THE PLAY AS A WHOLE Flashcards
“The Mona . . . ”
“The Mona Lisa of literature.”
- T. S Elliot
“Hamlet is like a . . . ”
“Hamlet is like a sponge. Unless produced in a stylized or antiquarian fashion, it immediately absorbs all the problems of our time. It is the strangest play ever written; by its very imperfections.”
- Jan Knott
“So far from . . . ”
“So far from being Shakespeare’s masterpiece, the play is most certainly an artistic failure…he has left in it superfluous and inconsistent scene s which even hasty revision should have noticed.”
- T. S Elliot
“The structure of Hamlet . . .”
“The structure of Hamlet, then, suggests that we should treat it as religious drama, and when we do, it certainly does not lose either in significance of in artistic integrity.”
- T. S Elliot
The play is . . .
The play is endlessly “problematic”.
- T.S Elliot
See’s Hamlet as a . . .
See’s Hamlet as a political play in which Hamlet, Laertes, Fortinbras and Ophelia play parts “imposed on them from outside.”
- Jan Knott
Although the play is filled with tragedy and horror . . .
Although the play is filled with tragedy and horror, many of the scenes are extremely funny, and indeed for much of the action, Hamlet and Claudius stalk each other like two murderous clowns attempting to achieve strategic advantage over the other.
-Michael D Bristol: Carnival and the Carnivalesque in Hamlet.
It is a device whereby the . . .
It is a device whereby the play comments on itself, drawing attention to the literal circumstance of its own production.
- Catharine Jo Dixon
The Elizabethan and Jacobean eras were . . .
The Elizabethan and Jacobean eras were an intensively theatrical time . . . in the way people ‘dressed-up’ to indicate their station and class, politics at court.
- Catharine Jo Dixon
