On Hamlet

Nearly twenty years ago, my mom bought me a book called 'The Friendly Shakespeare', by Norrie Epstein.  If my memory is right, she got this for me right about the time I was in 'A Midsummer Night's Dream'.  It's a fun book, which tries to help people past the enormous aura of Shakespeare so that they can simply enjoy his work.  I recommend it.
In the section on Hamlet there are some lists of quotes about the play.  I thought I'd share some of them here. 

• In the tragedy of Hamlet, the ghost of a king appears on the stage. Hamlet becomes crazy in the second act and his mistress becomes crazy in the third. The Prince slays the father of his mistress on the pretense of killing a rat, the heroine throws herself into the river. In the meanwhile another of the actors conquers Poland. Hamlet, his mother and his father all carouse on the stage. Songs are song at the table. There's quarrelling, fighting, killing. It is a vulgar and barbarous drama which would not be tolerated by the vilest populace of France or Italy. One would imagine this pieces to be the work of a drunken savage. - Voltaire
• So far from being Shakespeare's masterpiece, the play is most certainly an artistic failure. In several ways the play is puzzling, and disquieting as is none of the others. Of all the plays it is the longest and is possibly the one on which Shakespeare spent most pains; and yet he has left in it superfluous and inconsistent scenes which even hasty revision should have noticed. - T.S. Elliot
• I am trying to recall attention from the things an intellectual adult notices to the things a child or a peasant notices-night, ghosts, a castle lobby where a man can walk four hours together, a willow fringed brook and a sad lady drowned, a graveyard and a terrible cliff above the sea, and amidst all of these a pale man in black chothes with his stockings coming down, a dishevelled man whose words make us at once think of loneliness and doubt and dread, of waste and dust and emptiness and from whose hands to our own, we feel the richness of heaven and earth and the comfort of human affection slipping away.  - C.S. Lewis
• This monstrous Gothic castle of a poem with its baffled half-lights and glooms. - C.E. Montague
• One of the reasons audiences admire the play so much is that everybody in their own lives almost every day faces the kind of crisis that Hamlet faces, that is, do you behave like a reactive savage or like a rational and sensitive human being? - Michael Pennington
• It's nonsense to pretend that Hamlet is the story of Everyman. It isn't. It's Hamlet, Prince of Denmark. And that's the whole motive of the story; it's not just you or me growing up in a corrupt role, it's somebody who's obliged to take a public role. - Richard Eyre (director, Royal Shakespare Co.)
• What's really getting him down is that his mother has gone and married the other guy straight off the bat, like within two months. He loves his mother, and she's like deserting him in his really grief stricken time of need. He's only about fifteen years younger than her. He's pretty upset about the whole family thing... He's in a pretty heavy mood. - Mel Gibson