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

Our critical perspectives thus far have taken us to 1945 - which you may conceive of as a significant year in the twentieth century. Now it is time to explore some more contemporary criticism in the second half of the twentieth century, and right up to today. I have included a list below to get you started - it is by no means exhaustive. (There are even some women on the list who have some opinions. Just saying.) The idea is to pick one and read a whole essay -  rather than just a few paragraphs as we have done up until now - but then to do that selective job of identifying a few hundred words to share. And, of course, you aren't limited to these names if you come across something interesting as you are searching. Harold Goddard Harry Levin L. C. Knight Carolyn Gold Heilbrun Michael Long Helen Gardner Patrick Crutwell Marilyn French Leonard Tennenhouse Janet Adelman Elaine Showalter David P Gontar Harold Bloom Happy reading!

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 inadequ...

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 ...

Double whammy today: not one, but two extracts from the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834), best known for the Rime of the Ancient Mariner and Kubla Khan  - which the online Encyclopedia Britannica labels 'two of the greatest poems in English literature'. He was a mover and shaker within the Romantic movement, and good mates with Wordsworth. It is probably worth reading a little more about the Romantics before you move on, since some of the ideology is reflected here in Coleridge's words. The British Library is a good place to start. S. T. COLERIDGE: from Lectures on Shakespeare , 1818 IN Hamlet he [Shakespeare] seems to have wished to exemplify the moral necessity of a due balance between our attention to the objects of our senses, and our meditation on the workings of our minds, - equilibrium between the real and the imaginary worlds. In Hamlet this balance is disturbed: his thoughts, and the images of his fancy, are far more vivid than his actual perce...

Fair 'catapulting' forward to the nineteenth century now as we meet William Hazlitt (1778-1830), probably best known for his essays, and hobnobbing with the Romantic poets like Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats and Shelley - and not his spelling of 'Shakespeare'. He is also considered to be the first great English theatre critic. The extract below comes from Characters of Shakespear's Plays , published in 1817. Hamlet is a name; his speeches and sayings but the idle coinage of the poet's brain. What then, are they not real? They are as real as our own thoughts. Their reality is in the reader's mind. It is we who are Hamlet. This play has a prophetic truth, which is above that of history. Whoever has become thoughtful and melancholy through his own mishaps or those of others; whoever has borne about with him the clouded brow of reflection, and thought himself 'too much i' th' sun'; whoever has seen the golden lamp of day dimmed by envious...

If nothing else, our foray into criticism of Hamlet is providing us with a who's who of literary greats in Europe. Next up is Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832), widely considered to be Germany's greatest literary figure - and clearly a man who knew a thing or two about sporting a frock coat, judging by his picture. You may have come across him already as he is also credited with writing the first Bildungsroman in Willhelm Meister's Apprenticeship .  By the 1740s, Shakespeare's work had begun to be translated into German, and, by the end of the eighteenth century, had achieved great popularity and influence in Germany. In  Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship  the protagonist, Wilhelm sets out on his travels after being disillusioned in love - and is introduced to the works of Shakespeare by the character Jarno before playing the lead role in a theatrical production of Hamlet. Much discussion of Shakespeare's work takes place within the dialogue of t...

It's not surprising that Shakespeare tops the league as the most quoted Englishman of all time; nor that  Hamlet is  the most often quoted of his plays. But Samuel Johnson, as well as being recognised amongst the most highly regarded literary figures in the eighteenth century, is regularly credited as being the second most-quoted after Shakespeare. And of course, most famous for compiling the first dictionary of the English Language in 1755. You can find out more about him here . Aside from being a handsome fellow, poet, lexicographer, essayist, and a big list of other things, he was a literary critic who wrote this about Hamlet: SAMUEL JOHNSON: from his edition of Shakespeare's plays, 1765 IF the dramas of Shakespeare were to be characterised, each by the particular excellence which distinguishes it from the rest, we must allow to the tragedy of Hamlet the praise of variety. The incidents are so numerous, that the argument of the play would make a long tale. The ...

Over the next few weeks we are going to consider some different critical perspectives of Hamlet . First, it is worth considering why interpretation of the same words on the page and stage have come to be viewed so differently across the ages. There is a good explanation in one of my favourite books on poetry: ‘ Different historical periods have made very different assumptions about what literature is and have consequently come up with startlingly different accounts of the ‘same’ texts .. . historical pluralism can be graphically illustrated by the history of critical interpretations of a text such as Hamlet . In the four-hundred year period since it was written, critics and theatre producers have tried to solve the puzzle of Hamlet and have come up with a huge range of differering ‘solutions’. Each period has viewed the play differently, and critics within each period have disagreed over it. The actual text of the play - the words on the page or the stage - clearl...