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We've been rehearsing a classic from antiquity, Green Eggs and Hamlet, the story of a young prince of Denmark who goes mad, drowns his girlfriend, and in his remorse, forces spoiled breakfast on all whom he meets.
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Christopher Moore (Fool)
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You can't just skip the boring parts."
"Of course I can skip the boring parts."
"How do you know they're boring if you don't read them?"
"I can tell."
"Then you can't say you've read the whole play."
"I think I can live a happy life, Meryl Lee, even if I don't read the boring parts of The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark."
"Who knows?" she said. "Maybe you can't.
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Gary D. Schmidt (The Wednesday Wars: A Newbery Honor Award Winner)
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Alone in my chamber, I fairly trembled with excitement. How could it be that I, who had never been kissed before, had kissed the Prince of Denmark himself, not once but many times? Did he really speak to me of love? It was beyond belief that I, humble Ophelia, should be wooed by Prince Hamlet. Surely I had imagined it.
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Lisa M. Klein (Ophelia)
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I’ve never fully trusted people who don’t like dogs. They rarely turn out well.
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A.J. Hartley (Hamlet, Prince of Denmark)
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I think something must happen to you when you get into eight grade. Like the Doug Swieteck's Brother Gene switches on and you become a jerk.
Which may have been Hamlet, Prince of Denmark's problem, who, besides having a name that makes him sound like a breakfast special at Sunnyside Morning Restaurant--something between a ham slice and a three-egg omelet--didn't have the smarts to figure out that when someone takes the trouble to come back from beyond the grave to tell you that he's been murdered, it's probably behooveful to pay attention--which is the adjectival form.
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Gary D. Schmidt (The Wednesday Wars: A Newbery Honor Award Winner)
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In order to deceive others, it is necessary also to deceive oneself. The actor playing Hamlet must indeed believe that he is the Prince of Denmark, though when he leaves the stage he will usually remember who he really is. On the other hand, when someone's entire life is based on pretense, they will seldom if ever return to reality. That is the secret of successful politicians, evangelists and confidence tricksters—they believe that they are telling the truth, even when they know that they have faked the evidence. Sincerity, my dear Julia, is a quality not to be trusted.
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Sarah Caudwell (The Sibyl in Her Grave (Hilary Tamar, #4))
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In his twenties, John Bridgens most identified with Hamlet. The strangely aging Prince of Denmark—Bridgens was quite sure that the boy Hamlet had magically aged over a few theatrical weeks to a man who was, at the very least, in his thirties by Act V—had been suspended between thought and deed, between motive and action, frozen by a consciousness so astute and unrelenting that it made him think about everything, even thought itself.
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Dan Simmons (The Terror)
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Art frees us, illusorily, from the squalor of being. While feeling the wrongs and sufferings endured by Hamlet, prince of Denmark, we don’t feel our own, which are vile because they’re ours and vile because they’re vile.
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Fernando Pessoa (The Book of Disquiet)
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A stupid question,” said Badmouth King on the left. “Nothing at all to the point. Off we go into the wild blue yonder. Oh well, was there ever an action hero who was an intellectual?” “Prince Hamlet of Denmark,” said Referee King quietly from behind them. “But since he’s the only one who comes immediately to mind, he may be no more than the exception that proves the rule.
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Stephen King (The Dark Tower (The Dark Tower, #7))
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Hãy thành thật với chính mình.
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William Shakespeare (Hamlet, Prince Of Denmark: The New Cambridge Shakespeare (illustrated))
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Joffy," said Joffy, "brother of Thursday."
"Hamlet", said Hamlet,"Prince of Denmark
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Jasper Fforde
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Clearly Hamlet wasn’t just a fictional Prince of Denmark but also something of an alpha dodo.
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Anonymous
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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.
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Ronald Carter (The Routledge History of Literature in English: Britain and Ireland)
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I am Emir Dynamite!" he shouted, swaying on top of the tall camelback. "If within two days we don't get any decent food, I'll incite the tribes to revolt! I swear! I will appoint myself the Prophet's representative and declare holy war, jihad. On Denmark, for example. Why did the Danes torment their Prince Hamlet? Considering the current political situation, a casus beli like this would satisfy even the League of Nations. No, seriously, I'll buy a million worth of rifles from the British--they love to sell firearms to the tribes--and onward to Denmark. Germany will let us through--in lieu of war reparations. Imagine the tribes invading Copenhagen! I'll lead the charge on a white camel.
