Hamlet Critics Flashcards
Lee Edwards: Gender
“We can imagine Hamlet’s story without Ophelia, but Ophelia literally has no story without Hamlet.”
Helen Faucitt Martin: Gender
“[Ophelia is] only interesting when she loses the little wits she had.”
Belsey: gender
“women were everything men were not: silent, submissive, powerless.”
David Leverenz: Gender
“Hamlet’s disgust at the feminine passivity in himself is translated into violent revulsion against women.”
Rebecca Smith: Gertrude
“Gertrude is caught between two mighty opposites.”
Maragaret Atwood: Gertrude
‘Gertrude Talks Back’, 1993, suggestion that she killed OKH.
Sonia Massai 2018: Gender
“One of the most fiercely misogynistic plays […] Gertrude is the target of this hatred.”
Hippolyte Taine: Corruption
“The story of moral poisoning.”
Coleridge: Madness
“Hamlet suffered from an overbalance of the imaginative power.”
Changing interpretations: Queer Studies
Hamlet / Horatio (2020) explores the concept of the two men being lovers
Cedric Watts: Revenge
“Hamlet repeatedly displays a very credible resistance to that stereotype of the dedicated revenger.”
AC Bradley: tragedy
“a tragedy of thought; his Hamlet downfall is connected rather with his intellectual nature.”
Schuking: Hamlet
“‘Hamlet’ cannot be comprehended, except as a study of emotion.”
Belsey: Revenge + Ending
“the moral uncertainty persists to the end […] Hamlet dies a revenger, a poisoner, but also a soldier and a prince.”
Professor Campbell: Horatio
“[Horatio is} a character in the play in whom reason has swayed passion.”
Scofield: Claudius
“Claudius is morally empty.”
Andrew Gurr and Mariko Ichikawa: performance
“All theatre is about seeming and pretence”
John Russell: Family
“Though Gertrude is still nominally the wife of Claudius, she is no longer physically or sexually in union with him. She has consented to rejoin Hamlet in the paternal triangle, thus re-establishing the family configuration to its original form.”
