Hamlet Critic Quotes

There are as many Hamlets as there are melancholies.

Consciousness is the materia poetica that Shakespeare sculpts as Michelangelo sculpts marble. We feel the consciousness of Hamlet or Iago, and our own consciousness strangely expands.

Mr. Upward italicises “at the present time” because he realises that you cannot, for instance, dismiss Hamlet on the ground that Shakespeare was not a Marxist.

Form is everything. It is the secret of life. Find expression for a sorrow, and it will become dear to you. Find expression for a joy, and you intensify its ecstasy. Do you wish to love? Use Love's Litany, and the words will create the yearning from which the world fancies that they spring. Have you a grief that corrodes your heart? Steep yourself in the language of grief, learn its utterance from Prince Hamlet and Queen Constance, and you will find that mere expression is a mode of consolation, and that Form, which is the birth of passion, is also the death of pain.

I once witnessed a rather unfortunate production of Shakespeare's Hamlet - the lead actor didn't know his existential angst from his iambic pentameter and, alas, poor Yorick was a bemused bystander.

A thought expressed is a falsehood." In poetry what is not said and yet gleams through the beauty of the symbol, works more powerfully on the heart than that which is expressed in words. Symbolism makes the very style, the very artistic substance of poetry inspired, transparent, illuminated throughout like the delicate walls of an alabaster amphora in which a flame is ignited. Characters can also serve as symbols. Sancho Panza and Faust, Don Quixote and Hamlet, Don Juan and Falstaff, according to the words of Goethe, are "schwankende Gestalten." Apparitions which haunt mankind, sometimes repeatedly from age to age, accompany mankind from generation to generation. It is impossible to communicate in any words whatsoever the idea of such symbolic characters, for words only define and restrict thought, but symbols express the unrestricted aspect of truth. Moreover we cannot be satisfied with a vulgar, photographic exactness of experimental photoqraphv. We demand and have premonition of, according to the allusions of Flaubert, Maupassant, Turgenev, Ibsen, new and as yet undisclosed worlds of impressionability. This thirst for the unexperienced, in pursuit of elusive nuances, of the dark and unconscious in our sensibility, is the characteristic feature of the coming ideal poetry. Earlier Baudelaire and Edgar Allan Poe said that the beautiful must somewhat amaze, must seem unexpected and extraordinary. French critics more or less successfully named this feature - impressionism. Such are the three major elements of the new art: a mystical content, symbols, and the expansion of artistic impressionability. No positivistic conclusions, no utilitarian computation, but only a creative faith in something infinite and immortal can ignite the soul of man, create heroes, martyrs and prophets... People have need of faith, they need inspiration, they crave a holy madness in their heroes and martyrs. ("On The Reasons For The Decline And On The New Tendencies In Contemporary Literature")

When art is made new, we are made new with it. We have a sense of solidarity with our own time, and of psychic energies shared and redoubled, which is just about the most satisfying thing that life has to offer. 'If that is possible,' we say to ourselves, 'then everything is possible'; a new phase in the history of human awareness has been opened up, just as it opened up when people first read Dante, or first heard Bach's 48 preludes and fugues, or first learned from Hamlet and King Lear(/I> that the complexities and contradictions of human nature could be spelled out on the stage. This being so, it is a great exasperation to come face to face with new art and not make anything of it. Stared down by something that we don't like, don't understand and can't believe in, we feel personally affronted, as if our identity as reasonably alert and responsive human beings had been called into question. We ought to be having a good time, and we aren't. More than that, an important part of life is being withheld from us; for if any one thing is certain in this world it is that art is there to help us live, and for no other reason.

Bradley, I wish I’d understood that stuff you spouted about Hamlet." "Forget it. No high theory about Shakespeare is any good, not because he’s so divine but because he’s so human. Even great art is jumble in the end." "So the critics are just stupid?" "It needs no theory to tell us this! One should simply try to like as much as one can.

