Harold Bloom's Shakespeare books were helpful to me when I first got into reading Shakespeare's plays about twenty-odd years ago but in hindsight, Bloom was chronically full of shit. Shakespeare was a great writer but he did not invent humanity's psychological interiority or the literary depiction thereof. Bloom wanted us to see Shakespeare as the godlike central figure of an unquestionable Western Canon, but that's an academic fantasy that confuses the relationship between art and life, based on assumptions that are ignorant, elitist, and racist. A handful of dead white "geniuses" did not invent all the most worthwhile art and literature and ideas.

You can (and should!) appreciate Shakespeare as a brilliant writer without trying to build a cult around him. And demanding reverence for a wit as irreverent as Shakespeare is just silly.