English hamlet critics quotes

Glyn Austen: inaction

Hamlet is a tragic hero who knows that action is required of him, but his purpose is blunted by an inability to act.

Amy License: madness and grief

Where Hamlet feigns madness, Ophelia actually loses her sanity; where he only considers suicide, it becomes the official verdict on her life.

Anne Thompson and Neil Taylor: gender

A son exemplary in his unconscious fear of his mother.

Barbara Smith: madness

Her madness, although different in quality and duration from Hamlet's, like his, had method in it.

David Leverenz: femininity

Hamlet’s disgust at the feminine passivity in himself is translated into violent revulsion against women.

Terry Eagleton: inaction

Hamlet falls apart in the space between himself and his actions.

Lilla Grindlay: Ophelia’s death

Gertrude's speech uses beautiful imagery, but its underlying effect is a disturbing one, as it succeeds in containing that potent danger of Ophelia's madness, giving her no control over her death.

John Kerrigan: revenge

Hamlet never promises to revenge, only to remember.

Karin Coddon: politics

In the ambiguous space in which reason and madness intersect lies treason.

Clare Gunn: Gertrude

Gertrude retains her power by her very presence on stage.

G Wilson Knight: Claudius

Claudius, as he appears in the play, is not a criminal. He is – strange as it may seem – a good and gentle king, enmeshed by the chain of causality linking him with his crime.

Amy License: Ophelia’s death

To a modern audience it is the pathos of Ophelia's death that matters, not the coroner's verdict, but to Shakespeare's audience it was the difference between heaven and hell.

Von Goethe: morality

All duties seem holy for Hamlet.

1711 Dennis: morality

Young Hamlet, like many other characters in Shakespeare, has no tragic fault, for his regicide answered a call from heaven.

Victoria Bartels: violence

Violence, albeit in appropriate circumstances, appears to have been one method of demonstrating one’s masculinity.

Frank McGuiness: gender

The Queen too will die from liquid, and just as Ophelia's mind is poisoned by intrigue, Gertrude's body shall consume the same poison.

Rebecca Smith: grief

Gertrude’s apparent betrayal of his idealised Hyperion father, not the actual death, has given rise to Hamlet’s melancholy state.

Frank McGuinness: Ophelia’s death

It is not her weakness which impels her to her suicide, but her intelligence.

Karin Coddon: Hamlet’s madness

The fact that Hamlet's madness cannot be pinned down, clarified, or debunked allows its consistent perception as a threat to the sovereign.

Jeremy Lopez: madness

An important function to the role of Ophelia... Is to provide a sense of real madness which acts as a foil to the ambiguity or histrionics of Hamlet.

MD Faber: madness

[Ophelia's] madness is produced by grief, not Satan, and takes a form which could hardly have spoken to Elizabethans of vexing demons.

David Bevington: revenge

The humanizing of Hamlet is the strategy needed to counter the dehumanizing thrust of the revenge tradition.

Clare Gunn: inaction

As soon as Gertrude appears to give up her role as a sexual object, Hamlet reclaims his ability to act.

Helen Gardner: inaction

Hamlet's agony of mind and indecision are precisely the things which differentiate him from that smooth, swift plotter Claudius, and from the course, unthinking Laertes.

Dominic Dromgoole: inaction

One man reeling towards murder, the other away from it.