Hamlet critics

• 'Hamlet... cannot escape the human impulse to perform' -Woods
• 'Thought may be a symptom of fear' -Newell
• 'Women became hysteric because of the movement of their wombs' -Mali
• 'Outward displays of emotion are untrustworthy... because a person could play or mimic them' -Woods
• 'The play-within-a-play structure keeps us at a frustrating distance from the definite truth of things' -Woods
• 'In comparison to Hamlet, Ophelia is certainly a creature of lack' -Showalter
• 'It is we who are Hamlet' -Hazlitt
• 'I have a smack of Hamlet in myself' -Coleridge
• 'The revenger places himself outside the normal moral order of things' -Dr Taofiki Koumakpai
• 'Church, state and the regular morals of people in that age did not accept revenge' -Dr Taofiki Koumakpai
• 'It would unquestionably be nobler to eliminate evil than to endure it' -Newell
• 'Endangering the soul of the revenger' -Dr Taofiki Koumakpai
• 'Revenge is always in excess of justice' -Belsy
• 'She is pronounced guilty not as a judgement on her actions, but as a condition of her presence in the play in relation to Hamlet' -Jardine
• 'The paradox of Hamlet's courage arriving at the time when he is physically at his weakest' -Reid
• 'Altercation between the language of blood revenge and the language of conscience' -Booth
• 'The King being a sustaining, life-giving power... he poisons the whole of Denmark' -Reid
• 'Incest as a marital offence committed against Hamlet' -Jardine
• 'She is required by the kinship rules of her community to remain faithful to her deceased husband; that same community deprives her of any but the proxy influence her remarriage gives her, over her son's future' -Jardine
• 'Male friendship bas been... highly esteemed throughout man's history'
• 'He is back again where he was when we first had sight of his inner self' -Wilson
• 'The most aimable of misanthropes... powers have been eaten up by thought' -Hazlitt
• 'Many of Hamlet's qualities would have appeared feminine... his pechant for melancholy... his erratic behaviour'
• 'The verse seems barely able to contain Hamlet's distress'
• 'Woman as madness or madness as woman?' -Showalter
• 'It is not... a contrast of life versus suicide; but appears rather to be a contrast of passive existance versus a vital activity of opposition... to lead to death' -Richards
• 'Rather an instrument than an agent' -Johnson
• 'The speech begins and ends with explicit considerations concerning the problem of acting' -Newell
• 'A man distracted with contrariety of desires, and overwhelmed with the magnitude of his own purposes' -Johnson
• 'Not afraid to die but to die in sin' -Richards
• 'Hamlet is dominated by an emotion which is inexpressible, because it is in excess of the facts as they appear' -TS Eliot
• 'Reveal his thoughts and feelings without necessarily having his speech connect with the immediate action' -Newell
• 'The context of Ophelia's disease... is sexual frustration, social helplessness, and enforced control of women's bodies' -Neely
• 'Hamlet... could be seen as a superb practitioner in the art of verbal play'
• 'It is a vision of death in life, a life so drained of meaning, value, purpose and joy that is seems like death' -Poole
• 'Her guilt is... culturally constructed so as to represent her as responsible without allowing her agency' -Jardine
• 'The power of play, the danger of play and the threshold between play and reality' -Flaherty
• 'A ghost is unnerving (at least) because it seems alive, like the person we once knew. A ghost is confusing because it throws into doubt the difference between the living and the dead' -Poole
• 'At the very moment Hamlet insists that his mourning is authentic and internal, he seems deliberately to parade his grief for all to see' -Woods
• 'Each individual encounters life and death as if for the first time' -Howard