Twentieth Century
Leo Tolstoy, 1906: "I remember the astonishment I felt when I first read Shakespeare. I expected to receive a powerful esthetic pleasure, but having read, one after the other, works regarded as his best: "King Lear," "Romeo and Juliet," "Hamlet" and "Macbeth," not only did I feel no delight, but I felt an irresistible repulsion and tedium... Several times I read the dramas and the comedies and historical plays, and I invariably underwent the same feelings: repulsion, weariness, and bewilderment. At the present time, before writing this preface, being desirous once more to test myself, I have, as an old man of seventy-five, again read the whole of Shakespeare, including the historical plays, the "Henrys," "Troilus and Cressida," "The Tempest", "Cymbeline", and I have felt, with even greater force, the same feelings,—this time, however, not of bewilderment, but of firm, indubitable conviction that the unquestionable glory of a great genius which Shakespeare enjoys, and which compels writers of our time to imitate him and readers and spectators to discover in him non-existent merits,—thereby distorting their esthetic and ethical understanding,—is a great evil, as is every untruth." Tolstoy on Shakespeare.
D. H. Lawrence, 1928: "When I read Shakespeare I am struck with wonder / that such trivial people should muse and thunder / in such lovely language . . . How boring, how small Shakespeare's people are! / Yet the language so lovely! like the dyes from gas-tar." "When I Read Shakespeare" in The Complete Poems of D. H. Lawrence.
Sigmund Freud, 1930: "Incidentally, in this meantime, I stopped to believe that the author of Shakespeare's works was the man of Stratford." (Freud supported the theory that the works attributed to Shakespeare were written by Edward de Vere, the Earl of Oxford, and that this discovery help in better interpretation of his sonnets) (Outline of Psychoanalysis, 1940/1987: 220). Note added in The Interpretation of Dreams (1900) – Freud, 1900/1987: 260
Freud, 1939: "It is well known that the genius is incomprehensible and irresponsible; so we should bring it to the dance as a full explanation to what the other solution has failed. The same consideration applies also to the remarkable case of William Shakespeare of Stratford." Moses and Monotheism, 1939/1987: 83
W. H. Auden, 1947: "There is a continual process of simplification in Shakespeare's plays. What is he up to? He is holding the mirror up to nature. In the early minor sonnets he talks about his works outlasting time. But increasingly he suggests, as Theseus does in A Midsummer Night's Dream, that "The best in this kind are but shadows" (V.i.214), that art is rather a bore. . . . I find Shakespeare particularly appealing in his attitude towards his work. There's something a little irritating in the determination of the very greatest artists, like Dante, Joyce, Milton, to create masterpieces and to think themselves important. To be able to devote one's life to art without forgetting that art is frivolous is a tremendous achievement of personal character. Shakespeare never takes himself too seriously." Lectures on Shakespeare (ed. by Arthur Kirsch)
T. S. Eliot: "Dante and Shakespeare divide the modern world between them, there is no third."
T. S. Eliot, 1922 : "We must simply admit that here Shakespeare tackled a problem which proved too much for him. Why he attempted it at all is an insoluble puzzle; under compulsion of what experience he attempted to express the inexpressibly horrible, we cannot ever know. We need a great many facts in his biography; and we should like to know whether, and when, and after or at the same time as what personal experience, he read Montaigne, II. xii., Apologie de Raimond Sebond. We should have, finally, to know something which is by hypothesis unknowable, for we assume it to be an experience which, in the manner indicated, exceeded the facts. We should have to understand things which Shakespeare did not understand himself." Hamlet and His Problems, in The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism.
Otto Maria Carpeaux: "The greatest poet of modern times and - unless the limitations of our critical - of all time."
Allan Bloom, 1964: "Shakespeare devotes great care to establishing the political setting in almost all his plays, and his greatest heroes are rulers who exercise capacities which can only be exercised within civil society. To neglect this is simply to be blinded by the brilliance of one's own prejudices. As soon as one sees this, one cannot help asking what Shakespeare thought about a good regime and a good ruler." on his Shakespeare's Politics (with Harry V. Jaffa).
Kenneth Burke: "Shakespeare found many ingenious ways to make it seem that his greatest plays unfolded of themselves, like a destiny rather than by a technical expert’s scheming. . . . He spontaneously knew how to translate some typical tension or conflict of his society into terms of variously interrelated personalities—and his function as a dramatist was to let that whole complexity act itself out, by endowing each personality with the appropriate ideas, images, attitudes, actions, situations, relationships, and fatality. The true essence of his “beliefs” was thus embodied in the vision of that complexity itself. . . . Perhaps in this sense Shakespeare never wrote the ideal Shakespearean play; but again and again he came close to it. . . . he was the sort of craftsman who, if we believed such-and-such, could make a great play out of such beliefs, and could as easily have made a great play out of the opposite beliefs, if those others were what moved us. For what he believed in above all was the glory of his trade itself, which is to say, the great humaneness of the word . . . so masterfully embodied in Shakespeare’s blithe dramaturgic schemings." Kenneth Burke on Shakespeare
Stephen Booth, 1994: "A good metaphor for … the action of casual, incidental relationships among words and ideas in Shakespeare is patina. Networks of nonsensical relationship act upon speeches and plays the way a patina does upon artwork in metal. They smooth across seams and deny them without obliterating them. Grosser examples of the effect have been noted in literature ever since people started analyzing double plots and noticing echoing situations and spotting thematic common denominators and sustained patterns of imagery." Close Reading Without Readings
Harold Bloom, 1994: "...Shakespeare is the Canon. He sets the standard and the limits of literature." The Western Canon
Read more about this topic: Timeline Of Shakespeare Criticism
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