Critical Views Flashcards
Goethe in 1795 - hamlet as a tragic hero
‘A poetic and morally sensitive soul crushed by the barbarous task of murder’
R.A Fokes
“Although Hamlet was, as a character, abstracted from the play and privatised as a representative of everyman by Romantic and later by critics, he also became in the 19th century an important symbolic political figure”
Gary Taylor
“Shakespeares reputation peaked during the Victorian period and is now in decline, Hamlet remains famous for its soliloquies”
Gary Taylor
“To be or not to be has of course taken on a life of its own”
‘De Grazia’
“Hamlets consciousness, it is said, as dramatised primarily through his soliloquies, is what makes it so precocious”
Generic comment ->
“Critics and scholars often disagree over whether his most famous speech does or doesn’t tell us of his own suicidal tendencies”
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“The soliloquies give us a sense of his intelligence and his frustration, and dramatically they serve the usual end of allowing the character with superior awareness to set up situations of dramatic irony by his confidences in the audience”
Eagleton
“It is difficult to read shakespeare without feeling that he was almost familiar with the writings of Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche and Freud”
Freud
- Oedipus complex
“Unconscious understood the unconscious of his hero”
Psychoanalytic critics
“Hamlet and Ophelia have become respectively the iconic representatives of male and female instability”
Gaston Bachelard
“Symbolic connections between women, water and death, seeing drowning as an appropriate merging into the female element for women who are always associated with liquids”
“Visual images of Ophelia either about to drown or drowning became increasingly popular in the nineteenth century”
Elaine Showalter
“The particular circumstances of Ophelias madness have made her ‘a potent and obsessive figure in our cultural mythology”
“She represents a powerful archetype in which female insanity and female sexuality are inextricably intertwined”
Elaine Showalter
“Melancholy was a fashionable disease among young men in London late 16th century, but was associated with intellectual and imaginative geniuses in them, whereas women’s melancholy was seen instead as a biological and emotional in its origins”
Schiesari
“The very word ‘hysteria’ implies a female psychological condition”
Jacqueline Rose
“Femininity itself becomes the problem within the play, and within attempts to interpret it, but paradoxically femininity is also seen as the source of creativity and the very principle of the aesthetic process in other psychoanalytical readings”
