Hamlet AO5 Flashcards
Adelman (sex, morality, women)
“Hamlet is more motivated by his mother than his father”
O’Connor (morality, fate, duty)
“[King Hamlet] is the catalyst that sets the play in motion”
O’Connor (religion, fate, morality)
“[King Hamlet] serves as a symbol for the religious ambivalence present in England”
O’Connor (morality, religion)
“To the protestant, all ghosts are apparitions of the Devil”
Brucher (morality, duty, justice, power)
“Revengers create their own justice, often in ways that imitate or even mock divine justice and that compromise their own moral impulses”
Doran (women, sex, morality)
“[presentation of women] Often in the background or blurred out - indicative of how they are useless/inferior”
Dusinberre (women, sex)
“placing chastity and reputation for chastity above even the virtue of truthfulness”
Dusinberre (morality, women, sex)
“no chance to develop an individual conscience of her own”
Edwards (women, sex)
“We can imagine Hamlet’s story without Ophelia, but Ophelia literally has no story without Hamlet.”
Glasgow
“Horatio is a harbinger of truth”
Hall (power, duty, action)
“Laertes and Fortinbras are representatives of action”
Heilburn (women, sex, power)
“Ophelia is surrounded by three power males: Hamlet, Laertes and Polonius. Without these men to make decisions for her she goes mad”
Ryan (duty, morality)
“spends almost entirety of the play spectacularly failing to keep his oath”
Lacan (women, sex)
“[Ophelia] obviously essential. she is linked forever, for centuries, to the figure of Hamlet”
Leclerc (women, sex)
“Woman is valuable in so far as she permits man to fulfil his being as man”
Magnus (power, justice, action, duty)
“Laertes is a crucial and explicit dramatic foil to Hamlet”
Mack (madness, morality, fate)
“Cassandra’s madness… she is doomed to know… she is doomed never to be believed”
Rubenfeld (power, morality, action)
“Claudius is the embodiment of Hamlet’s own secret wishes; he is a mirror of Hamlet himself”
Showalter
“A potent and obsessive figure in our cultural mythology” [Ophelia]
Von Goethe (morality, duty, justice, power, fate)
“Impossibilities have been required of Hamlet; not in themselves impossibilities, but such for him.”
Von Goethe (religion, duty, justice, fate)
“All duties seem holy to Hamlet”
Wagner (madness, women, sex)
“perhaps the frailty of women has embittered him to callousness”
Knight (morality, fate, religion)
“he [Hamlet] is in fact the poison in the vines of the community.”
Knight (morality, duty)
“Claudius is a good and gentle king, enmeshed by the chain of causality linking him to his crime.”
Campbell (madness, morality)
“Hamlet is the malcontent, he’s emotionally unstable, not insane”
Kirsch (women, sex, morality, duty, justice)
“Oedipal echoes cannot be disentangled from Hamlet’s grief”
Bradley (religion, morality, duty, action)
“Hamlet is unable to carry out the sacred duty, imposed by divine authority, of punishing an evil man by death.”
Alexander (morality, duty, action)
“The play does not offer any conclusions about what is the right response to the questions it poses about human aggression not because it is confused but because Hamlet is aware that more than one single set of answers exists.”
Belsey (justice, morality)
“Revenge is not justice. It is rather an act of injustice on behalf of justice”
Hazlitt
“It is we who are Hamlet,” most of all in the way in which his “powers have been eaten up by thought.”
L.C Knights (morality, justice, action)
“sterile concentration on death and evil.” [Hamlet]
Bernhardt (women, sex)
“It is not male parts but the male brain I prefer…Ophelia brought nothing to me”
