CRITICS HAMLET

Richard Vardy

Connected Polonius with Francis Walsingham, Elizabeth’s infamous spymaster (surveillance state).

Emma Smith

Describes 'Hamlet' as a male-oriented play, arguing it is more sympathetic to male identity.

Lee Edwards

States that we can imagine Hamlet’s story without Ophelia, but Ophelia literally has no story without Hamlet.

Jacques Lacan

Refers to Ophelia as 'The object Ophelia,' describing her as 'a piece of Bait.'

Elaine Showalter

Argues that for many feminist theorists, the madwoman is a heroine, a powerful figure who rebels against the family and the social order.

Graham Holderness

Posits that Hamlet is stranded between two worlds, unable to emulate the heroic values of his father or engage with modern diplomacy.

A.C. Bradley

Describes Hamlet's hamartia as 'brooding melancholy.'

Ernest Jones (1910)

Argued that Hamlet had an Oedipal complex.

Sigmund Freud

Argued that Hamlet’s 'unconscious desire for his mother' leads him to see Claudius too readily as himself.

Lisa Jardine

Questions why critics place 'the play’s burden of guilt' on Gertrude, presenting Hamlet as a 'blameless hero.'

Lisa Jardine (continued)

Blames the 'political tendency' in society where the powerful blame the 'disadvantaged of all races, genders, and sexual preferences' for their own lack of power.

Alan Gardiner

Describes Claudius as 'the principal source of the rottenness which pervades Denmark.'

Caroline Spurgeon

Notes the prevalence of images of sickness and disease in Denmark, describing it as morally unwholesome.

Francis Drake

Argued that the ending was a 'divine kind of justice' where 'stratagems recoil upon the criminals.'

Samuel Johnson

Describes Hamlet as 'an instrument, rather than an agent,' lacking agency.

Schlegel

Describes 'Hamlet' as a tragedy of thought inspired by continual and never-satisfied meditation on human destiny; the ghost 'cripples the power of thought.'

Goethe

Identifies Hamlet as the archetype of the modern hero paralyzed by imagination.

Coleridge

States that 'all of us have a smack of Hamlet.'

Peter Hall

Describes 'Hamlet' as a mirror for the age.

C.S. Lewis

Describes Hamlet as the realistic everyman haunted by fear of death.

James Shapiro

Observes that 'Hamlet' is shaped by the succession crisis and fears of foreign invasion.

Thomas Kyd

Makes a reference to 'The Spanish Tragedy' and the Senecan hero Hieronimo.