Hamlet critics quotes

• the key comic


  element of the play is madness (Herbert Tree)
• Hamlet's madness is 'clearly

  feigned' (Johnson)
• Hamlet assumes without any

  questioning that he ought to avenge his father's death (A C Bradley)
• Hamlet is a...

  tragedy of thought (A.C. Bradley)
• A.C. Bradley on Hamlet's delay


  His explanation of Hamlet's delay was one of a deep "melancholy" which grew from a growing disappointment in his mother
• Freud on Hamlet


  - Hamlet is indecisive because he has repressed sexual desire for his mother, which is being acted out by and challenged by Claudius

  - Ophelia's madness after her father's death may be read through the Freudian lens as a reaction to the death of her hoped-for lover, her father.
• Hamlet only possesses the word


  of an unreliable ghost and his own instinctive dislike of Gertrude's second husband as a basis for revenge (Barton)
• killing claudius - Hamlet is obliged to

  act on the spur of the moment (Coleridge)
• Hamlet is haunted, not by


  a physical fear of dying, but of being dead (CS Lewis)
• the violence towards the


  mother is the effect of the desire for her (Rose)
• Hamlet would readily

  risk his damnation to obey his father's ghost (Belsey)
• Claudius - He loved Gertrude

  deeply and genuinely (Dawson)
• Ophelia is deprived of

  thought, sexuality and language (showalter)
• Women are often given

  the same advice that is given to servants...chastity, piety, obedience (Bornstein)
• Ophelia has literally no

  story without Hamlet (Edwards)
• Ophelia - an insignificant


  and minor character (Showalter)
• Hamlet is a play about a

  father and a son who were weak because they were undone... by sexually treacherous women (Ehrlich)
• we are never perfectly

  certain as to just who or what the ghost is (John Dover Wilson)
• His ruling passion


  is to think, not to act (Hazlitt)
• Hamlet thinks


  too deeply (Ehrlich)
• Pleasing men is Gertrude's


  main interest (Rebecca Smith)
• He is being asked, as a son who (surely) loves his father,


  to avenge his father's foul and unnatural murder (Josipovici)
• Polonius - Cold


  hearted devil (J H Walter)
• Polonius - A man who's moral


  compass is infinitely wobbly (Josipovici)
• Hamlet - a poetic and morally


  sensitive soul crushed by the barbarous task of murder (Goethe)
• Hamlet is a man incapable


  of acting because he thinks too much (Coleridge)
• Hamlet is a merge of the tragic


  hero and a clown figure (Josipovici)
• He is not a

  monster, he is morally weak (Mabillard)
• The ghost is the

  spirit of war and a symbol of the devil, corrupting Hamlet with his thirst for vengeance (Harold Goddard)
• The ghost is definitely...

  a demon who wants to damn Hamlet to Hell (Prossor)
• John Lennard- The Ghost

  Hamlet's ghost is unusual

  - Wears different clothes to when he died (armour)

  - The audience has no way of knowing who this is- have not seen him alive as a character.

  - Hard to execute the armour within theatre

  
  

  - Why did the ghost appear to Horatio but not Gertrude in the bedroom scene.

  - Absurdly talkative- Shakespeare's other ghosts have very minor roles with few lines.

  
  

  Complicated religious issue about the nature of the ghost

  - Very Catholic view presented in a Protestant country (both Denmark and England)

  - Ghost in purgatory

  
  

  Unlike Shakespeare's other ghosts, he does not appear to or confront his murderer.
• Hamlet has an...

  obligation to avenge his father (Kiernan Ryan)
• Ophelia drowns

  in a surfeit of feeling (Showalter)
• Real remembrance of his...

  love comes only when it's too late; at Ophelia's graveside (Juliet McLauchlan)
• Polonius seems to

  love his children; he seems to have the welfare of the kingdom in mind; his means of action, however, are totally corrupt (Smith)
• Claudius, as he appears

  in the play, is not a criminal...he is a good and gentle king, enmeshed by the chain of casuality linking him with his crime (Knight)
• Revenge is not

  justice , it is rather an act of injustice on behalf of justice - Belsey
• Revenge exists

  on a margin between justice and crime (Belsey)
• The desire for

  vengeance is seen as part of a continuing pattern of human conduct (Alexander)
• Trained his daughter

  to be obedient and chaste and is able to use her as a piece of bait for spying (Rebecca Smith)