Hamlet Critical Essay quotes Flashcards
David Scott Kastan (A rarity most beloved: Shakespeare and the Idea of Tragedy- 2003)
‘they came more from medieval articulations of the genre than classical ones.’
‘the characters struggle unsuccessfully to reconstruct a coherent worldview from the ruins of the old.’
‘it is the emotional truth of the struggle rather than the metaphysical truth of the worldview that is at the centre of these plays.’
‘Shakespeare’s tragedies provoke the questions about the cause of the pain and loss the plays so agonizingly portray,’
‘in the refusal of any answers starkly prevent any confident attribution of meaning or value to human suffering.’
‘“There is no such thing as Shakespearian tragedy: there are only Shakespearian tragedies”’- Kenneth Muir
‘Tragedy, for Shakespeare, is the genre of uncompensated suffering,’
‘the successive plays reveal an ever more profound formal acknowledgement of their desolating controlling logic.’
A.D Nuttall (Aristotle and After- 1996)
‘In the tragic theatre suffering and death are perceived as matter of grief and fear, after which it seems that grief and fear become in their turn matter for enjoyment.’
‘if people go again to see such things, they must in some way enjoy them.’
‘if you like the disturbing kind of play then this disturbance is something you like, must itself be a further mode of pleasure.’
‘it sets an allied, similarly challenging problem- that of enjoyed discomfort- alongside it.’
‘pleasure need not occupy the foreground of consciousness,’
A.C Bradley (The Substance of Shakespearean Tragedy- 1991)
‘such a tragedy brings before us a considerable number of persons…but it is pre-eminently the story of one person, the ‘hero’, or at most of two, the ‘hero’ and ‘heroine’.’
‘no play at the end of which the hero remains alive is, in the full Shakespearean sense, a tragedy.’
‘the story depicts also the troubled part of the hero’s life which precedes and leads up to his death… an instantaneous death occuring by ‘accident’ isn the midst of prosperity would not suffice for it.’
‘It is, in fact, essentially a tale of suffering and calamity conducting to death.’
‘The suffering and calamity are moreover, exceptional. They befall a conspicuous person.’… ‘They are also, as a rule, unexpected, and contrasted with previous happiness or glory.’
‘Tragedy with Shakespeare is concerned always with persons of ‘high degree’; often with kings or princes’
Maynard Mack (Tragedy and Madness-1993)
‘the hero’s second phase. That is his experience of madness’
‘madness, when actually exhibited, was dramatically useful,’
‘madness is to some degree a punishment or doom, corresponding to the adage’ adage= proverb/saying
‘in both instances the madness has a further dimension as insight,’
‘Hamlet wears… the guise of the madman.’
‘both he and Hamlet can be privileged in madness to say things- Hamlet about the corruption of human nature,’ (he= King Lear)
‘Shakespeare could hardly have risked apart from this license’- avoiding getting his head chopped off
‘the madness verbally assigned to other Shakespearean tragic heroes- contains both punishment and insight.’
‘Shakespeare himself, perhaps- who had been given the power to see the truth, can convey it only through poetry- what we commonly call a ‘fiction’, and dismiss.’
John Kerrigan (Revenge Tragedy: Aeschylus to Armageddon- 1996)
‘Hamlet never promises to revenge, only to remember.’
‘Such memories divert and slow the play,’
‘Such true, false, and cynical remembrances all reflect on the play’s chief link with the past.’
‘His words advertise a privacy which remains his throughout the play.’
‘Remembrance haunts him, even to the point of madness, and call this the heart of his mystery.’
‘In memory, Hamlet eludes us.’
‘Hamlet, healthily enough, is trying to shake of at least the last part of the burden of his father’s memory.’
‘His inky cloak is ambiguous… indicates his desire eventually to detach himself from him.’
‘she throws his love back onto the father who has never (it would seem) emotionally betrayed him.’
‘leaves the prince surrounded by people and places which remorselessly remind him of the dead king.’
‘the ghost condemns Hamlet to an endless, fruitless ‘yearning for the lost figure.’
‘Ophelia wants to divest herself of every shred of attachment.’