Like Hamlet, Goethe's Faust offers a wide panorama of scenes from the vulgar to the sublime, with passages of wondrous poetry that can be sensed even through the veil of translation. And it also preserves the iridescence of its modern theme. From it Oswald Spengler christened our Western culture 'Faustian,' and others too have found it an unexcelled metaphor for the infinitely aspiring always dissatisfied modern self. Goethe himself was wary of simple explanations. When his friends accused him of incompetence in metaphysics, he replied. 'I, being an artist, regard this as of little moment. Indeed, I prefer that the principle from which and through which I work should be hidden from me.

In order to understand Hamlet as Shakespeare understood it, we need to see the play through the playwright’s profoundly Christian eyes. This inescapable truth was understood by the Shakespearean critic E. M. W. Tillyard, who emphasized Shakespeare’s breadth of spiritual vision in Hamlet: I doubt if in any other play of Shakespeare there is so strong an impression of the total range of creation from the angels to the beasts. 

He is the most Shakespearean creature since Shakespeare. If Shakespeare could sing with myriad lips, Browning could stammer through a thousand mouths. [...] Yes, Browning was great. And as what will he be remembered? As a poet? Ah, not as a poet! He will be remembered as a writer of fiction, as the most supreme writer of fiction, it may be, that we have ever had. His sense of dramatic situation was unrivalled, and, if he could not answer his own problems, he could at least put problems forth, and what more should an artist do? Considered from the point of view of a creator of character he ranks next to him who made Hamlet. Had he been articulate, he might have sat beside him. The only man who can touch the hem of his garment is George Meredith. Meredith is a prose Browning, and so is Browning. He used poetry as a medium for writing in prose.

I remember the astonishment I felt when I first read Shakespeare. I expected to receive a powerful esthetic pleasure, but having read, one after the other, works regarded as his best: "King Lear," "Romeo and Juliet," "Hamlet" and "Macbeth," not only did I feel no delight, but I felt an irresistible repulsion and tedium . . . . Shakespeare can not be recognized either as a great genius, or even as an average author. . . . far from being the height of perfection, [King Lear] is a very bad, carelessly composed production, . . . can not evoke among us anything but aversion and weariness. . . . All his characters speak, not their own, but always one and the same Shakespearian, pretentious, and unnatural language . . . .

Life was transparent, literature opaque. Life was open, literature a closed system. Life was composed of things, literature of words. Life was what it appeared to be: if you were afraid your plane would crash it was about death, if you were trying to get a girl into bed it was about sex. Literature was never about what it appeared to be about, though in the case of the novel cosiderable ingenuity and perception were needed to crack the code of realistic illusion, which was why he had been professionally attracted to the genre (even the dumbest critic understood that Hamlet wasn't about how the guy wanted to kill his uncle, or the Ancient Mariner about cruelty to animals, but it was surprising how many people thought Jane Austen's novels were about finding Mr Right).

Shakespeare's plays do not present easy solutions. The audience has to decide for itself. King Lear is perhaps the most disturbing in this respect. One of the key words of the whole play is 'Nothing'. When King Lear's daughter Cordelia announces that she can say 'Nothing' about her love for her father, the ties of family love fall apart, taking the king from the height of power to the limits of endurance, reduced to 'nothing' but 'a poor bare forked animal'. Here, instead of 'readiness' to accept any challenge, the young Edgar says 'Ripeness is all'. This is a maturity that comes of learning from experience. But, just as the audience begins to see hope in a desperate and violent situation, it learns that things can always get worse: Who is't can say 'I am at the worst?' … The worst is not So long as we can say 'This is the worst.' Shakespeare is exploring and redefining the geography of the human soul, taking his characters and his audience further than any other writer into the depths of human behaviour. The range of his plays covers all the 'form and pressure' of mankind in the modern world. They move from politics to family, from social to personal, from public to private. He imposed no fixed moral, no unalterable code of behaviour. That would come to English society many years after Shakespeare's death, and after the tragic hypothesis of Hamlet was fulfilled in 1649, when the people killed the King and replaced his rule with the Commonwealth. Some critics argue that Shakespeare supported the monarchy and set himself against any revolutionary tendencies. Certainly he is on the side of order and harmony, and his writing reflects a monarchic context rather than the more republican context which replaced the monarchy after 1649. It would be fanciful to see Shakespeare as foretelling the decline of the Stuart monarchy. He was not a political commentator. Rather, he was a psychologically acute observer of humanity who had a unique ability to portray his observations, explorations, and insights in dramatic form, in the richest and most exciting language ever used in the English theatre.

