The World of Hamlet

Extract

It is a strange fact that although Hamlet has spoken with unique force to the most diverse audiences for over three centuries, and has been so incorporated into our lives that it is, as the joke goes, a patchwork of quotations, yet the majority of contemporary critics agree with T. S. Eliot in finding it essentially incoherent. Mr. Eliot, says, “Here Shakespeare tackled a problem that was too much for him… Nothing that [he] can do with the plot can express Hamlet for him.” Another critic concurs: “The spirit of the tragedy is … imperfect in its clarity of conception“; and another: “The dramatist never succeeded in finding a dramatic form that could completely express his idea“; another: “What is seen is a series of pictures, vivid, brief, isolated“; another: “No play, doubtless, is so ill constructed … and all efforts to reduce it to unity fail.”