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Eliot, T. S. "Hamlet and His Problems."
The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism. London: Methune, 1921.
 95
HAMLET AND HIS PROBLEMS


      FEW critics have even admitted that Hamlet the play is the primary problem, and Hamlet the character only secondary. And Hamlet the character has had an especial temptation for that most dangerous type of critic: the critic with a mind which is naturally of the creative order, but which through some weakness in creative power exercises itself in criticism instead. These minds often find in Hamlet a vicarious existence for their own artistic realization. Such a mind had Goethe, who made of Hamlet a Werther; and such had Coleridge, who made of Hamlet a Coleridge; and probably neither of these men in writing about Hamlet remembered that his first business was to study a work of art. The kind of criticism that Goethe and Coleridge produced, in writing of Hamlet, is the most misleading kind possible. For they both possessed unquestionable critical insight, and both make their critical aberrations the more plausible by the substitution -- of their own Hamlet for Shakespeare's -- which their creative gift effects. We should be thankful that Walter Pater did not fix his attention on this play.

      Two recent writers, Mr. J. M. Robertson and