The Turn of the Screw” has been turned and returned through a large number of critical approaches, perhaps only rivaled in this regard by Hamlet. The spectrum of critical approaches ranges from Freudian, to feminist, to gay, to materialist, partly because the complexity of the first-person narrative lends itself to analysis and partly because the tale also offers an engaging twist on the traditional genre of the ghost story.

Our age is bewailed as the age of Introversion. Must that needs be evil? We, it seems, are critical; we are embarrassed with second thoughts; we cannot enjoy any thing for hankering to know whereof the pleasure consists; we are lined with eyes; we see with our feet; the time is infected with Hamlet’s unhappiness,— ‘Sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought.’ Is it so bad then? Sight is the last thing to be pitied. Would we be blind? Do we fear lest we should outsee nature and God, and drink truth dry?

In his book Real Presences, George Steiner asks us to "imagine a society in which all talk about the arts, music and literature is prohibited." In such a society there would be no more essays on whether Hamlet was mad or only pretending to be, no reviews of the latest exhibitions or novels, no profiles of writers or artists. There would be no secondary, or parasitic, discussion - let alone tertiary: commentary on commentary. We would have, instead, a "republic for writers and readers" with no cushion of professional opinion-makers to come between creators and audience. While the Sunday papers presently serve as a substitute for the experiencing of the actual exhibition or book, in Steiner's imagined republic the review pages would be turned into listings:catalogues and guides to what is about to open, be published, or be released. What would this republic be like? Would the arts suffer from the obliteration of this ozone of comment? Certainly not, says Steiner, for each performance of a Mahler symphony is also a critique of that symphony. Unlike the reviewer, however, the performer "invests his own being in the process of interpretation." Such interpretation is automatically responsible because the performer is answerable to the work in a way that even the most scrupulous reviewer is not. Although, most obviously, it is not only the case for drama and music; all art is also criticism. This is most clearly so when a writer or composer quotes or reworks material from another writer or composer. All literature, music, and art "embody an expository reflection which they pertain". In other words it is not only in their letters, essays, or conversation that writers like Henry James reveal themselves also to be the best critics; rather, The Portrait of a Lady is itself, among other things, a commentary on and a critique of Middlemarch. "The best readings of art are art." No sooner has Steiner summoned this imaginary republic into existence than he sighs, "The fantasy I have sketched is only that." Well, it is not. It is a real place and for much of the century it has provided a global home for millions of people. It is a republic with a simple name: jazz.

