A Cat and Hamlet

Just as a vivid sketch of a cat by a good draughtsman may contain in a few crisp lines the entire feline experience of everyone who looks at it, so the powerfully constructed pattern of words that we know as Hamlet may contain an amount of meaning which the vast and constantly growing library of criticism on the play cannot begin to exhaust…when a poetic structure attains a certain degree of concentration or social recognition, the amount of commentary it will carry is infinite. The fact is in itself no more incredible than the fact that a scientist can state a law illustrated by more phenomena than he could ever observe or count, and there is no occasion for wondering, like the yokels in Goldsmith, how one small poet’s head can carry the amount of wit, wisdom, instruction, and significance that Shakespeare and Dante have given the world.

— Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism (Princeton University Press, 1957)

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