Hamlet Critics Flashcards
‘Revenge exists on the margin between justice and crime.’
Belsey
‘All duties seem holy for Hamlet’
Van Goethe
‘Laertes is the typical avenger’
Kitteridge
‘Hamlet’s principal concern is not revenge but to purify his mother’
Adelman
‘Tragedy is made blacker by the jewels of humour in which it is bestowed’
Alexander Crawford
‘Gertrude moves throughout Claudius’ shadow’
Barker
‘Gertrude is the scapegoat of the play’
Rose
‘Ophelia has no story without Hamlet’
Lee Edwards
‘Ophelia is a player trying to respond to several directors at once’
David Levernz
‘His grief for his dead father seems more nostalgia than loss’
Worral
‘Hamlet is obliged to act on the spur of the moment’
Coleridge
‘Hamlet has no straight forward revenge stratergy’
Ann Thompson
‘The melancholy hero, doomed to an awful fate’
G.H Lewes
‘Ophelia’s madness fills the heart with tenderness
Johnson
‘Claudius has corrupted the whole kingdom of Denmark’
Atlick
‘It is a play about political chicanery’
Worral
‘his habitual feeling is one of disgust at life and everything in it, himself included’
A.C Bradley
‘she represents the strong emotions that the Elizabethans thought womanish’
Showalter
‘Ophelia is stifled by the authority of the male world’ -
Dusinbere
‘Claudius is a good and gentle king’
Knight
‘The ghost is the linchpin of the play’
John Wilson
‘In Shakespears society, the ideal female is cherished for her youth, beauty and purity’
Rogers
‘Hamlets madness is associated with intellectual and imaginative genius but Ophelia’s affliction is erotomania, of love madness’
Showalter
‘Ophelia is a play within a play’
David Leverenz
‘pleasing men is Gertrude’s main interest’
Rebecca Smith
‘he thinks too much and does too little’
Williamson
‘(Horatio) loves Hamlet with all his heart’
Mabillard
‘desire to take his father’s place in his mother’s affections’
Ernest Jones
‘Of all the unclean ones, Hamlet was the uncleanest. But he accused only the others’
D.H. Lawrence
‘pure, noble and most moral nature’
Van Goethe
‘a character of ambiguous morality whom we can never fully know’ (on Gertrude)
G.F. Bradby
‘disgust at the feminine passivity within himself’
David Leverenz
‘Hamlet is an element of evil’
Wilson Knight
‘Gertrude is in fact protecting her son from the man who murdered her husband’
Graf
‘Gertrude is shallow and a sexual being’
Mabillard
