Critical Responses
According to one critic, Caesar and Pompey "could have been the most interesting" of Chapman's late plays, given the author's deep and long-standing interest in Stoicism; yet the play never gels as a dramatic work. "Its historical hurly-burly never achieves full form or meaning; it is ill-related to the three major characters and allows them little room and not much life." Other critics have also been harsh, calling the play "a series of dull moralistic speeches" and "a dull piece of work." A minority view is that the play is "an introspective play with integrity and clarity of meaning." Commentators have also noted that the play has a relationship with the traditional morality plays to the Middle Ages; it even includes a devil.
Read more about this topic: Caesar And Pompey
Famous quotes containing the words critical and/or responses:
“If our entertainment culture seems debased and unsatisfying, the hope is that our children will create something of greater worth. But it is as if we expect them to create out of nothing, like God, for the encouragement of creativity is in the popular mind, opposed to instruction. There is little sense that creativity must grow out of tradition, even when it is critical of that tradition, and children are scarcely being given the materials on which their creativity could work”
—C. John Sommerville (20th century)
“The fantasies inspired by TB in the last century, by cancer now, are responses to a disease thought to be intractable and capricious—that is, a disease not understood—in an era in which medicine’s central premise is that all diseases can be cured.”
—Susan Sontag (b. 1933)