Critics

Question 1

Aristotle

The Poetics

Answer 1

an imitation of an action that is serious, complete, and of a certain magnitude; in language embellished with each kind of artistic ornament, the several kinds being found in separate parts of the play; in the form of action, not of narrative; through pity and fear effecting the proper purgation of these emotions

defined tragedy as

Question 2

Aristotle

The Poetics

Tragic protagonist

Answer 2

the tragic hero, defined in Aristotle’s Poetics as “an intermediate kind of personage, not pre-eminently virtuous and just” whose misfortune is attributed, not to vice or depravity, but an error of judgment. The hero is fittingly described as good in spite of an infirmity of character.

Question 3

Andrew Benett and Nicholas Royale

described ghosts

dramatic method

Answer 3

“The embodiment of strange repetition or recurrence: it is a revenant it comes back”

vicious cycle of violence

Question 4

Leverenz

misogyny gender

Answer 4

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

Question 5

Dusinberre

misogyny, gender

Answer 5

“Ophelia is stifled by the authority of the male world.”

Question 6

Smith

Answer 6

“Gertrude has not moved in the play towards independence or a moral stance.”

Gertrude used as merely a plot device theory

Question 7

Showalter

misogyny, gender

Answer 7

“Ophelia embodies the male attitudes to female sexuality and insanity”

Question 8

Bradley

Answer 8

Laertes “possesses in abundance the very quality which the hero seems to lack.”

Question 9

Bradley

Answer 9

Hamlet is “a man of exquisite moral sensibility”

Question 10

Bamber

Answer 10

Gertrude is “a character of ambiguous morality whom we can never fully know”

Question 11

Williamson

Answer 11

“Hamlet is too intellectual to be practical”

Question 12

Besley

Answer 12

“Revenge exists on the margins between crime and justice”

Question 13

Bacon

Answer 13

“Revenge is a kind of wild justice”

Question 14

Austen

Hamlet

Answer 14

“A tragic hero who knows action is required of him, but whose purpose is blunted by an inability to act.”

Question 15

Brucher

Answer 15

“Revengers create their own civil justice.”

Question 16

Alexander

theme

Answer 16

“The desire for vengeance is seen as part of a continuing pattern of human conduct.”

Question 17

Belsey

Answer 17

“Revenge is not justice. It is rather an act of injustice on behalf of justice.”

Question 18

Helen Gardener

Answer 18

“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.”

Question 19

Hunt

Hamlet

Answer 19

“In order to act the part of revenger, he must become the bloody villain himself.”

Question 20

West

Answer 20

‘The indecisive explanations Shakespeare gives … creates awe and mystery .. in contemporary consciousness such experience kept a preponderance of terror and doubt that overrode normal confidence in pneumatological rationalisations. We see just this overriding take place in the sceptical Horatio, and Shakespeare meant, perhaps, that it should take place in the audience too.’

Horatio as the audience’s touchstone

Question 21

Alan Gardiner

Answer 21

‘The society depicted … is oppressively narrow and claustrophobic; for the audience as well as for Hamlet, Denmark is indeed something of a prison’

repressive society = violent outcome

Question 22

Alan Gardiner

Answer 22

‘The revelation that Claudius is a usurper and guilty of fratricide confirms that he is the principal source of the rottenness which pervades Denmark’

health of royal family directly connected to the nations health

Question 23

Alan Gardiner

Answer 23

‘It is difficult to view Fortinbras’ accession as anything other than a triumph of mediocrity .. his coming to power does not mark a radical alteration in the ethos of Denmark; it remains a society in which the qualities we most admire in Hamlet have no place’.

hamlet’s progressive ideas about ethics, religion and society are gone

Question 24

Helen Gardner

Answer 24

‘In the denouement of Hamlet the irony is profound. Claudius, who has arranged the whole performance in order to destroy Hamlet, is himself destroyed and destroys his queen’

Question 25

J H Walter

Answer 25

Horatio is the witness and measure of truth’
‘Horatio has the ability to detach himself from events and examine them dispassionately, he is stoical constant’

horation touchstone to the audience

Question 26

J H Walter

Answer 26

Polonius is ‘a cold hearted devil’ prepared to ‘gamble with his daughter’s distress to improve his own standing’

Question 27

Jan Kott

theory

Answer 27

sees hamlet as a political play in which Hamlet, Laertes, Fortinbras and Ophelia play parts ‘imposed on them from outside’

Question 28

Stephen Siddall

Answer 28

It is not difficult to see why Hamlet values the theatre and the players. As a rebel and an idealist, he himself constantly adopts roles in relation to the world he inhabits, generally to disconcert the orthodox ; Gertrude, Claudius, Polonius, Ophelia (and later Osric and Laertes) all have to face performances from him that are designed to baffle and humiliate’

Question 29

Kate Flint

Hamlet

Answer 29

comedy i described as a standard cure both for melancholy and for the melancholic’s inability to adjust to his situation’

‘he uses more puns than any other Shakespearean figure’

Question 30

Kate Flint

Answer 30

Hamlet’s madness ‘gives him the license of a fool to speak cruel truths, transgressing the language of social decorum’

Question 31

Kate Flint

Answer 31

Claims Hamlet’s repressed oedipal complex prevents him from avenging due to his awareness ‘that her himself is literally no better that the sinner whom he is to punish’

Question 32

Ernest Jones

Answer 32

When sexual repression is highly pronounced, as with Hamlet, then both types of women are felt to be hostile: The pure one out of resentment at her impulses, these sensual one out of the temptation she offers to plunge into guiltiness. Misogyny … is the inevitable result’

