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!

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...

From father to son. Hartley Coleridge (1796-1849) is the eldest son of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who followed in his father's footsteps by becoming a poet (though was also a teacher), and likewise wrote about Hamlet. It is generally accepted that he was not as successful in literary terms, or in life more generally, as his father. Perhaps burdened by the expectation of his famous name, and in the shadow of his father's genius, he is variously described as 'wayward', 'a failure'. 'melancholic' and 'solitary'. HARTLEY COLERIDGE: from Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine , November 1828 Let us, for a moment, put Shakespeare out of the question, and consider Hamlet as a real person, a recently deceased acquaintance. In real life, it is no unusual thing to meet with characters every whit as obscure as that of the Prince of Denmark; men seemingly accomplished for the greatest actions, clear in thought, and dauntless in deed, still meditating mi...

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...

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 ...

Schools closed on Friday afternoon due to the Covid-19 pandemic. Our task of remote education now begins in earnest. We study one of the world’s most famous plays - when theatres around the world have been shut down to prevent the spread of the virus. We live in extraordinary times. Like Horatio at the appearance of Hamlet’s ghost during the opening scene of the drama, ‘it harrows me with fear and wonder’ (I.i.47). It is perhaps inevitable then, as I re-read the text, that images to do with infection surface and resonate more powerfully than they have ever done before; while we collectively experience ‘some strange eruption to our state’ (I.i.72). Even Hamlet’s ‘windy suspiration of forc’d breath’ (I.ii.79)  in his opening exchange with the queen now seems to rattle as an early symptom of coronavirus rather than the more usual interpretation as a criticism of the appearance of grief. And don't get me started on Laertes counselling of Ophelia, that ‘in the morn...