CRITICISM ON SHAKESPEARE

Criticism on Shakespeare:

1) John Dryden Said about Shakespeare.

“To begin then with Shakespeare he was the man, who of all modern and perhaps ancient poets 

had the largest and most comprehensive soul.” 

2) John Milton Said about Shakespeare.

“What needs my Shakespeare for his honoured bones,

The labor of an age in pilèd stones, Or that his hallowed relics should be hid.”

3) Ben Johnson Said about Shakespeare. 

“He redeemed his vices with his virtues. There was even more in him to be praised than to be 

pardoned.”

“He was not of an age, but for all time”.

4) Samuel Pepys Said about Shakespeare. 

“To the king’s theatre where we saw Midsummer Night’s Dream, which I had never seen before, 

nor shall ever again, for it is the most insipid ridiculous play that ever I saw in my life.”

5) Samuel Johnson Said about Shakespeare. 

“Shakespeare opens a mine which contains gold and diamonds in inexhaustible plenty, though 

clouded by incrustations debased by impurities, and mingled with a mass of meaner minerals.”

6) Joseph Addison Said about Shakespeare. 

“Among the English, Shakespeare has incomparably excelled all others.”

7) Johann Wolfgang Goethe Said about Shakespeare. 

“There is no pleasure greater and purer than, with eyes closed, accompany a Shakespeare’s play 

not declaimed, but recited by a safe and natural voice.”

8) Alexander Pope Said about Shakespeare.

“His characters are so much nature herself that ‘tis a sort of injury to call them by so distant a 

name as copies of her.”

9) T. S.  Eliot Said about Shakespeare. 

“Dante and Shakespeare divided the modern world between them, there is no third”

“We should have to understand things which Shakespeare did not understand himself.”

10) W. H. Auden Said about Shakespeare. 

“Shakespeare never takes himself too seriously”

11) D. H. Lawrence said about Shakespeare. 

“When I read Shakespeare I am struck with wonder, that such trivial people should muse and 

thunder in such lovely language.”

12) Sigmund Freud said about Shakespeare. 

“Incidentally, in this meantime, I stopped to believe that the author of Shakespeare’s works were 

the man of Stratford.”

13) Charles Lamb said about Shakespeare.

“We talk of Shakespeare’s admirable observation of life, when we should feel, that not from a 

petty inquisition into those cheap and everyday characters.”

14) Leo Tolstoy said about Shakespeare. 

“I remember the astonishment I felt when I first read Shakespeare. I expected to receive a 

powerful esthetic pleasure but having read one after the other works regarded as his best: ‘King 

Lear’, ‘Romeo and Juliet’, ‘Hamlet’ and ‘Macbeth’, not only did I feel no delight, but I felt an 

irresistible repulsion and tedium.”

15) Thomas Carlyle said about Shakespeare.

 

“Nay, apart from spiritualties and considering him merely as a real marketable, tangibly useful 

possession.”

16) Thomas De Quincey said about 

Shakespeare. 

O mighty poet! Thy works are not as those of other man, simply and merely great works of art, 

but are also like the phenomena of nature.”

17) Harold Bloom said about Shakespeare 

“Shakespeare is the Canon. He sets the standard and the limits of Literature.”

18) Machado de Assis Said about Shakespeare. 

“One day, when there is no more Great Britain, when there is no more United States, when there 

is no more the English language will exit Shakespeare; we will speak Shakespeare.”