What, then, can Shakespearean tragedy, on this brief view, tell us about human time in an eternal world? It offers imagery of crisis, of futures equivocally offered, by prediction and by action, as actualities; as a confrontation of human time with other orders, and the disastrous attempt to impose limited designs upon the time of the world. What emerges from Hamlet is--after much futile, illusory action--the need of patience and readiness. The 'bloody period' of Othello is the end of a life ruined by unseasonable curiosity. The millennial ending of Macbeth, the broken apocalypse of Lear, are false endings, human periods in an eternal world. They are researches into death in an age too late for apocalypse, too critical for prophecy; an age more aware that its fictions are themselves models of the human design on the world. But it was still an age which felt the human need for ends consonant with the past, the kind of end Othello tries to achieve by his final speech; complete, concordant. As usual, Shakespeare allows him his tock; but he will not pretend that the clock does not go forward. The human perpetuity which Spenser set against our imagery of the end is represented here also by the kingly announcements of Malcolm, the election of Fortinbras, the bleak resolution of Edgar. In apocalypse there are two orders of time, and the earthly runs to a stop; the cry of woe to the inhabitants of the earth means the end of their time; henceforth 'time shall be no more.' In tragedy the cry of woe does not end succession; the great crises and ends of human life do not stop time. And if we want them to serve our needs as we stand in the middest we must give them patterns, understood relations as Macbeth calls them, that defy time. The concords of past, present, and future towards which the soul extends itself are out of time, and belong to the duration which was invented for angels when it seemed difficult to deny that the world in which men suffer their ends is dissonant in being eternal. To close that great gap we use fictions of complementarity. They may now be novels or philosophical poems, as they once were tragedies, and before that, angels. What the gap looked like in more modern times, and how more modern men have closed it, is the preoccupation of the second half of this series.

The sin of Book I is at first sight more obscure, but it is particularly significant. We have seen that there appear to be two very important episodes showing the Red-Crosse a prey to Despair. When we find, further, that of the three Paynim Brethren, Sansfoy, Sansloi and Sansjoy, it is the last who is the Red-Crosse's most formidable enemy, we are driven to assume that there is some special significance in this stressing of a tendency to melancholy. Such a tendency is not now regarded as a serious sin, but in mediaeval times melancholy leading to inertia and in extreme cases to suicide was under the name of accidie one of the recognized Deadly Sins. By Elizabeth's day the much less pregnant term Sloth had been substituted in the usual catalogue, and Spenser nowhere uses the word accidie. But the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries were much preoccupied with the subject. They regarded the sufferers from it as at once in a highly dangerous spiritual state and as intensely interesting. It was the favourite pose of fashionable young men. Hamlet is the supreme treatment of it in literature, but most of the dramatists of the day are interested in it. I suggest that the first Book of the original Faerie Queene treated of the sin of accidie.

The character and the play of Hamlet are central to any discussion of Shakespeare's work. Hamlet has been described as melancholic and neurotic, as having an Oedipus complex, as being a failure and indecisive, as well as being a hero, and a perfect Renaissance prince. These judgements serve perhaps only to show how many interpretations of one character may be put forward. 'To be or not to be' is the centre of Hamlet's questioning. Reasons not to go on living outnumber reasons for living. But he goes on living, until he completes his revenge for his father's murder, and becomes 'most royal', the true 'Prince of Denmark' (which is the play's subtitle), in many ways the perfection of Renaissance man. Hamlet's progress is a 'struggle of becoming' - of coming to terms with life, and learning to accept it, with all its drawbacks and challenges. He discusses the problems he faces directly with the audience, in a series of seven soliloquies - of which 'To be or not to be' is the fourth and central one. These seven steps, from the zero-point of a desire not to live, to complete awareness and acceptance (as he says, 'the readiness is all'), give a structure to the play, making the progress all the more tragic, as Hamlet reaches his aim, the perfection of his life, only to die.

[Henry James'] essay's closing lines can either be read neutrally or as a more purposeful wish that this mystery [of Shakespeare's authorship] will one day be resolved by the 'criticism of the future': 'The figured tapestry, the long arras that hides him, is always there ... May it not then be but a question, for the fullness of time, of the finer weapon, the sharper point, the stronger arm, the more extended lunge?' Is Shakespeare hinting here that one day critics will hit upon another, more suitable candidate, identify the individual in whom the man and artist converge and are 'one'? If so, his choice of metaphor - recalling Hamlet's lunge at the arras in the closet scene - is fortunate. Could James have forgotten that the sharp point of Hamlet's weapon finds the wrong man?

