...critic, William Hazlitt, eloquently describes the extraordinary impact of what is finally a fiction: 'Hamlet is a name; his speeches and sayings but the idle coinage of a poet's brain. What then, are they not real? They are as real as our own thoughts. Their reality is...

...can be seen as an existential, universal Everyman. 'Hamlet is a name,' wrote William Hazlitt in 1818, 'his speeches and sayings but the idle coinage of...reality is in the reader's mind. It is we who are Hamlet'.21 We can see, then, that by the early nineteenth century there had been many Hamlets; from...

...more interesting, Hazlitt has here exerted an unusual effect on Heine's very style. Hazlitt observed: ,,Hamlet is a name; his speeches and sayings but the...the poet's brain. What then, are they not real? They Prawer, Frankenstein's Island, 202. are as real as our own thoughts. Their reality is in the reader's...

...thoughts 'as well as we do our own'. His words are merely 'the idle coinage of the poet's brain', yet 'They are as real as our own thoughts. Their reality...is in the reader's mind. It is we who are Hamlet. The play has a prophetic truth, which is above that of history' (HW iv. 232). Here Hamlet is 'prophetic'...

...richiamato alla mente dei suoi lettori il celebre Amleto come si fa con una vecchia conoscenza, rivela loro: «Hamlet is a name; his speeches and sayings but the idle coinage of the poet's brain», Amleto è solo un nome ei suoi discorsi, le sue azioni, così come tutto ciò che lo riguarda, le sue...

...a cow does of a park of artillery, or a blind horse of a cocked pistol. This is the sentence :— " Hamlet is a name; his speeches and sayings but the...real ? They are as real as our own thoughts. Their realmis in the reader's mind. It is WE who are Hamlet." Now I submit that a much more asinine sentence...