Harold Bloom

“It is not correlative with wonder; for wonder is our reaction to things which we are conscious of not quite understanding, or at any rate of understanding less than we had thought. The element of strangeness in beauty has the contrary effect. It arises from contact with a different kind of consciousness from our own, different, yet not so remote that we cannot partly share it, as indeed, in such a connection, the mere word ‘contact’ implies. Strangeness, in fact, arouses wonder when we do not understand: aesthetic imagination when we do.”

Shakespeare, when you give yourself completely to reading him, surprises you by the strangeness which I take to be his salient quality. We feel the consciousness of Hamlet or Iago, and our own consciousness strangely expands. The difference between reading Shakespeare and reading nearly any other writer is that greater widening of our consciousness into what initially must seem a strangeness of woe or wonder.