Characters Flashcards
Polonius’s pompous and overbearing manerisms are reminscient of
Queen Elizabeth’s cheif minister Lord Burghley
Victor Hugo- who did he constrast Hamlet with? and quote
Contrasts Hamlet with Prometheus. ‘Prometheus is action. Hamlet is hesitation. In Prometheus the obstacle is the exterior, in Hamlet the obstacle is the interior… Hamlet must break and conquer himself’
Sean McEvoy on critical perceptions of the Prince throughout time
until the romantic period (late 18th to early 19th century) the earliest critics had little sympathy with the prince. The romantics saw in Hamlet someone much like themselves… for whom the world of the imagination had become more real than reality. In the 20th Century people predominantly applied a psychoanalytical reading to the character of Hamlet
Samuel Johnson on Hamlet
Hamlet is, throughout the play, rather an instrument than an agent. After he has, by the stratagem of the play, convicted the King, he makes no attempt to punish him, and his death is at last effected by an incident in which hamlet has no part in introducing
Samuel Taylor Coleridge on Hamlet
In Hamlet, Shakespeare seems to have wished to exemplify the moral necessity of a due balance between our attention to the objects of our sense, and the meditations of the workings of our minds… in Hamlet this balance is disturbed… the effect of this overbalance of the imaginative power is beautifully illustrated in the everlasting brooding and superfluous activities of Hamlets mind
William Hazlitt 1817 on the reason why hamlet cannot take his revenge
He [Hamlet] is the Prince of philosophical speculators; and because he cannot have his revenge perfect, according to the most refined idea his wish can form, he declines it altogether
Freud on Hamlets delay (1900)
'’Hamlet is able to do anything except take vengeance on the man who did away with his father and took that father’s place with the mother, the man who shows him the repressed wishes of his own childhood realised. Thus the loathing which should drive him to revenge is replaced in him by self reproaches, by scruples of conscience, which remind him that he himself is literally no better than the sinner whom he is to punish’
what led many 18th centuary critics to view Hamlet as a wholly admirable character
-the morally uncomplicated heroes of 18th century sentimental drama
Williams on Hamlet and Laertes and why this supports the thesis that Hamlet is unable to kill Clauidus an dmerly uses the theological argument as an excuse
'’Hamler’s alter ego is Laertes… [Laertes says that] he would be prepared …‘to cut his throat i’th’church’… Hamlet differs from him… in his incapacity for action
Williams on Laertes
‘Laretes is the traditional reveneger of the Elizabethan and Jacobean stage; a man without scruple whose determination to carry out his revenge is the only morality that he can acknowledge
Williams on Hamlets violence
‘The prospect of actually causing blood to flow… repels him … He can and does, speak as violently as Laertes, but he acts.. only in the impulse of the moment’
Belsey on how Hamlet reacts to his feminity
‘Hamlet despises what he finds feminine in his own behaviour’
what does Bradley compare Gertrude to and why
a sheep due to her passivity and stupidity
production in which the Oedipal hamlet is portrayed
-1992 John Barrymore: his caresses in the closet scene were explicitly sexual
John Updike’s presentation of Gertrude in gertrude and claudius
gertrude at the mercy of an unhappy arranged marriage to old Hamlet, who escapes from boredom into medieval romance
