Though this be madness, yet there is method in't

George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950) is best known as a dramatist. Born in Dublin, he came to London in 1876, establishing himself as a music and theatre critic (spending three years writing for the London newspaper Saturday Review) . He was also a prominent member of the Fabian Society (a socialist organisation with a commitment to social justice and a belief in the progressive improvement of society through political reform).   Pygmalion (1912) is probably his best known play. Spoiler: He's not a fan. GEORGE BERNARD SHAW: from Postscript (1945) to 'Back to Methuselah', 1921 HE took up an old play about the ghost of a murdered king who haunted his son crying for revenge, with comic relief provided by the son pretending to be that popular curiosity and laughing- stock, a village idiot. Shakespeare, transfiguring this into a tragedy on the ancient Athenian level, could not have been quite unconscious of the evolutionary stride he was taking. But he did not see his way

We've already met TS Eliot (1888 – 1965) - in the first critical essay that I gave out after we had read the opening scene. Now would be a good time to return to that essay, and make a kind of 'double entry' for this critic.  Thomas Stearns Eliot won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1748, and is considered one of the giants of modern literature. He is best known as a poet, famous for 'The Waste Land' and 'The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock'  but was also a literary critic, dramatist, and editor and publisher. He was born in St. Louis, Missouri but relocated to England in 1914 at the age of 25. He was a contemporary of Virginia Woolf, and they were friends for more than twenty years. Here they are together, probably having a good old chinwag about Modernism, or, perhaps, the price of tea. T. S. ELIOT: from 'Hamlet' 1919 Few critics have ever admitted that Hamlet the play is the primary problem, and Hamlet the character only secondary. And Hamlet th

Now we reach the twentieth century in our journey into changing interpretations of Hamlet over time. A C Bradley (1851-1935) - 'Andrew Cecil', in case you were wondering - was known as a Shakespearian scholar and literary critic. He wrote this: He was another Oxford graduate who held the Professor of Poetry role there between 1901 and 1906.  His psychological approach to the analysis of Shakespeare’s characters is considered to anticipate post-Freudian criticism. In this extract we return to the frequently discussed idea of Hamlet's inaction, but with some psychological insight and explanation. A. C. BRADLEY: from Shakespearean Tragedy , 1904 Let me try to show now, briefly, how much this melancholy accounts for. It accounts for the main fact, Hamlet's inaction. For the immediate cause of that is simply that his habitual feeling is one of disgust at life and everything in it, himself included, - a disgust which varies in intensity, rising at times into a longing for de

The Victorian poet Algernon Charles Swinburne (1837-1909) was educated at Eton and Oxford, was friendly with the Rossettis, and even lived with Dante Gabriel Rosetti at one time; certainly part of the of the Pre-Raphaelite circle.   He might offer a contradictory perspective to some of the earlier ideas we have seen on  Hamlet .  A. C. Swinburne: from 'A Study of Shakespeare' 1880 ... it should be plain to any reader that the signal characteristic of Hamlet's inmost nature is by no means irresolution or hesitation or any form of weakness, but rather the strong conflux of contending forces. That during four whole acts Hamlet cannot or does not make up his mind to any direct and deliberate action against his uncle is true enough; true, also, we may say, that Hamlet had somewhat more of mind than another man to make up, and might properly want somewhat more time than might another man to do it in; but not, I venture to say in spite of Goethe, through innate inadequacy to

I always like it when a man is introduced in reference to his more famous partner (though sadly it usually happens the other way round.) In this case, George Henry Lewes (1817-1878) is actually better known for being the partner or 'companion' of Mary Ann Evans - herself better known as George Eliot. By the time Eliot was writing, some female authors were  being published under their own names but  she chose to escape the stereotypes surrounding women's writing and its supposed limitations by choosing a male-sounding name. She also wished to have her fiction judged separately from her writing as an editor and literary critic. The magnificent  Middlemarch  is an epic summer holiday read if you need one. Martin Amis, eminent novelist in his own right, describes it as being 'the'  novel of the 19th century ', and a group of international critics decided that it was the best novel of all time  back in 2015. Quite a claim indeed. Anyway, I digress. We're

Matthew Arnold (1822-1888) is probably best known as a poet, and in particular for the poem 'Dover Beach' which you will almost certainly encounter if you go on to study English Literature beyond A Level. The poem explores a nightmarish world from which the old religious certainties have disappeared - and is therefore sometimes celebrated as an early, perhaps the first, example of the 'modern' sensibility; so although he is firmly 'Victorian' in terms of era, he might be considered to anticipate the Modernist movement. He became Professor of Poetry at Oxford in 1857, and was the first figure to be elected to this position who delivered his lectures in English rather than in Latin! As well as this, Arnold was a schools inspector for more than three decades. Partially to blame for the existence of Ofsted, then? Finally, he was also the owner of an impressive set of sideburns. A quick Google search will lead you to a host of images of their changing length and