His total effect upon the world's culture is incalculable. "Hamlet is the only secular rival to his greatest precursors in personality. Well, it wasn't my idea: it was Harold Bloom's. You may wonder what I'm doing putting Hamlet and Jesus in the same paragraph. T S Eliot made the point in his 1919 essay on the subject, saying that Hamlet had "an especial temptation for that most dangerous type of critic: the critic with a mind which is naturally of the creative order, but which through some weakness in creative power exercises itself in criticism instead". And if they don't do it when they talk about Shakespeare, they do it when they talk about Hamlet. One would hope that Professors of Literature are above making such errors, but you can't help feeling that some of them undergo a similar process of identification when they think, talk, or write about Shakespeare.
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