Hamlet Critics

Question 1

1748 Voltaire.

Answer 1

“a vulgar and barbarous tragedy.”

Question 2

1765 Coleridge.

Answer 2

“Hamlet is through the whole play an instrument rather than an agent” … “more a thinker than a doer” … “a habitual dweller with his own thoughts, preferring the possible to the real”

Question 3

1795 Goethe.

Answer 3

Hamlet has a “pure and nobel and most moral nature” … “represents the effects of a great action laid upon a soul unfit for the performance of it.”

Question 4

1808 Schlege.

Answer 4

“Tragedy of thought” … “a hypocrite towards himself” … “his far fetched scruples are often mere pretexts to cover his want of determination”

Question 5

1898 Brandes (Ophelia).

Answer 5

“She is a soft, yielding creature, with no power of resistance; a loving soul; but without the passion which gives her strength.”

Question 6

1899 Anna Jameson.

Answer 6

“Poor Ophelia. Too soft, too good too fair.”

Question 7

1905 A.C. Bradley.

Answer 7

“Hamlet mostly brings home to us the sense of the soul’s infinity.”

Question 8

1940s C.S. Lewis.

Answer 8

Hamlet is “not an individual at all, but everyman, haunted by original sin.”

Question 9

1960s L.C. Knights.

Answer 9

Hamlet is a “young rebel” … The play is “forever suggestive”

Question 10

1977 J. Lacan.

Answer 10

Ophelia is obviously essential she is linked forever, for centuries, to the figure of Hamlet.”