Critics

• "A woman's virginity is the 'best portion, the greatest inheritance, and the most precious jewel"

  A Godly Form of Household Government
• "Hamlet is a Protestant man haunted by a Catholic ghost"


  Greenblat
• "a play dealing with the effect of a mother's guilt on her son"

  Eliot
• "[Ophelia is] valued only for the roles that further other people's plots"

  David Leverenz
• "[Ophelia is] chiefly interesting in what she tells us about Hamlet"

  Showalter
• "Gertrude is caught between two mighty opposites"


  Rebecca Smith
• "Hamlet can't kill Claudius without killing himself"

  Ernest Jones
• "Claudius is morally empty"

  Scofield
• "Revenge is not justice. It is rather an act of injustice on behalf of justice"


  Belsey
• "Hamlet is an element of evil in the state of Denmark"

  Wilson Knight
• "the moral uncertainty persists to the end

  Belsey
• "Hamlet's disgust at the feminine passivity in himself is translated into violent revulsion against women"


  David Leverenz
• "Her whole character [Ophelia] is that of simply unselfish affection"

  A C Bradley
• "Gertrude chooses a brother over a dead Hamlet, Ophelia chooses a father over a living Hamlet"


  Kay Stanton
• "women were everything men were not: silent, submissive, powerless"


  Belsey
• "Gertrude believes that quiet women best please men, and pleasing men is Gertrude's main interest"


  Rebecca Smith
• "Hamlet cannot be comprehended except as a study of emotion"

  Schuking
• "a tragedy of thought; his [Hamlet] downfall is connected rather with his intellectual nature"


  AC Bradley
• "[Ophelia] freed and contained by her madness"


  Goodland
• "Drowning was a typically feminine death"

  Elaine Showalter
• "We can imagine Hamlet's story without Ophelia, but Ophelia literally has no story without Hamlet"

  Lee Edwards
• "Hamlet was in love with his mother and inhibited from killing his rival"

  Stanley Wells
• "Gertrude isn't the stereotypical lustful woman of revenge drama, she's far more sympathetic"


  Cedric Watts
• Ophelia - Women - madness


  David Leverenz - 'Ophelia's suicide becomes a microcosm of the male world's banishment of the female
• Hamlet - religion


  Van Goethe - 'All duties seem holy for Hamlet
• Gertrude - lack of change


  Rebecca Smith - 'Gertrude has not moved in the play toward independence or a moral stance
• Gertrude - morality


  Kenneth Muir - Gertrude is a 'moral defective
• Ophelia - women

  Juliet Dusinberre - 'Ophelia is stifled by the authority of the male world
• Female madness

  Elaine Showalter - 'madness is a product of the female body and female nature
• Hamlet - family - morality - revenge


  Leonard Tennenhouse - Hamlet attempts to 'locate and purge a corrupt element within the aristocratic body
• Hamlet - lack of action


  Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Hamlet 'loses the power of action in the energy of resolve
• Hamlet - Over thinking


  Schlegel and Coleridge - 'excessive reflectiveness
• Play response - disgust

  John Evelyn - 'the old play began to disgust this refined age
• Hamlet - humanity - mystery

  CS Lewis - Hamlet depicts 'lasting mystery of our human situation