Abstract
Nearly 200 years ago, Charles Lamb recorded a phenomenon of Shakespearean spectatorship which has only gained in currency over the time since. Already, even then, the constant cultural recycling of Shakespeare’s speech had alienated it from any literal meaning the text might once have had.
I confess myself utterly unable to appreciate that celebrated soliloquy in Hamlet, beginning ‘To be or not to be’, or to tell whether it be good, bad, or indifferent, it has been so handled and pawed about by declamatory boys and men, and torn so inhumanly from its living place and principle of continuity in the play, till it is become to me a perfect dead member.
(Lamb 1963: 22–3)
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© 2009 Stephen Purcell
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Purcell, S. (2009). Shakespearean ‘Samples’. In: Popular Shakespeare. Palgrave Shakespeare Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230234222_7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230234222_7
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-36687-3
Online ISBN: 978-0-230-23422-2
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