Critical views Flashcards
Emma Smith
“Hamlet’s own instincts are towards undoing rather than doing”
William Hazlitt (Revenge)
“The prince of philosophical spectators…he cannot have his revenge perfect…he declines it altogether.”
Sigmund Freud
Hamlet is faced with “scruples of consciousness” reminding him “he himself is literally no better than the sinner whom he is to punish.”
Danby
“To everyone except Hamlet, Claudius is as good as his predecessor.”
Swinburne
“The single characteristic of Hamlet’s innermost nature is by no means irresolution or hesitation..but rather a strong conflux of contending forces.”
William Hazlitt (Hesistation)
Hamlet is he whose “powers of action have been eaten up by thought.”
Coleridge
“Hamlet’s mind, which unseated from its healthy relation, is constantly occupied with the world within.”
Knight
Hamlet “cannot break out of the closed circle of loathing and self contempt.”
Von Goathe
“All duties seem holy for Hamlet”
Belsey
“Revenge exists as a margin between justice and crime.”
Smith
“Hamlet seems obsessed with Gertrude as a sex object.”
Wilson Knight (Hamlet)
“He [Hamlet] is, in fact, the poison in the veins of the community.”
Showalter
“Ophelia is deprived of thought, sexuality and language…she represents the strong emotions that Elizabethans thought womanish.”
Holderness
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.”
Wood
“Trapped in a choiceless existence, Ophelia has no choice but to throw herself into the river to drown.”
Bradley (Hamlet and Ophelia)
“No reasonable doubt can be felt” on the view that “Hamlet was at one time sincerely in love with Ophelia.”
Wilson Knight
Claudius is a “good and gentle king.”
Mabillard
“he [Claudius] uses the death of Hamlet’s father to create a sense of national solidarity.”
Dollimore
“Hamlet articulates a crisis in the decay of a traditional social order in England.”
Brucher
“Revengers create their own social justice.”
Campbell
“Melancholy…defeats all his impulses towards action and increasingly paralyses his will.”
Hapgood
“Hamlet’s form of delay is ‘inertia’, he finds difficulty in starting and coming to a stop.”
Bradley (Women)
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.”
Stanton
“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.”
Dewards
“We can imagine Hamlet’s story without Ophelia, but Ophelia literally has no story without Hamlet.”
Levernez (Ophelia’s suicide)
“A microcosm of the male world’s banishment of the female, because ‘women’ represents everything denied by reasonable men.”
Levernez (Hamlet)
“Hamlet’s disgust at the feminine passivity in himself is translated into violent revulsion against women, and into his brutal behaviour towards Ophelia.”
Showalter (Drowning)
“Feminine fluidity as opposed to masculine aridity.”
Waugh
“It’s a play about suffocating sorrow.”
Jones
“The repressed wish is not only that the father should die, but that the son should then espouse the mother.”
John
“This is Hamlet living on the edge of his emotions.”
Bloom
“The fundamental fact about Hamlet is not that he thinks too much, but that he thinks too well”
Schuking
“Hamlet…cannot be comprehended except as a study of emotion.”
Licence
“Where Hamlet feigns madness, Ophelia actually loses her sanity.”
Bloom
“Hamlet’s tragedy is at last the tragedy of personality.”
Hazlitt
“It is we who are Hamlet.”
Dane
“Motherless and completely circumscribed to the men around her, Ophelia has been shaped to conform to external desires
Bradley
“An element, not of deep tragedy, but of pathetic beauty, which makes analysis of her character seem almost desecration.”
Johnson
“He plays the madman most, when he treats Ophelia with so much rudeness”
Benedix
“No girl becomes insane because her father dies, least of all Ophelia…”
Dane
“Madness releases Ophelia from the enforced repressions of the prescribed roles of daughter, sister, lover, subject”
