Q: Shakespeare "is full of quotations"

[George Thompson]

Another Victorian reaction to seeing "Hamlet":

"How very unlike the home life of our own dear Queen."

GAT

George A. Thompson
Author of A Documentary History of "The African Theatre", Northwestern Univ. Pr., 1998, but nothing much lately.

----- Original Message -----
From: "Joel S. Berson" <Berson at ATT.NET>
Date: Tuesday, May 19, 2009 10:39 am
Subject: Q: Shakespeare "is full of quotations"
To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU

> Do we know who originated the anecdote of someone saying of Hamlet
> (or more generally of Shakespeare) "it/he is full of quotations"?
>
> Googling leads me to William Wetmore Story, in _Conversations in a
> Studio_.  This was published/printed in 1890, by both W. Blackwood &
> Sons, Edinburgh, and Houghton Mifflin & Co., Boston.  And also to:
>
> _Appleton's Journal_ June 1875 (p. 831), includes the anecdote as
> from "Blackwood's for June".
>
> _Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine_ for June 1875 (Vol. 117, No. 716),
> "In a Studio.---Conversatoin No. II" (unattributed), p. 722:
>
> _Bolton_.   You remind me of a story I heard the other day of an
> English swell, whose education, whatever it might have been in Greek
> and Latin (as much perhaps as Shakespeare's, according to Ben
> Johnson's sneer), was not _liberally_ endowed with English
> literature. Some of his fiends persuaded him to go and hear Hamlet,
> which was then playing in London. On his return he was asked how he
> liked it, and he said, "Very nice, very nice, but awfully full of quotations."
>
> Joel
>
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