Hamlet critics and interpretations Flashcards
“a vile and barbarous drama that would not be tolerated by the vilest populace of France, or Italy”
Voltaire, french writer in 1700s
referring to the “country matters” punning - “if ever a poet deserved a whipping for low and indecent ribaldry, it was for this passage”
Lewis Theobald, 1700s
Hamlet’s passivity in enacting revenge, he is “rather an instrument than an agent”
Samuel Johnson, 1700s
the insertion of revenge into Hamlet as a character is equivalent to “an oak tree planted in a costly jar”
Goethe, 1700s, romantic
“it is we who are Hamlet”
Hamlet articulates the experience of anyone who has felt “his mind sink within him”
William Hazlitt, romantic writer
I have “a smack of Hamlet in myself”
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, romantic poet
rejects idea that Hamlet is paralysed by his thoughts, points out killing Polonius and sending R & G to death
Freud, 1900
Hamlet is unable to kill the man who shows him “the repressed wishes of his own childhood realised”
Freud, 1900 - Hamlet has an oedipus complex
Hamlet’s “whole mind is poisoned” by his grief and his melancholy is “the centre of the tragedy”
A.C Bradley, 1904
Gertrude is too “negative and insignificant” to be a believable cause of Hamlet’s despair
T.S Eliot, modernist, 1900s
“we need not see the world through Hamlet’s eyes” as Hamlet was “an element of evil in the state of Denmark”
Wilson Knight, mid 1900s
Hamlet can’t be expected to act like a real person as “Hamlet is a character in a play, not in history”
John Dover Wilson, mid 1900s
“the subject of Hamlet is death”
C.S Lewis, mid 1900s
if we look at Gertrude’s own lines, she is a woman of sound good sense
Carolyn Heilbrun, feminist, late 1900s
Ophelia is a hybrid of patriarchal assumptions and symbolisms used to typify young women
Elaine Showalter, feminist, late 1900s
Hamlet is “a charismatic of charismatics” but is still a “hero-villain”, whose value lies in being “the leading Western representation of an intellectual”
Harold Bloom, late 1900s, humanist
Hamlet is “hoodwinked by history” and “it’s the time that’s ‘out of joint’ and not Hamlet”
Kiernan Ryan, late 1900s
Hamlet is more interested in redeeming his mother than revenging his father, and ‘The Mousetrap’ was “to catch the conscience of the Queen”
Janet Adelman, feminist, modern
Polonius being in Gertrude’s closet “fatally confuses privacy with affairs of state”
Lisa Jardine
“Hamlet spectacularly fails to keep his oath to his father”
Kiernan Ryan