Yes, it's annoying that Hamlet doesn't kill his stepfather ten minutes into the play, but if he did kill his stepfather ten minutes into the play, there wouldn't be a play. He has to be annoying, if you will, and not do what would be the thing to do.
Richard III is not likeable. Macbeth is not likeable. Hamlet is not likeable. And yet you can't take your eyes off them. I'm far more interested in that than I am in any sort of likeability.
Hamlet: If thou didst ever hold me in thy heart, absent thee from felicity awhile and in this harsh world draw thy breath in pain to tell my story.
When Rosencrantz asks Hamlet, "Good my lord, what is your cause of distemper? You do surely bar the door upon your own liberty, if you deny your grief to your friends"(III, ii, 844-846), Hamlet responds, "Why, look you now, how unworthy a thing you m...
Scholars don't have blood flowing in their veins," said Hamlet. "When they're wounded, they bleed logic, and when all of it is gone, their brains die, and they become ... soldiers.
...imagine anybody having lived forty-five or fifty years without knowing Hamlet! One might as well spend one's life in a coal mine.
She had spears of straw and grass in her hair, not like Ophelia gone mad through contact with Hamlet's madness, but because she had slept in some stable loft.
I like the spirit of this great London which I feel around me. Who but a coward would pass his whole life in hamlets; and for ever abandon his faculties to the eating rust of obscurity?
I don't admire Freud as much as some people do. Imagine Shakespeare being aware of the Oedipal complex when he wrote Hamlet. It would have been a disaster.
I was doing Hamlet in the off-season, and I had a specific idea in my mind about what I wanted that character to look like, and because it's going to lead into the next year, I knew that it was going to have to be established somewhere in the show.
I've worked in the Inuit hamlets of the west coast of Hudson Bay since 1994. Over that time I've been very moved by both the pace of social change there - the loss of traditional ways of seeing the world, the affinity for and comfort with the land - ...
'Hamlet' is one of the most dangerous things ever set down on paper. All the big, unknowable questions like what it is to be a human being; the difference between sanity and insanity; the meaning of life and death; what's real and not real. All these...
The longer I've been doing this, the more I've realized that you have no idea what kinds of roles are possible for you - dream roles can take you by surprise. That being said, I need to play Hamlet one day. I'd also love to be in a play that I have w...
The reason that I'm a writer today is because of Shakespeare and falling in love with Shakespeare when I was 8. That was through the movies, actually - through Olivier's 'Hamlet.' That was the first thing that got me to fall in love with Shakespeare ...
That thing that Hamlet says - "there is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so". Not quite true if you are stuck under a grand piano, not quite true for genocide, but surely it must be true about love?
Who of English speech, bred to the traditions of his race, does not recognize Hamlet in his 'inky cloak' at a glance? Not to know him would argue one's self untaught in the chief glories of his language.
I'm often given parts that aren't as big as they are colorful, but people remember them. When it's a minor or supporting role, you learn to make the most of what you're given. I can make two lines seem like 'Hamlet'.
Consciousness is the materia poetica that Shakespeare sculpts as Michelangelo sculpts marble. We feel the consciousness of Hamlet or Iago, and our own consciousness strangely expands.
It's always seemed a little preposterous that Hamlet, for all his paralyzing doubt about everything, never once doubts the reality of the ghost. Never questions his own madness might not in fact be unfeigned.
The study of mathematics is apt to commence in disappointment... We are told that by its aid the stars are weighed and the billions of molecules in a drop of water are counted. Yet, like the ghost of Hamlet's father, this great science eludes the eff...
It was one of those cases where you approve the broad, general principle of an idea but can't help being in a bit of a twitter at the prospect of putting it into practical effect. I explained this to Jeeves, and he said much the same thing had bother...
