prince Hal and of Iago are the best I've read and are rooted in the texts; on the other hand, his section on Hamlet is tiresome, devoted to his own theory that Shakespeare rather than Kyd wrote the crude, original Hamlet (Bloom gives no evidence to support his assertion). Nor am I convinced by his theory that his favorite characters (Hamlet, Falstaff, Rosalind) are Nietzschean supermen created centuries before Nietzsche. However, they are enough intriguing ideas to make it worth the read.