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Ilya Ilf (Золотой теленок)
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Let me sum up: Hamlet’s the prince of Denmark. His dad, the king, died and though it’s only been two months, his mom married his dad’s brother, Claudius. Now Claudius is king. Hamlet thinks that’s whack.” “Sounds just like Shakespeare.” “One night, three guards see a ghost and they tell Ham. Ham sees it too. It’s Dad. Dad says Claudius poured poison in his ear and killed him. Hamlet’s mind is blown. But hold up, he’s been dating Ophelia, daughter of Polonius. Polonius is Claudius’ right-hand man. Polonius tells Ophelia that Hamlet’s losing his marbles and she has to break up with him. “Ophelia and Hamlet are in love but, like, the fucking patriarchy, right? She caves to her dad’s pressure and agrees to break up with him. Ham’s devastated and rants that all women are traitorous bitches, and Ophelia should go to a nunnery and never reproduce. Then Ham confronts his mom while Polonius eavesdrops and—whoops!—Ham kills Polonius. “Ophelia, having lost her man and her dad, proceeds to lose her mind. She goes nuts, sings a bunch of dirty, sexy-time songs, and drowns herself in the river. Then a bunch of other shit happens until pretty much everyone else in the cast is dead. Curtain.
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Emma Scott (In Harmony)
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Their father, Polonius, was in a ‘have a go’ mood and joined in. He also made changes, and together they renamed it: The Tragedy of the Very Witty and Not Remotely Boring Polonius, Father of the Noble Laertes, Who Avenges His Fair Sister, Ophelia, Driven Mad by the Callous, Murderous and Outrageously Disrespectful Hamlet, Prince of Denmark.” “What was it like?” “With Polonius? Very . . . wordy.
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Jasper Fforde (A Thursday Next Digital Collection: Novels 1-5 (Thursday Next, #1-5))
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By this edition of HAMLET I hope to help the student of Shakspere to understand the play—and first of all Hamlet himself, whose spiritual and moral nature are the real material of the tragedy, to
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George MacDonald (The Tragedie of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark A Study with the Text of the Folio of 1623)
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And so the Scots grew restless, moaning all the time as only they could.
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A.J. Hartley (Hamlet, Prince of Denmark)
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If you wanted reflections on the nature of the universe and your place in it, you should have stayed in school. You want fart noises and cock jokes, I’m your man.
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A.J. Hartley (Hamlet, Prince of Denmark)
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What kind of love demands the life of another? A child at that?”
“Danish love, my sweet. Can’t you smell it?
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A.J. Hartley (Hamlet, Prince of Denmark)
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Where on earth do you get a rose in Elsinore in the middle of winter?” “Don’t you want it?” She took the flower from him, kissed his cheek. No bristles. No beard. A clean-shaven man with a kind and amiable face. Scheming. She didn’t doubt it. But he was a diplomat by training. It was only to be expected. And if he’d lacked those skills perhaps neither of them would have managed Old Hamlet’s death, the marriage, the succession so easily.
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A.J. Hartley (Hamlet, Prince of Denmark)
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The prince put the dagger on the table. “Sorry.”
Yorick bent forward and looked up into his eyes. “Don’t forget our respective places here. I’m your clown. Your plaything. Your toy. Scarcely human. No need to apologise.
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A.J. Hartley (Hamlet, Prince of Denmark)
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Suicide was a sin. It would condemn her for eternity. But so was murder, even a just one sought out of righteous grief.
The revenger always dug two graves, they said. One for his victim. One for himself. She’d never understood that old saying till now.
Either way she was dead.
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A.J. Hartley (Hamlet, Prince of Denmark)
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Content,” Guildenstern agreed. “One aspires to happiness, but not too much since one would not wish to be disappointed.
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A.J. Hartley (Hamlet, Prince of Denmark)
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Version of Hamlet in which there appear on the ramparts two ghosts, the true ghost and the false ghost. Each ghost speaks his lines simultaneously with the other, the true ghost saying the opposite of what the false ghost proclaims. When the prince asks “Murder?” it is unclear to which ghost he is responding. Throughout the remainder of the play, as Hamlet vacillates and kills, it is impossible to know which ghost’s command he has heard and is carrying out.
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James Tadd Adcox (Denmark: Variations)
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Something smelled rotten in Denmark. The odor lilted more rank than the slimy cabbage leaves and maggot-boiling mutton discarded in a heap behind the royal kitchen, or more than the moldy cheesed breath of Orrick, the tavern owner in the village, when he blasted a laugh between the yellow posts of his teeth. The putrid aroma drifted on the wind like the blasts of winter, permeating the stone walls of Elsinore Castle in a hard, cold, bitter wetness, and growing along the dark corridors, spreading and eating away at the peace of the entire Kingdom and her inhabitants. - Prince of Sorrows
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D.K. Marley
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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.
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A.J. Hartley (Hamlet, Prince of Denmark)
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To be, or not to be, that is the Question:
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George MacDonald (The Tragedie of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark A Study with the Text of the Folio of 1623)