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The latter portion of the essay is dedicated to Eliot's criticism of Hamlet based on his concept of the objective correlative. He begins by arguing that the greatest contributor to the play's failure is Shakespeare's inability to express Hamlet's emotion in his surroundings and the audience's resultant inability to localize that emotion.
Eliot famously called Hamlet "an artistic failure", and criticized the play as analogous to the Mona Lisa, in that both were overly enigmatic. Eliot targeted Hamlet's disgust with his mother as lacking an "objective correlative"; viz., his feelings were excessive in the context of the play.
Eliot uses Lady Macbeth's state of mind as an example of the successful objective correlative: "The artistic 'inevitability' lies in this complete adequacy of the external to the emotion….", as a contrast to Hamlet. According to Eliot, the feelings of Hamlet are not sufficiently supported by the story and the other characters surrounding him.
During the Victorian era, Quillian argues, there was an "enormous and positive hold that Hamlet exerted on the literary imagination." [2] This was followed by a "shift in perception" [3] during the period of Modernism (c. 1911–1922) when T. S. Eliot and James Joyce condemned the play as a "failure."
In this analysis, the essence of Hamlet is the central character's changed perception of his mother as a whore because of her failure to remain faithful to Old Hamlet. In consequence, Hamlet loses his faith in all women, treating Ophelia as if she too were a whore and dishonest with Hamlet.
Author Molly Booth has written a young adult historical fiction novel, Saving Hamlet, about a teenage girl who time travels back to the original production of Hamlet at Shakespeare's Globe Theatre in London, 1601. The book has a focus on Ophelia's role, and how the sexism from Shakespeare's era translates to sexism in modern society for young ...
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Comparison of the "To be, or not to be" speech in the first three editions of Hamlet, showing the varying quality of the text in the Bad Quarto, the Good Quarto, and the First Folio. "To be, or not to be" is a speech given by Prince Hamlet in the so-called "nunnery scene" of William Shakespeare's play Hamlet (Act 3, Scene 1).