Critical Quotes

• "All duties seem holy to Hamlet" - Goethe
• "He has the persuasiveness and physical courage of a ruler, but is morally empty." - Schofield (on Claudius)
• "Hamlet is obliged to act in the spur of the moment" - Coleridge
• "He loved Gertrude deeply and genuinely" - Dawson (on Claudius)
• "The key comic element of the play is madness" - Sir Herbert Tree
• "a woman of exuberant sexuality, who inspires uxorious passion first in King Hamlet and later in Claudius" - Bloom
• "Hamlet is haunted, not by a physical fear of dying, but of being dead" - C.S. Lewis
• "Ophelia is deprived of thought, sexuality and language." - Elaine Showalter
• "A man whose moral compass is infinitely wobbly" - Gabriel Josipovici (on Polonius)