Hamlet critics

Question 1

Quotes from Adelman

Answer 1

“Her body is the garden in which her husband dies, her sexuality the poisonous weeds that kill him”

“Hamlet’s unexpected meeting with Claudius feels to us like an interruption of a more fundamental purpose”
(playlet to Catch conscience of queen)

‘He that hath kill’d my king and whor’d my mother’ the second phrase clearly carries more intimate and emotional weight than the first

Question 2

Quotes from Hazlitt

Answer 2

Hamlet philosophical
“not a character marked by strength of will or even of passion, but by refinement of thought and sentiment”

“prince of philosophical speculators and because he cannot have his revenge perfect… he declines it”

Question 3

Quotes from Kerrigan

Answer 3

Ophelia remembering Polonius
“Such memories divert and slow the play, giving it an eddying, onward inclusiveness”
“Prince attempting to replace a dead love-object with a living one”
“Even when comfort is found in the past, that only makes the present more desolate”

Question 4

Quotes from Bradley

Answer 4

“only in love-tragedies that the heroine is as much at the centre of the action as the hero”
“Concerned always with somebody of high degree; often kings or princes” because his “fate affects welfare of whole nation”
“His fall produces sense of contrast of the powerlessness of man”

Question 5

Quotes from Mack

Answer 5

“excess of any passion approached madness”
“Madness is to some degree a form of punishment or doom”
“The madness has a further dimension, as insight” e.g. “Ophelia, mad, able to make awards of flowers”
Shakespeare similar to Hamlet as “given the power to see the truth can convey it only through poetry” (Hamlet uses madness)

Question 6

Quotes from Nutall

Answer 6

New generation of audiences taught to
“despise the pleasurable and to value the disturbing”
“Pleasure need not occupy the foreground of consciousness”

Question 7

Quotes from Kastan

Answer 7

“Tragedy as the fall from prosperity to wretchedness”
“Is the tragic motor human error or capricious fate” (capricious = unpredictable)
Shakespeare’s “Refusal of any answers starkly prevent any confident attribution of meaning or value to human suffering”