Excerpt from Hamlet, Prince of Denmark

In preparing the notes to explain the text of Hamlet I have followed my usual practice of seeking to help the teacher by helping the pupil. Working absolutely without help, the young reader makes his way through our English classics too slowly and laboriously, toiling in vain over details, and so failing to get large impressions. Above all things, the school must keep the study of English literature interesting, or else the school practically belies the very end and aim of the subject it professes to teach. All the poets and the prose writers have striven to interest their contemporaries and their posterity. The classics are those who succeeded and still succeed in this endeavor; the great classics are those who have succeeded in a pre-eminent degree.

Hence, whatever else, in a school course, a strenuous discipline may, for training's sake, insist on keeping hard and dry, the English literature must ever be tempered with the warmth of liking and curiosity. The primal relation of literature to the mind is an appeal for attention, an effort to stimulate, to please. We cannot lose sight of this truth and treat poetry as if it were science, which we can absolutely withdraw from and view as an objective thing.

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