"It may be replied that if he talked commonplace prose he would reveal his character less vividly. I am not so sure. He would certainly have revealed something less vividly; but would that something be himself? ...And I do not thinkk it true to reply that he would be a different character if he spoke less poetically. This point is often misunderstood. We sometimes speak as if the characters in whose mouths Shakespeare puts great poetry were poets: in the sense that Shakespeare was depicting men of poetical genius... In poetical drama poetry is the medium, not part of the delineated characters."
"I would not cross the room to meet Hamlet. It would never be necessary. He is always where I am."
"Its true hero is man--haunted man--man with his mind on the frontier of two worlds, man unable either quite to reject or quite to admit the supernatural, man struggling to get something done as man has struggled from the beginning, yet incapable of achievement because of his inability to understand either himself or his fellows or the real quality of the universe which has produced him."
C.S. Lewis, Hamlet: The Prince or the Poem?
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