‘Through the loss of Ophelia, Hamlet feels that of his father- which is why the hysteria which follows is in excess of its apparent object.’
‘the sexuality which the prince denounces is that of his mother as well as Ophelia.’
Janet Adelman (Man and Wife Is One Flesh: Hamlet and the Confrontation with the Maternal Body- 1992)
‘She is kept ambiguously innocent as a character, but in the deep fantasy that structures the play’s imagery, she plays the role of the missing Eve’- about Gertrude
‘Hamlet’s father has become unavailable to him… through the complex vulnerability that his death demonstrates’
‘his disappearance in effect throws Hamlet into the domain of the engulfing mother… the loss of the father turns out in fact to mean the psychic domination of the mother.’
‘it is the spectre of his mother, not his uncle=father, who paralyses his will. The Queen, the Queen’s to blame.’
‘this shift of agency and of danger from male to female seems to me characteristic of the fantasy structure of Hamlet and of Shakespeare’s imagination in the plays that follow.’
‘the main psychological task that Hamlet seems to set himself is not to avenge his father’s death but to remake his mother: to remake her in the image of the Virgin Mother… repairing the boundaries of his selfhood.’
‘Hamlet seems motivated more by his mother than by his father’
‘he manages to achieve his revenge only when he can avenge his mother’s death, not his father’s’
‘Hamlet with Gertrude in the clost scene seems much more central, much more vivid, than any confrontation between Hamlet and Claudius.’
‘the playlet is in fact designed to catch the conscience of the queen’- (murder of Gonzago)
‘worrying about the extent to which he can repudiate the Nero in himself’- ‘the apex of the revenge plot’
‘Not even Hamlet could reasonably expect to manage his mother’s moral reclamation immediately after he has killed her husband.’
William Hazlitt (Hamlet- 1916)
‘the distresses of Hamlet are transferred, by the turn of his mind, to the general account of humanity.’
‘He is not a common-place pendant.’
‘Hamlet is the most remarkable for the ingenuity, originality, and unstudied development of character.’
‘The character of Hamlet stands quite by itself. It is not a character marked by strength of will or even of passion, but by the refinement of thought and sentiment.’
‘Hamlet is as little of the hero as a man can well be’
‘He seems incapable of deliberate action and is only hurried into extremities on the spur of the occasion when he has not time to reflect.’
‘At other times, when he is most bound to act, he remains puzzled, undecided, and sceptical, dallies with his purposes, till the occasion is lost, and finds out some pretence to relapse into indolence and thoughtfulness again.’
‘He is the prince of philosophical speculators’… ‘he cannot have his revenge perfect’
‘he is sensible of his own weakness, taxes himself with it, and tries to reason himself out of it.’
Kate Flint (Madness and Melancholy in Hamlet)
‘an almost text book type of the melancholic’ (Hamlet)
Carol Thomas Neely (Ophelia’s madness- 1992)- Ophelia
‘Ophelia becomes alienated, acting into the madness only Hamlet plays at.’
‘Ophelia’s own affliction provides a useful point in contrast with the Prince.’
‘somatised and its content eroticised’
‘must be watched, contained within the family.’- so she doesn’t expose anything through her madness/truth telling (also links to Maynard Mack’s essay)
‘becomes alienated’- AO3: has 0 value as she has lost her virginity- lack of worth for dowry.
MORE AO3: Freud analysis of hysteria- womb pushing the heart into your head; cure= flowers (in which Ophelia gives away (suicide connotations))
Carol Thomas Neely (Ophelia’s madness- 1992)- Hamlet
‘Hamlet is presented as fashionably introspective and melancholy’- AO3: Timothy Bright + Melancholy (John Donne)
‘his restored identity is validated, symbolically as well as literally’
‘it manifests itself in social criticism, and is viewed as politically dangerous.’- commenting on the state of Denmark under Claudius’ monarchy.
‘politicised in form and content’- gendered, taken more seriously as he is male.
‘detached from family and from sexuality, seemingly free from passivity and loss of control, capable of philosophical contemplation and revenge.’
