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 ...

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...

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...