Bloom on Satan and Hamlet

Harold Bloom hinted at this in his Shakespeare book, and it's hard not to see the point here, which he has elaborated on in his new book:

"It does not matter that Satan is an obsessed theist and Hamlet is not .... Two angelic intellects inhabit a common abyss: the post-Enlightenment ever-augmenting inner self, of which Hamlet is a precursor ...."

--from The Anatomy of Influence, as quoted in the New York Times Book Review

What Bloom might add here is that Montaigne is the to some extent the real-life antecedent to both of these characters.

It is easy, perhaps, to dismiss Bloom as pompous and bombastic, but it is not easy to dismiss the pull of his ideas, and I cannot help but feel that more often than not there is the ring of something valid in what he has to say.