Hamlet Critics Flashcards
‘When the bad bleed then the tragedy is good.’
Middleton, 1606
‘Revenge is a kind of wild justice.’
Bacon, 1625
‘[Depiction of Ophelia] lewd and unreasonable.’
Collier, 1698
‘Hamlet’s cruel…something very bloody in it, so inhuman, so unworthy of a hero.’
Hanmer, 1736
‘Hamlet is… rather an instrument than an agent.’
Johnson, 1765
‘The death of a beautiful woman is… the most poetic topic.’
Poe, 1846
‘Melancholia [is] at the root of Hamlet’s problems.’
Bradley, 1904
‘[Hamlet] may even seem a monster of inconsistency.’
Wilson, 1935
‘Ophelia has no chance to develop an independent conscience, stifled by the authority of the male world.’
Dusinberre, 1975
‘The identity of the ghost is secondary to its effect upon Hamlet.’
King, 1982
‘The ghost… dominates… even in his absence.’
Hawkes, 1986
‘Male power is restored through… the vilification of women.’
Traub, 1988
‘Ophelia’s dead, virginial body is fetishized by Hamlet and Laertes… the grave [is] a site of masculine competition… Laertes and Hamlet fight over the right and rite of sexual possession.’
Traub, 1988
‘Hamlet is presented as fashionably introspective and melancholy while Ophelia becomes alienated, acting out the madness Hamlet only plays at.’
Neely, 1991
‘The Ophelia figure was a kind of feminine ideal: totally passive, sexualised, and utterly defined by her romantic relationships.’
Ingram, 2005
‘Ophelia and Gertrude can superficially be seen as representatives of the two archetypes of women in early modern drama: the virgin and the whore.’
McEvoy, 2006
‘Surveillance state: a totalitarian monarchy with a highly developed spy network. ‘ ‘The system under which those who first watched this play lived.
Hytner, 2010
‘Soliloquies are a calculated performance that the character stages deliberately and rhetorically.’
Gauci, 2015
‘Royal families have no private life… these are people forever being watched or forever watching themselves.’
Branagh, 1997
‘An ensemble wearing Titanic-style life vests that foreshadow the play’s catastrophic climax.’
Barekat, 2025
‘Leaving only the dying Hamlet, cradled by his friend Horatio.’
Barekat, 2025
‘A sense of disequilibrium from the start, a sense of characters trapped by fate, and eventually sliding, literally, into oblivion.’
Davison, 2025
‘Sycophantic councilor Polonius, whose desperate desire to ingratiate himself to the royal household results in the demise of his daughter.’
Barekat, 2025
‘This Hamlet is not containable — he’s deeply damaged, unhinged by grief, his bearings lost, tormented by visions of heaven and hell.’
Hemming, 2025
‘His is a thrillingly wired, self-mocking Hamlet consumed to the bone by a near unbearably exquisite self-doubt.’
Allfree, 2025
“She [Ophelia] has little to say but a lot to perform.”
Massai, 2017
