Critical Quotes Flashcards
Jan Knott
Hamlet is like a sponge. Unless produced in a stylized or antiquarian fashion, it immediately absorbs all the problems of our time. It is the strangest play ever written; by its very imperfections.
T.S. Eliot
So far from being Shakespeare’s masterpiece, the play is most certainly an artistic failure…he has left in it superfluous and inconsistent scene s which even hasty revision should have noticed.
Helen Gardner
It seems as if in plays of this kind [revenge tragedies] it was a necessary part of the total effect that the villain should be to some extent the agent of his own destruction. As initiator of the action he must be the initiator of its resolution.
H. D. F. Kitto
The structure of Hamlet, then, suggests that we should treat it as religious drama, and when we do, it certainly does not lose either in significance of in artistic integrity.
W. M. T. Nowottny
Shakespeare sees it as one of the tragic conditions of living, that man is not in control of the processes of bringing purposes into being; his passions are the unstable driving force, and time and accident frustrate both passion and deliberation.
G. K. Hunter
…the play seems designed to prevent Hamlet from finding any external model or simple solution for conduct, driving him into a version of heroism which depends less upon acting or even knowing than upon being.
Anne Righter
Hamlet is a tragedy dominated by the idea of the play.
J. Vyvyan
Hamlet is a study in degeneration from first to last, and that is the tragedy.
J. H. Walter
To some Hamlet is anti-social, neurotic, egomaniac, a malcontent, an anti-hero, a corrupt influence in an orderly court, or one who surrenders to despair in a futile world and only by change completes his task. To others he is a noble, heroic figure, or a sensitive intellectual overwhelmed by the task imposed on him, or a man with a fatal flaw in his characte
J. H. Walter
The function of Laertes is to present a direct blood-revenge story in its unscrupulous savagery and that enables us to discriminate more nicely the complexities and moral dilemma that besets Hamlet.
J. H. Walter
The Ghost is a dramatic device to spring the action and to intimate the disorder in Denmark.
A C Bradley
In the circumstances where we see the hero placed, his tragic trait, which is also his greatness, is fatal to him. To meet these circumstances something is required which a smaller man might have given, but which the hero cannot give. He errs, by action or omission; and his error, joining with other causes, brings on him ruin.
Kiernan Ryan
In Hamlet Shakespeare deliberately sabotages the whole genre of revenge tragedy by creating a tragic protagonist who refuses, for reasons he can’t fathom himself, to play the stock role in which he’s been miscast by the world he happens to inhabit.
Kiernan Ryan
Shakespeare makes his purpose plain by juxtaposing Hamlet with Fortinbras and especially Laertes, two conventional sons who are also determined to avenge their fathers, but who don’t have the least scruple about doing so.
T. S Elliot
The Mona Lisa of literature.
