Hamlet critical quotes Flashcards
Witt: metatheatricality and development
Through contact with theatre, Hamlet learns the complexity of the ‘relationship between inner and outer’
T.S Eliot
Hamlet fails as it eschews action [central to classical theatre]
De Grazia
Shakespeare ‘internalises plot’- action becomes ‘psychological’
Nietzsche
His ‘knowledge kills action’
Belsey
‘most discontinous….not a unified subject’
Grendler
‘collisions between emergent and residual discourses’
Fowler - mirror
Provides ‘moral mirror’ for audience, especially highlighted by metadrama
Fowler - Elizabethan Drama
Structured ‘by scenes not acts…by ideas as much as plots’
‘profound realism’ - realistic to emotions, not reality
Fowler - Ophelia
Adds an ‘additional viewpoint’ encouraging ‘reflexiveness’
Fowler - realism
‘Profound realism’ - to emotions, not reality
‘what may seem gaps [to a modern audience] are really transitions between perspectives’
Believes that these perspectives can be ‘synthesised’ - dispute this
May have some naturalistic realism (modernism) but also ‘relates morally or psychologically rather than causally’ (still influenced by Cycle Plays/medieval realism)
Emma Smith - context
Looks at issue of inheritance obliquely through Hamlet not succeeding to throne
‘A play that looks backwards: theatrically, structurally, psychologically, and religiously’
Emma Smith - repetition
‘Re-venge, like re-membering, takes on the quality of repetition’
A.C. Bradley
Diagnosed Hamlet with Freudian melancholy
Gillian Woods: lesson in…
Hamlet interprets everything as a lesson in performance; yet cannot himself escape ‘the human impulse to perform’, for him ‘performance is part of reality’
Auerbach
Notes ‘mixed style’ in Hamlet - embraces the everyday as well as the elevated
Schmitt - context
The queen’s ambiguous role emerges out of contemporary questions about guilt of Mary Queen of Scots
Benjamin
‘every elemental utterance gains meaning from the allegorical, and everything allegorical acquires emphasis from the material world of the senses’
Colie
‘never sacrifices naturalism to symbolism’
Belsey - the self
‘public and private, social and personal, are not yet fully differentiated’
Frank Kermode
‘doubling’ as key feature