OTHER AO1/2: Hamlet’s roles- madman, prince, director, player, avenger- perhaps his act of madness is part of his ‘roles’?
John Dixon Hunt
‘the human body forms human experience, being the medium through which men suffer and act’
‘the body also deforms human beings and threatens ultimately to reduce them to nothing’
‘The eyes of the mind, if they are open, behold in the play’s language a spectacle of ruined bodies fully as grim as what their physical counterparts behold on stage’
‘‘The body politic’ is more than a metaphor for social organisation in this play, it describes a tightly integrated world where reality stems palpably from the centres of political and religious authority.’
‘Shakespeare seems to be methodically deconstructing the body.’
‘The attitude towards corporeal existence inherent in the play’s imagery figures prominently in the protagonists thinking as well; it contributes to his inability to ‘act’ by challenging what he regards as the integrity of his being.’ - Yorick scene (A5S1) + to be or not to be (A3S1)
Catherine Belsey (Tales of the Troubled Dead)
‘When the frozen soil was unresponsive, people filled the dark evenings with games and pastimes, among them storytelling.’- AO3 for ghost stories
‘the conventions governing winter’s tales override an emerging realism.’
‘Hamlet gathers up a range of threads of distinct traditions to weave a tale that continues to haunt the imagination of the modern world.’
‘this play marks a critical moment in the development of the genre’
‘ghosts defy the laws of nature as well as the principles of logic.’
‘what is outside the framework of logic has made its way in; the unknown has intruded into the familiar.’
‘Shakespeare’s ghost evades definition.’
‘the unknown has intruded into the familiar’
‘fear is not in these instances, however psychological its symptoms.’
the uncertainty deepens the enigma that surrounds his Ghost’s identity.’
G Wilson Knight (From the Embassy of Death)
‘Hamlet is a living death in the midst of life’
‘That sepulchral cataclysm at the beginning is the key to the whole play’- sepulchral= tomb/gloomy
‘this play is so rich in death’
‘we are propelled to the last holocaust of mortality’
Andrew Brown (Hamlet’s Divided Self- Eng Review)
‘how much has that consciousness been formed by the distance that he chooses to put between himself and the society in which he lives?’
‘Hamlet explicitly rejects his heritage’- inky cloak (‘cast thy knighted colour off’- Gertrude/’tis not alone my inky cloak, good mother’- Hamlet)- A1S2
‘exposes the self destructiveness of the martial ethos that prevails in these Northern kingdoms’
-Denmark (or at least) Elsinore is constantly aware and afraid of potential threats/attacks
-Hamlet has become influenced to constantly become aware of his enemies (‘from this time forth, my thoughts be bloody or nothing worth.’)
‘Hamlet seems distanced from his father’
‘He is a thinker in a society of do-ers , a student surrounded by warriors.’
‘Hamlet never questions why his father did not nominate him as heir to the throne.’
‘Hamlet’s consciousness is a product of the conflicting pressures that Denmark and Wittenberg have imposed on him.’
-Influenced by his surrounding built/natural environment; there isn’t enough mental/physical space for Hamlet to express himself in ways he’d want to- England being his space of refuge.
‘The tragedy of Hamlet is not his single death… It’s that the possibilities he represents die with him.’
‘Hamlet is the tragedy of an emergent culture being destroyed by a tacit union of the dominant and regressive,’ - tacit= understood or implied without being stated
‘The hegemony of the state is such that it can reconcile a nation to its enemy and stifle the emergent new order which Hamlet represents.’
Camille Paglia
‘for the head of state to be at ease on leisurely afternoons means the nation is at peace.’
‘a kind napping would symbolise the harmony of nature and society.’- AO3: body politic/kings to bodies (if the king is diseased, the whole country is) + Devine right of kings (as a king, you’re God’s representative on Earth).
‘Claudius resembles a gardener tenderly watering his garden.’
‘Shows civilisation collapsing into the realm of gross matter.’
‘with unnerving intensity and overbearing paternal authority.’- Ghost’s relationship with Prince Hamlet.
‘magnificent flight of strange, lurid poetry.’
‘presses his heavy revelation on his son.’
