Critics on Hamlet

Wagner on Ophelia

Described her as "a device used by hamlet"

Goethe on duty

"All duties seem holy for Hamlet"

Goethe on Hamlet's personality

"he is a poetic and morally sensitive soul crushed by the barbarous task of murder"

Coleridge on Hamlet's beliefs

"Hamlet has no firm belief in himself or anything"

Coleridge on Hamlet inability to act

"He is a man incapable of acting because he thinks too much"

Coleridge on Hamlet killing P and C

"Hamlet is obliged to act on the spur of the moment"

Adelman on Gertrude

"She is an intimate unknown figure around whom these fantasies swirl"

Adelman on Hamlet

"Hamlet's goal is not to avenge his father but to remake his mother"

Mabillard on Gertrude

"She is shallow and thinks only of her body and external pleasures"

Freud on Hamlet

"He himself is no better than the murderer he is required to punish"

Edwards on Ophelia

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

Emi Hamana on Ophelia

"She suffers a series of patriarchal oppressions"

Toshkiko Oshio on Ophelia

"she has an inability to express herself by means of words"

G.F. Bradley on Gertrude

"She is a character of ambiguous morality whom we can never fully know"

A.C Bradley on Hamlet's mental state

"A state of profound melancholy"

Michael Pennington on Polonius

"Between knave and fool, most performances fall to one side or the other"

Rebecca Smith on Polonius

"He trained his daughter to be obedient and chaste and is able to use her as a piece of bait for spying"

A.C Bradley on Hamlet (trust)

"Hamlet assumes without any questioning that he ought to avenge his father"

C.S Lewis on Hamlet (death)

"Hamlet is haunted, not by a physical fear of dying, but of being dead"

Greenblatt on Hamlet's mental attitude

"in the grip of continued doubts"

Terry Eagleton on Hamlet

"unable to find self definition"

A C Bradley on Gertrude

"died a better woman than she lived"

Harold Bloom on the play

"revenge on revenge tragedy"

A.C. Bradley on Gertrude

"she was untroubled by shame"

Freud on Claudius to Hamlet

"the man who shows him in realisation the repressed desires of his own childhood"

Harold Bloom on marriage

"Gertrude and Claudius certainly are one of the happiest marriages in Shakespeare."

Harold Bloom on Hamlet

"despite his passion in the graveyard, we have every reason to doubt Hamlet's capacity to love anyone, even Ophelia"

Philip Edwards on Hamlet

"It is hard to know what Hamlet has to know (he loved Ophelia) when we think of how we have seen him treat her"

Elaine Showalter on Ophelia

has suggested that "Ophelia is deprived of thought, sexuality, and language" - Ophelia is gradually reduced to a position of passive obedience.

Belsy on revenge

"Revenge is always in excess of justice"