Hamlet

Shakespeare: The Critical Tradition, Volume 2

Marvin W. Hunt

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
• Year: 2025
• eBook ISBN: 9781350287389
• Edition: 0
• Subtopic: Shakespeare Drama

A companion to volume 1, Hamlet: Shakespeare: The Critical Tradition, Volume 2 presents key critical accounts of Hamlet from 1885-1964. The volume offers, in separate sections, both critical opinions about the play across the centuries and an evaluation of their positions within and their impact on the reception of the play. The volume features criticism from leading literary figures, such as Sigmund Freud, T.S. Eliot, A.C. Bradley, Helena Faucit Saville and Matthew Arnold. The chronological arrangement of the text-excerpts engages the readers in a direct and unbiased dialogue, whereas the introduction offers a critical evaluation from a current stance, including modern theories and methods. The volume makes a major contribution to our understanding of the play and of the traditions of Shakespearean criticism surrounding it as they have developed from century to century.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title Page
• Dedication
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Contents
• General editor’s preface
• General editor’s preface to the revised series
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Georg Gottfried Gervinus, Germany is Hamlet, 1872
• 2 Jacob Feis, Hamlet’s rejection of Montaigne, 1884
• 3 Helena Faucit Saville, Lady Martin, on Ophelia, 1885
• 4 George MacDonald, The First Folio Hamlet, 1885
• 5 Frederick Gard Fleay, Hamlet as text, 1886
• 6 Hiram Corson, on Hamlet’s mental condition, 1889
• 7 Laurence Hutton, Hamlets in New York, 1889
• 8 W. J. Craig, from the (Oxford) Complete Works, 1891
• 9 Thomas Duff Barnett, a Hamlet primer, 1893
• 10 John Corbin, the comic effects of Hamlet’s mad scenes, 1895
• 11 Frederick Samuel Boas, Hamlet contextualized, 1896
• 12 Richard Grant White, the modernization of Hamlet, 1896
• 13 George Bernard Shaw, Irving vs Robertson, 1906
• 14 Walter Calvert, panegyric souvenirs, 1897
• 15 Georg Brandes, Hamlet’s history, 1898
• 16 Henry Maximillian (‘Max’) Beerbohm, on Sarah Bernhardt’s Hamlet, 1899
• 17 Sigmund Freud, the Oedipal complex, 1899
• 18 Scott Clemen, Hamlet at century’s end, 1900
• 19 George Santayana, Hamlet as palimpsest, 1900
• 20 Sidney Lee, Shakespeare hagiography, 1898
• 21 Matthew Arnold, a critique of Jacob Feis, 1903
• 22 H. R. D. Anders, Shakespeare’s sources, 1904
• 23 A. C. Bradley, Hamlet and melancholy, 1904
• 24 Albert H. Tolman, Hamlet’s delay, 1904
• 25 Austin Brereton, Henry Irving’s Hamlet, 1905
• 26 Robert Bridges, Shakespeare and his audience, 1907
• 27 Anna Akhmatova, ‘Reading Hamlet’, 1909
• 28 W. W. Greg, ‘The Hamlet Quartos, 1603, 1604’, 1910
• 29 Gilbert Murray, Hamlet and Orestes, 1914
• 30 W. W. Greg, schizophrenic Hamlet? 1917
• 31 John Dover Wilson, the invention of ‘Voltemar’, 1918
• 32 J. M. Robertson, the question of pessimism, 1919
• 33 G. F. Bradby, Hamlet’s problems, 1920
• 34 T. S. Eliot, Hamlet as artistic failure, 1919
• 35 William Poel, the First Quarto Hamlet, an Elizabethan actor’s emendation, 1922
• 36 Lily B. Campbell, sanguine, passion and grief, 2009
• 37 Harley Granville-Barker, Shakespeare, Hamlet and the ‘workplace of the theatre’, 1930
• 38 G. Wilson Knight, ‘To be or not to be’, 1930
• 39 Hardin Craig, Shakespeare’s dramatic development, 1931
• 40 A. J. A Waldock, Shakespeare’s critical method, 1931
• 41 John Dover Wilson, the road to Elsinore, 1951
• 42 Fredson Bowers, the transmission of Hamlet, 1940
• 43 Ernest Jones, Freud, repression and the unconscious, 1949
• 44 Maynard Mack, Hamlet’s imaginative world, 1994
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Permissions
• Index
• Copyright