Critics Flashcards
Nigel Alexander on vengance in the play
Fortinbras, Hamlet and Laertes all kniw their fathers have been killed. All in their own fashion of human behaviour and the effect it has upon the lives and fortunes of all of the characters . The varied ways in which individuals meet the challenge of their common humanity is compared and contrasted
Types of agression and their effect- Nigel Alexander
Hamlet dramatisises a number of possible human responses to direct and indirect agression . It is therefore concerned with the kind of internal psychological pressures which may destroy not only an individual or a society but the human species
Nigel Alexander on Hamlet ‘dual mind’
Hamlets mind is a t war with itself because he is aware that more than one single set of answers exists to the problems which face him
The influences of Montaigne essays on Shakespeare’s Hamlet (according to John Russel Brown)
Montaigne’s scepticism, his concern with the nature of truth, honesty and fame , his conscience and questioning of both himself and others, and his repeated contemplation of death have many parallels with Hamlet’s soliloquies and intellectual restlessness. WHILST IS CANNOT BE PROVED HAT SHAKESPEARE HAD READ MONTAIGNE AT THIS TIME OT CAN BE SAID CONFIDENTLY THAT THE TWO AUTHORS SHARED COMMON CONCERNS (NATURE OF TRUTH AND DIFFICULTY OF SEEKING IT)
earliest surving allusion to a play called Hamlet
Made in 1589 by Thomas Nashe
which critic first drew attention to hamlets delay
Thomas Hanmer in 1736 when he suggested the importance of the delay for the structure of the play ‘there would have been an end to the play’ oif hamlet had carried out the task exactly as his father had set it out
Dr Johnson on the soliloquy in Hamlet
confusion in hamlet’s soliloquys arise from ‘a man distracted with contrariety of desires and overwhelmed with the magnitude of his own purpose [which suggests that the thought of the soliloquy] is connected rather in speakers mind than on his tounge’
Voltaire on Shakespeare, and when
1733 ‘Shakespeare boasted a string fruitfull genius: he was natural and sublime but had not so much as a single spark of good taste or knew one rule of drama…the greatest merit of this dramatic poet has been the ruin of the english stage’
voltaire on hamlet
one would think that this work was the fruit of the imagination of a drunken savage
Edgar Allan Poe on the error of Hamlet
We talkm of Hamlet the man, instead of Hamlet the dramatis persona- of Hamlet that God in place of Hamlet that Shakespeare created
what is structuralism
Critics who approach a text as an interesting linguistic phenomenon. Structuralists explore the ways in which key words generate about them force fields of associations and value systems.
Marx on consciousness (quote and text)
‘It is not the consciousness of men that determin their being but on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness’ (Preface to the critique of political economy)
what is structuralism
Critics who approach a text as an interesting linguistic phenomenon. Structuralists explore the ways in which key words generate about them force fields of associations and value systems.
Marx on consciousness (quote and text)
‘It is not the consciousness of men that determine their being but on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness’ (Preface to the critique of political economy)
De Grazia on Hamlet (in loght of romantic criticism)
she rejects a post romantic reading of hamlet as a play concerned with an exploration of the inner life of its central character. She argues that the stress on the internal character (and supposed ‘modernity’) of hamelt has blindd us to the fact that the play is as much a history as a tragedy and that the heros behaviour is motivated by his uncle and mother’s
