Hamlet Critics quotes and performance conditions

she is a creation of such perfectly feminine proportions and beauty

Edward Strachey (1848) on Ophelia

Grief at her father’s sudden and unexplained death has unbalanced her mind

L.L Schucking on Ophelia

No line in the play suggests that she felt either passion or affection for Hamlet

Rebecca West on Ophelia

No girl becomes insane because her father dies, least of all Ophelia

Roderick Benedix on Ophelia

Hamlet, then, is the ‘beauteous majesty’

Carroll Camden on Ophelia’s soliquey

Then point is that Polonius makes an unlikely candidate to appear among verses on true love

Carrol Camden on Ophelia’s songs

Who can believe that a solitary violet withered when that silly old Pomposity died?

Katherine Mansfield on Ophelia’s flowers

It is not often that young women run mad for the loss of their fathers

Thomas Hanner (early 18th century) on Ophelia

the Elizabethan audience … would at least see Ophelia as a girl suffering physically and mentally the pangs of rejected love

Carrol Camden on Ophelia

She never turns to the audience to reveal her ‘true’ mind

RSC on Ophelia

She is shown to have very little agency in life or death, sanity or insanity

RSC on Ophelia

Madness is used in many ways in Hamlet- it’s used to disguise the truth… as well as reveal it

RSC on madness in Hamlet

the causes of human suffering and the sources of human strength

Edward Bond on Shakespearean tragedies0

Hamlet is both capable of soaring vision that contains and reduces human existence, and of childish petulance

Rowland Molony on Hamlet

even in this state of high emotion he immediately turns a call to action into words

Lucy Webster on Hamlet

he belongs to a completely different dramatic and moral world

Lucy Webster on Hamlet

The canonical and patriarchal interpretations of Gertrude have not only rendered her voiceless but have also denied her interiority, complexity, and agency.

Dr. R. Mohanraj on Gertrude

In Gertrude's case, silence can be seen as an adaptive response to patriarchal structures

Dr. R. Mohanraj on Gertrude

Her silence is not the silence of erasure but of survival

Dr. R. Mohanraj on Gertrude

She dies as she lived, which is entangled in the tensions between son and husband, love and duty, emotion and strategy.

Dr. R. Mohanraj on Gertrude

Gertrude's story is a cautionary tale about the cost of female silence and the distortion of female experience through masculine projections.

Dr. R. Mohanraj on Gertrude

The Hamlet of the first solioquey is a victim of melancholy despair

Larry Champion on Hamlet

It is thus a feeling which he cannot understand, he cannot objectify it, and therefore it remains to poison life and obstruct action

T.S Eliot on Hamlet’s first soliloquy

Hamlet sense of betrayal comes from the belief that she has cheated on his memory

Julian Girdham on Hamlet’s first soliloquy

“Endless reasoning and hesitating, constant urging and solicitation of the mind to act”

Samuel Taylor Coleridge on Hamlet’s indecision

“he knows well what he ought to do, and over and over again makes up his mind to do it”

Samuel Taylor Coleridge on Hamlet

“unable to rouse himself into action”

Samuel Taylor Coleridge on Hamlet

“Yet with all this strong conviction of duty, and with all this resolution arising out of strong conviction, nothing is done”

Samuel Taylor Coleridge on Hamlet

Hamlet’s disgust at the feminine passivity in himself is translated into violent revulsion against women, and into his brutal behaviour towards Ophelia

David Leverenz on Hamlet

Hamlet’s madness is metaphysical, linked with culture, for Ophelia, it is a product of the female body and female nature

Elaine Showalter on madness

“a young girl driven passionately and visibly to picturesque madness”

Elaine Showalter on traditional depictions of Ophelia

“the world of Hamlet is a remarkably enclosed one”

Gardiner on Elisnore

“Shakespeare had become intensely conscious of the power of drama upon the human soul”

Green on metatheatricality

“just toadies to the King”

John Gielgud on Rosencrantz and Guildenstern

“Hamlet’s tone is one who has suffered tortures on the score of his mother’s degredation”

T.S Eliot on Hamlet

“Hamlet (the man) is dominated by an emotion which is inexpressible, because it is in excess to the facts as they appear”

T.S Eliot on Hamlet

“The levity of Hamlet… are not part if a deliberate plan of dissimulation, but a form of emotional relief”

T.S Eliot on Hamlet

“The intensity of Hamlet’s repulsion against women in general and Ophelia in particular, is a measure of the powerful “repression” to which his s.x..l feeling are being subjected”

Ernst Jones on Hamlet

“we see his fundamental attitude towards moralising elders who use their power to thwart the happiness of the young.”

Ernst Jones on Hamlet

“a warrior King who did not respect the laws of war”

Jeffery Wilson on Old Hamlet

“a political marriage designed to stabilise the teetering state of Denmark in the eyes of it’s enemies”

Jeffery Wilson on Gertrude’ marriage

“Hamlet is, through the whole play, rather an instrument than an agent”

Samuel Johnson

“the untimely death of Ophelia, the young, the beautiful, the harmless, the pious”

Samuel Johnson