Hamlet/ AO5 Flashcards
Hamlet’s conduct is cruel… there is something very bloody in it, so inhumane, so unworthy of a hero
Thomas Hanmer 1736
Hamlet is rather an instrument than an agent
Samuel Johnson 1765
Hamlet represents the type of man whose power of direct action is paralysed by an excessive development of intellect
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe 1795
Hamlet seems incapable of deliberate action
William Hazlitt 1817
Hamlet is no better than the sinner whom he is to punish
Sigmund Freud 1900
Melancholia is at the root of Hamlet’s problems
A.C Bradley 1904
Hamlet’s genius might even be his doom
A.C Bradley 1904
Nothing stands between Hamlet and suicide except religious awe
A.C Bradley 1904
Hamlet may even seem a monster of inconsistency
John Dover Wilson 1935
Ophelia’s dead, virgin body is fetishised by Hamlet and Laertes alike
Valerie Traub 1988
Hamlet is intensely aware of himself as an “actor” who is continually being cast by other people into roles with which he partially engages, but which he ultimately resists
Graham Holderness 1989
Hamlet idealises the medieval world of his father but the Denmark of the play is no longer ruled by these values
Graham Holderness 1989
Hamlet resembles the archetype of the violent and visionary “Dionysian” man… no action of theirs can work any change in the eternal condition of things
Friedrich Nietzsche 1872
Hamlet is presented as fashionably introspective and melancholy while Ophelia becomes alienated, acting out the madness Hamlet only plays at
Carol Thomas Needy 1991
Hamlet is surrounded by people and places which remorselessly remind him of the dead king
John Kerrigan 1996
The weapons finally used to kill Claudius mark the attack as spontaneous retaliation, not long-nurtured vengeance
John Kerrigan 1996
