Critical views

Question 1

Emma Smith

Answer 1

“Hamlet’s own instincts are towards undoing rather than doing”

Question 2

William Hazlitt (Revenge)

Answer 2

“The prince of philosophical spectators…he cannot have his revenge perfect…he declines it altogether.”

Question 3

Sigmund Freud

Answer 3

Hamlet is faced with “scruples of consciousness” reminding him “he himself is literally no better than the sinner whom he is to punish.”

Question 4

Danby

Answer 4

“To everyone except Hamlet, Claudius is as good as his predecessor.”

Question 5

Swinburne

Answer 5

“The single characteristic of Hamlet’s innermost nature is by no means irresolution or hesitation..but rather a strong conflux of contending forces.”

Question 6

William Hazlitt (Hesistation)

Answer 6

Hamlet is he whose “powers of action have been eaten up by thought.”

Question 7

Coleridge

Answer 7

“Hamlet’s mind, which unseated from its healthy relation, is constantly occupied with the world within.”

Question 8

Knight

Answer 8

Hamlet “cannot break out of the closed circle of loathing and self contempt.”

Question 9

Von Goathe

Answer 9

“All duties seem holy for Hamlet”

Question 10

Belsey

Answer 10

“Revenge exists as a margin between justice and crime.”

Question 11

Smith

Answer 11

“Hamlet seems obsessed with Gertrude as a sex object.”

Question 12

Wilson Knight (Hamlet)

Answer 12

“He [Hamlet] is, in fact, the poison in the veins of the community.”

Question 13

Showalter

Answer 13

“Ophelia is deprived of thought, sexuality and language…she represents the strong emotions that Elizabethans thought womanish.”

Question 14

Holderness

Answer 14

Hamlet is “stranded between two worlds, unable to emulate the heroic values of his father, unable to engage with the modern world of political diplomacy.”

Question 15

Wood

Answer 15

“Trapped in a choiceless existence, Ophelia has no choice but to throw herself into the river to drown.”

Question 16

Bradley (Hamlet and Ophelia)

Answer 16

“No reasonable doubt can be felt” on the view that “Hamlet was at one time sincerely in love with Ophelia.”

Question 17

Wilson Knight

Answer 17

Claudius is a “good and gentle king.”

Question 18

Mabillard

Answer 18

“he [Claudius] uses the death of Hamlet’s father to create a sense of national solidarity.”

Question 19

Dollimore

Answer 19

“Hamlet articulates a crisis in the decay of a traditional social order in England.”

Question 20

Brucher

Answer 20

“Revengers create their own social justice.”

Question 21

Campbell

Answer 21

“Melancholy…defeats all his impulses towards action and increasingly paralyses his will.”

Question 22

Hapgood

Answer 22

“Hamlet’s form of delay is ‘inertia’, he finds difficulty in starting and coming to a stop.”

Question 23

Bradley (Women)

Answer 23

Hamlet sees Gertrude’s action “not only as an astounding shallowness of feeling but as an eruption of coarse sensuality, ‘rank and gross’…his whole mind is poisoned. He can never see Ophelia in the same light again: she is a woman, and his mother is a woman.”

Question 24

Stanton

Answer 24

“What makes a woman a wh*re in Hamlet’s estimation is her sexual use by not one man but by more than one man.”

Question 25

Dewards

Answer 25

“We can imagine Hamlet’s story without Ophelia, but Ophelia literally has no story without Hamlet.”

Question 26

Levernez (Ophelia’s suicide)

Answer 26

“A microcosm of the male world’s banishment of the female, because ‘women’ represents everything denied by reasonable men.”

Question 27

Levernez (Hamlet)

Answer 27

“Hamlet’s disgust at the feminine passivity in himself is translated into violent revulsion against women, and into his brutal behaviour towards Ophelia.”

Question 28

Showalter (Drowning)

Answer 28

“Feminine fluidity as opposed to masculine aridity.”

Question 29

Waugh

Answer 29

“It’s a play about suffocating sorrow.”

Question 30

Jones

Answer 30

“The repressed wish is not only that the father should die, but that the son should then espouse the mother.”

Question 31

John

Answer 31

“This is Hamlet living on the edge of his emotions.”

Question 32

Bloom

Answer 32

“The fundamental fact about Hamlet is not that he thinks too much, but that he thinks too well”

Question 33

Schuking

Answer 33

“Hamlet…cannot be comprehended except as a study of emotion.”

Question 34

Licence

Answer 34

“Where Hamlet feigns madness, Ophelia actually loses her sanity.”

Question 35

Bloom

Answer 35

“Hamlet’s tragedy is at last the tragedy of personality.”

Question 36

Hazlitt

Answer 36

“It is we who are Hamlet.”

Question 37

Dane

Answer 37

“Motherless and completely circumscribed to the men around her, Ophelia has been shaped to conform to external desires

Question 38

Bradley

Answer 38

“An element, not of deep tragedy, but of pathetic beauty, which makes analysis of her character seem almost desecration.”

Question 39

Johnson

Answer 39

“He plays the madman most, when he treats Ophelia with so much rudeness”

Question 40

Benedix

Answer 40

“No girl becomes insane because her father dies, least of all Ophelia…”

Question 41

Dane

Answer 41

“Madness releases Ophelia from the enforced repressions of the prescribed roles of daughter, sister, lover, subject”