Question 33

Ernest Jones

Hamlet

Answer 33

‘In reality his uncle incorporates the deepest and most buried part of his own personality, so that he cannot kill him without also killing himself’

Question 34

Michael D Bristol

theory

Answer 34

‘Although the play is filled with tragedy and horror, many of the scenes are extremely funny, and indeed for much of the action, Hamlet and Claudius stalk each other like two murderous clowns attempting to achieve strategic advantage over the other’

Question 35

Colin Burrow

Answer 35

Hamlet assocciates Horatio with ‘Roman Stoicicm’ which has a revival in the late 16th century. Stoics ‘completely controlled his passions by his reason and so insulated himself from the influence of fortune’ ‘and impassive hero’

Question 36

Maurice Charney and Hanna Charney (1977)

ophelia, misogyny

Answer 36

argue that “her madness… enables her to assert her being; she is no longer enforced to keep silent and play the dutiful daughter”.

Question 37

Belsey

Answer 37

“Revenge is always in excess of justice.”

Question 38

Johnny Patrick

theory

Answer 38

A level students were asked to consider that ‘Hamlet should have been an actor, not a prince’, as though these are two mutually exclusive roles’ ‘a good king must be a good actor’

This also gives ‘rise to a number of profound anxieties about political control; if kingship is all about performance, anyone can play the king’

Question 39

Catharine Jo Dixon

dramatic method

Answer 39

metatheacricality .. emphasises the literary artifice behind the production’

it ‘is a device whereby the play comments on itself, drawing attention to the literal circumstance of its own production’

Question 40

Raman Selden

Answer 40

‘Hamlet identifies himself with Claudius, because he did the thing the son unconsciously desired to do’

Question 41

HDF Kitto

theory, denmark, hamlet

Answer 41

‘The general enemy is the rottenness that pervades Denmark; therefore it is shown in many persons and many guises’

‘Shakespeare’s real theme is not the moral or theological or social problem of crime and vengeance, still less its effect on a single mind and soul, but the corroding power of sin’

Question 42

TS Elliott

theory

Answer 42

“The Mona Lisa of literature.”

Question 43

Jan Knott

theory

Answer 43

“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.”

evergreen play as it is always topical

Question 44

Alexander Crawford

Answer 44

“Much evidence in the play that Hamlet deliberately feigned fits of madness.”

madness

Question 45

Samuel Johnson

Answer 45

“Hamlet is rather an instrument than an agent.”

Question 46

Goethe

Answer 46

A poetic and morally sensitive soul crushed by the barbarous task of murder.

hamlet as a tragic hero

Question 47

Smith

Answer 47

Gertrude’s “speeches include references to humour, virtue, flowers, and a dove’s golden couplets; neither structure not content suggests wantonness.”

Question 48

Peter Reynolds

Answer 48

Once the ghost manifests itself for a second time, the pace of the action immediately quickens . . . the actors are, paradoxically, in some way enlivened by this creature from the dead; each abandons a sedentary position to assume and active role.

Question 49

Charney

ophelia, misogyny

Answer 49

“through madness, the women on stage can suddenly make a forceful assertion of their being”

Question 50

Kirsch

Answer 50

“Hamlet’s grief is intensified by the functional loss of his mother and the inability to mourn his father”

Question 51

Janet Adelman

theory

Answer 51

‘The confrontation of Hamlet with Gertrude in the closet scene seems much more central, much more vivid, than any confrontation between Hamlet and Claudius’

Question 52

Stanley Wells

shakespeare

Answer 52

‘Never shackled by convention, he offered his actors the alternation between serious and comic modes from play to play, and often also within plays themselves’

Question 53

Stanley Wells

shakespeare

Answer 53

‘As his experience grows, his verse and prose become more supple, the patterning less apparent, more ready to accomodate the rhythms of ordinary speech, more colliquial in diction.’

Question 54

alan sinfield

Answer 54

Hamlet has become the prototype of the enigmatic, sensitive and thoughtful young man, damaged by a corrupt society yet stimulated by interaction with everyone around him.

Question 55

Romans 12:19-20

theory

Answer 55

‘Vengeance is mine, I will repay, saith the Lord. Therefore if thine enemy hunger, feed him: if he thirst give him drink. For in so doing thou shalt heap coals of fire on his head’

this argument is further supported in Richard II when Gloucester’s widow calls upon Gaunt to avenge her but he counsels christian patience: “Let heaven revenge, for I may never lift
An angry arm against His minister”

Question 56

A. C. Bradley

Answer 56

Iago is the counterpart of Hamlet, who tries to find reasons for his delay in pursuing a design which excites his aversion. And most of !ago’s reasons for action are no more the real ones than Hamlet’s reasons for delay were the real ones. Each is moved by forces which he does not understand; and it is probably no accident that these two studies of states psychologically so similar were produced at about the same period.

Question 57

Bradley

Answer 57

the main reason is surely that this tendency, as we see it in Hamlet, betokens a nimbleness and flexibility of mind which is characteristic of him and not of the later less many-sided heroes.

Question 58

Alan Sinfield

Answer 58

Misogyny is routine, reiterated , and active in the plot, as though the play were designed to persuade us of it as a fact.

Actually, little of the rottenness in Denmark derives from the women; rather, they are pretexts in the attempts of the men to gain advantage and control within a corrupt political elite.