Lit Crit of the Day

12/16

How might you use the quote below?

Fleischer, Leonard. “Sondheim, Stephen.” Encyclopedia of American Drama, Third Edition , Facts On File, 2012. Bloom's Literature, online.infobase.com/Auth/Index?aid=17021&itemid=WE54&articleId=6420. Accessed 16 Dec. 2019.

In Sweeney Todd, the Demon Barber of Fleet Street (1979), Hugh Wheeler once again collaborated with Sondheim, adapting Christopher Bond's play about a murderous London barber, in what is perhaps Sondheim's richest score for the theater. This ballad-like tale of Sweeney and his pie-making paramour, Mrs. Lovett, is an attack on coldhearted industrialism, as well as a chilling story of revenge.

12/11

Lit Crit of the Day: Rosenblum, Joseph. “Hamlet.” The Facts On File Companion to Shakespeare, Facts On File, 2012. Bloom's Literature, online.infobase.com/Auth/Index?aid=17021&itemid=WE54&articleId=483593. Accessed 11 Dec. 2019.

Hamlet is one of the central texts of Western civilization, and Hamlet is the most self-conscious literary figure ever created. A. C. Bradley commented that Hamlet is the only Shakespearean character who could have written Shakespeare's plays. His most famous soliloquy explores the power of the mind to overcome mortality, juxtaposing human unbounded imagination—"how infinite in faculties" (2.2.304)—with the physical limitations of the flesh. That contrast informs the entire play. Gertrude speaks of Ophelia's floating "mermaid-like" until she sinks "to muddy death" (4.7.176, 183). The Player King observes, "Our thoughts are ours, their ends none of our own" (3.2.208). Therein lies the human triumph and tragedy: Infinite mind trapped in finite being.

12/9

Lit Crit of the Day: Harold Goddard on Hamlet

However all this may be, there is no doubt that Shakespeare endowed Hamlet with the best he had acquired up to the time he conceived him. He inherits the virtues of a score of his predecessors—and some of their weaknesses. Yet he is no mere recapitulation of them. In him, rather, they recombine to make a man as individual as he is universal. He has the passion of Romeo ("Romeo is Hamlet in love," says Hazlitt), ... —not to mention gifts and graces that stem more from certain of Shakespeare's heroines than from his heroes—for, like Rosalind, that inimitable boy-girl, Hamlet is an early draft of a new creature on the Platonic order, conceived in the Upanishads, who begins to synthesize the sexes. "He who understands the masculine and keeps to the feminine shall become the whole world's channel. Eternal virtue shall not depart from him and he shall return to the state of an infant." If Hamlet does not attain the consummation that Laotse thus describes, he at least gives promise of it. What wonder that actresses have played his role, or that among the theories about him one of the most inevitable, if most insane, is that he is a woman in disguise! Mad literally, the idea embodies a symbolic truth and helps explain why Hamlet has been pronounced both a hero and a dreamer, hard and soft, cruel and gentle, brutal and angelic, like a lion and like a dove. One by one these judgments are all wrong. Together they are all right—