Faustian man has nothing more to hope for in anything pertaining to the grand style of Life. Something has come to an end. The Northern soul has exhausted its inner possibilities, and of the dynamic force and insistence that had expressed itself in world-historical visions of the future — visions of millennial scope — nothing remains but the mere pressure, the passion yearning to create, the form without the content. This soul was Will and nothing but Will. It needed an aim for its Columbus-longing; it had to give its inherent activity at least the illusion of a meaning and an object. And so the keener critic will find a trace of Hjalmar Ekdal in all modernity, even its highest phenomena. Ibsen called it the lie of life. There is something of this lie in the entire intellect of the Western Civilization, so far as this applies itself to the future of religion, of art or of philosophy, to a social-ethical aim, a Third Kingdom. For deep down beneath it all is the gloomy feeling, not to be repressed, that all this hectic zeal is the effort of a soul that may not and cannot rest to deceive itself. This is the tragic situation — the inversion of the Hamlet motive — that produced Nietzsche's strained conception of a "return," which nobody really believed but he himself clutched fast lest the feeling of a mission should slip out of him. This Life's lie is the foundation of Bayreuth — which would be something whereas Pergamum was something — and a thread of it runs through the entire fabric of Socialism, political, economic and ethical, which forces itself to ignore the annihilating seriousness of its own final implications, so as to keep alive the illusion of the historical necessity of its own existence.

A good way of introducing you to my experience of it will be to tell you the exact point at which anyone else’s criticism of it begins to lose my allegiance. It is a fairly definite point. As soon as I find anyone treating the ghost merely as the means whereby Hamlet learns of his father’s murder—as soon as a critic leaves us with the impression that some other method of disclosure (the finding of a letter or a conversation with a servant) would have done very nearly as well—I part company with that critic. After that, he may be as learned and sensitive as you please; but his outlook on literature is so remote from mine that he can teach me nothing. Hamlet for me is no more separable from his ghost than Macbeth from his witches, Una from her lion, or Dick Whittington from his cat. The Hamlet formula, so to speak, is not ‘a man who has to avenge his father’ but ‘a man who has been given a task by a ghost’. Everything else about him is less important than that. If the play did not begin with the cold and darkness and sickening suspense of the ghost scenes it would be a radically different play. If, on the other hand, only the first act had survived, we should have a very tolerable notion of the play’s peculiar quality. I

In July 1697 the matter went to three arbitrators, including two former witchcraft judges. To them the Nurse family complained that Parris led his congregants into “dangerous errors, and preached such scandalous immoralities” that he ought be dismissed from his profession. He had stifled some accusations while encouraging others. He had sworn to falsehoods. Both sides reached to hyperbole; as his critics saw it, Parris had “been the beginner and procurer of the sorest afflictions, not to this village only, but to this whole country, that did ever befall them.” The arbitrators ruled against him. Parris returned to Stow, the remote hamlet where he had preached earlier. Immediately embroiled

In his Principles of Psychology, James already criticized what he took to be the artificial and deeply misleading traditional empiricist accounts of experience. Experience does not consist of discrete atomic units that simply follow or are associated with each other. This is an intellectualist abstraction of philosophers, not an account of concrete experience as it is lived. James emphasizes the dynamic, flowing quality of the “stream of experience” – what he sometimes called the “muchness” and pluralistic variety of experience. Contrary to Hume and those influenced by him, James argued that we experience “relations,” “continuity,” and “connections” directly. We experience activity – its tensions, resistances, and tendencies. We feel “the tendency, the obstacle, the will, the strain, the triumph, or the passive giving up, just as [we feel] the time, the space, the swiftness or intensity, the movement, the weight and color, the pain and pleasure, the complexity, or whatever remaining characters the situation may involve” (James 1997, p. 282). He does not denigrate or underestimate the importance of our conceptual activity, but concepts are never quite adequate to capture the concreteness of experience. To say this is not to claim that there is something about experience that is in principle knowable, but that we cannot know. Rather, it is to affirm that there is more to experience than knowing. James criticizes the epistemological prejudice, which assumes that the only or primary role that experience plays in our lives is to provide us with knowledge. Paraphrasing Hamlet, James might well have said to his fellow philosophers: “There are more things in experience than are dreamt of in your philosophy.

