Hamlet Critics

"woman is an excellent ornament of man [...] over which man may exercise his jurisdiction and authority"

Cornelius a Lapide-

"Daughters would have been expected to be entirely obedient to their fathers, yet Shakespeare's daughters challenge patriarchal authority at every turn"

Barbara Bleiman-

"Gertrude isn't the stereotypical lustful woman of revenge drama, she's far more sympathetic"

Cedric Watts-

"The Ghost seeks to impose a stereotype on the prince, that of a dedicated revenger; but Hamlet repeatedly displays a very credible resistance to that stereotype"

Cedric Watts-

"We can imagine Hamlet's story without Ophelia, but Ophelia literally has no story without Hamlet"

Lee Edwards

"[Horatio is] a character in the play in whom reason has swayed passion"

Professor Campbell

"[Ophelia] freed and contained by her madness"

Goodland

"Gertrude believes that quiet women best please men, and pleasing men is Gertrude's main interest"

Rebecca Smith

"the moral uncertainty persists to the end [...] Hamlet dies a revenger, a poisoner, but also a soldier and a prince"

Belsey

"Knowledge kills action, to action belongs the veil of illusion -that is the lesson of hamlet (because) true knowledge, insight into the horrific truth, outweighs any motive leading to action"

Nietzsche

"Hamlets appearance to Ophelia is like the mysterious appearance of the Ghost. Hamlet has in effect become the Ghost."

Garber

"In Hamlet, everyone is 'acting a part' except Horatio"

Empson

"Gertrude plays the role of the missing Eve"

Adelman

"Hamlets aim is to remake (Gertrude) in the image of the Virgin Mother"

Adelman

"Hamlet can't kill Claudius because he identifies with him too strongly"

Watson

"The play is a guided tour through a lying world (...) so that we doubt not only what we see and hear but our own powers of judgement and action"

Greer

"The difficulty of separating dream from reality haunts Hamlet"

Nuttal

-argues that we should not focus on tragic hero, but the society in which he exists—> argues tragedies are not primarily treatments of characters with a fatal flaw, but that the fatal flaw is within the world they inhabit e.g. the political state, the social order it upholds

-problem isn't with Hamlet's inabilityt o act but with Denmark and its rotten political state and uncertainity

JW Lever

-argued that Hamlet resists playing the roles society expects of him, therefore trapped ebetween society's explectations of him and his own inabilty to redefine himself, which will eventually be his destruction

Terry Eagleton:

-considers tension in play as resulting from conflict between different 'forces' of hisotyr in the context of the old world of 'chivarly' fading away and a new society founded on Protestanism and global capitalism beginning to replace it

James Shapiro,

-sees play as dramatising funedmental changes in Elizabethan society—> "medieval world" of old Hamlet fading into past, Claudius representing new vision of statesmanship, negotiates peace rather than engaging in battle

Graham Holderness:

Laertes is like a hurricane. He rushes into the palace in an uncontrolled rage, roaring for blood.

Prosser

Laertes and Fortinbras are both representatives of action, and such furnish a most expressive contrast to the non-activity of the Danish prince.

Hall

hamlet is an element of evil in the state of Denmark

he is the poison in the veins of the community -

Knight

hamlets inability to act paralysed by the futility of the revenge

Ryan

"manipulators and agents'

Stephen Siddall

"Rosencrantz and Guildenstern sacrifice the bond of human friendship to a social propriety"

Marilyn French