In an essay, one critic describes the “Problems” of this play, which he calls “the Mona Lisa of Literature.” For 10 points each:
[10e] Name this play about the title prince of Denmark who attempts to take revenge on his uncle Claudius. Jacques Lacan’s essay on “Interpretation of Desire in” this play begins by reducing Ophelia to “a piece of bait.”
ANSWER: Hamlet (by William Shakespeare)
[10m] This writer of “Hamlet and His Problems” became a major influence on New Criticism. This critic and poet set out his theory of “impersonal poetry” in the 1919 essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent.”
ANSWER: T. S. Eliot [or Thomas Stearns Eliot]
[10h] In “Hamlet and His Problems,” Eliot codified this concept, a “situation” or “chain of events” that creates a specific emotional response in the audience, and argued that Hamlet was an “artistic failure” for not doing so.
ANSWER: objective correlative
<Editors, British Literature>