Hamlet (Vol. 44) | Philip Edwards (essay date 1985)
Philip Edwards (essay date 1985)
SOURCE: "The Play and the Critics," "The Action of the Play," and "Hamlet and the Actors," in Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, edited by Philip Edwards, Cambridge University Press, 1985, pp. 32-61.
[In the following excerpt, Edwards surveys important critical interpretations of Hamlet and offers his own critical review of the play's events, characters, and themes.]
The Play and the Critics
It is probably safe to say that in the world's literature no single work has been so extensively written about as Hamlet Prince of Denmark. There are numerous histories, summaries and analyses of this great body of criticism, or parts of it, and numerous anthologies give selections from it. . . . What follows here is not an attempt to provide, even in the most summary form, a history of Hamlet criticism. It is a personal graph, linking together some moments in the history of the interpretation of...
[The entire page is 14218 words long]
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