Prince Hamlet

Famous quotes containing the words prince hamlet, prince and/or hamlet:

    No! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be:
    Am an attendant lord, one that will do
    To swell a progress, start a scene or two,
    Advise the prince.
    —T.S. (Thomas Stearns)

    When Prince William [later King William IV] was at Cork in 1787, an old officer ... dined with him, and happened to say he had been forty years in the service. The Prince with a sneer asked what he had learnt in those forty years. The old gentleman justly offended, said, “Sir, I have learnt, when I am no longer fit to fight, to make as good a retreat as I can” —and walked out of the room.
    Horace Walpole (1717–1797)

    A reader who quarrels with postulates, who dislikes Hamlet because he does not believe that there are ghosts or that people speak in pentameters, clearly has no business in literature. He cannot distinguish fiction from fact, and belongs in the same category as the people who send cheques to radio stations for the relief of suffering heroines in soap operas.
    Northrop Frye (b. 1912)