When the line is delivered, Hamlet is gazing on Yorrick's skull, casually unearthed by the gravedigger. Yorrick's fame grew out of being the line which accompanied what is perhaps the single most recognizable iconic image in literature: a man in black, considering a human skull. Show some form of that picture to most moderately educated people and plenty who aren't and they'll know that the man is Hamlet. Such things don't find their way into the popular consciousness by accident and trivial though the line may sound, it speaks to the heart of the play: a man compelled by circumstances outside of his control to confront his own mortality.

All Shakespeare’s work can be regarded as a criticism of action and of the agent-principle: though it is only in Hamlet that this mood becomes explicit, and as it were personal. This incomparable observer of the life around him “had his opinions” of what he saw, although he had no gesture of rebellion against individual phases of it, but innumerable gestures against life itself. And, if against life itself, then against action itself. It was the universality or impersonal all-inclusiveness of this rebellion that makes him a “universal” artist, as he is often called.

Ten Words to Poetry Critics Everywhere [10w] "If you can't write Hamlet, don't call Shakespeare a hack.

Kill me dead” is a tautology that worries some critics, but Dylan, before writing his own version, sang it early (and later) in his career as part of ‘Cocaine Blues’. It appears straight, as those three words, in Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus and in variants elsewhere, most notably, given Dylan’s frequent recourse to that seminal play, in Hamlet.1 We will be looking at the language of Dylan’s Tempest in detail in the final chapter, but it is fitting here to quote one of Anne Margaret Daniel’s notes on ‘Early Roman Kings’: “That ‘Gonna shake ’em all down’ sounds contemporary, or at least twentieth century; automatically, we associate shakedown with the Grateful Dead, yet, it too is Shakespeare’s. Merriam-Webster lists its first use in 1859, but Shakespeare riffed on it in Coriolanus.

Shakespeare’s Hamlet was preceded by an earlier Hamlet play, unfortunately now lost and its author unknown (though some believe it was the hazy genius Thomas Kyd), leaving us to guess how much his version owed to the original. His King Lear was similarly inspired by an earlier King Leir. His Most Excellent and Lamentable Tragedy of Romeo and Juliet (to give it its formal original title) was freely based on the poem The Tragicall History of Romeus and Juliet by a promising young talent named Arthur Brooke, who wrote it in 1562 and then unfortunately drowned. Brooke in turn had taken the story from an Italian named Matteo Bandello. As You Like It was borrowed quite transparently from a work called Rosalynde, by Thomas Lodge, and The Winter’s Tale is likewise a reworking of Pandosto, a forgotten novel by Shakespeare’s bitter critic Robert Greene.

Bohemian Rhapsody has the tortured individual at its centre struggling with a dilemma involving murder and a parent—a conflict structurally similar to Hamlet’s agony in William Shakespeare's 'To be or not to be' soliloquy. That timeless and universal link confirms its power: no matter how sophisticated we become or imagine ourselves to be, we still struggle with the primal problems life throws at us. Whereas Hamlet internally debates the merits of life and death as he teeters on the tightrope between those all-or-nothing points, Freddie Mercury's protagonist sings: 'I don't want to die, I sometimes wish I'd never been born at all!

If I could rewrite the ending of any Shakespeare play, it would definitely be the finale of Romeo and Juliet. That dénouement just seems so far-fetched, over-complicated, and forced into a tragedy. It would have worked much better with a happier ending. While it is realistic that young lovers might take their own lives because of relentless interference and persecution, the Tragic Ex Machina (a sudden, unearned disastrous intervention) mechanism chosen was neither believable nor apt. The Bard perfected the character-driven tragic architecture later in Hamlet and King Lear.