Hamlet Ao5

A.C. Bradley

“Hamlet is a tragedy of thought, not just action.”

Elaine Showalter

"Ophelia is deprived of thought, sexuality, and language."

2009 RSC with CCTV

Modern productions highlight the surveillance and paranoia

Goethe

“Hamlet is an intellectual who moralises rather than acts.”

Kenneth Branagh Interpretation

Use of mirrors echoes theme of surveillance/ appearance versus reality

Voltaire

One would imagine the play to be the work of a drunken savage

Olivier

Hamlet approaches life like an actor, always trying on new characteristics

Discovering Hamlet Doc

Hamlet is his own obstacle to desire

Gregory Doran

Hamlet is both the avenger and the barrier to that revenge

Jonathan Bate

“Hamlet is the only Shakespearean hero whose greatest enemy is his own mind.”

David Tenant

“He’s a man at war with himself.”

Stephen Greenblatt

“Hamlet is haunted not only by his father’s ghost but by the fear that he might become like Claudius.”

Emma Smith

“Hamlet is a play that always seems to be about something else.”

Hytner

Hamlet uses theatre as a "weapon to discover the truth"

Woods

Hamlet "polices the boundaries between performance and reality"

Johnson

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

Wilson

Hamlet recognises himself as an instrument of justice

Leverenz

Hamlets disgust at the feminine passivity in himself is translated as a violent revulsion towards women, and his brutal behaviour towards ophelia

Bush

Hamlets revenge is barbaric and holy at the same time

Belsey

Revenge exists on a margin between justice and crime

Knight

Hamlet is the ambassador of death walking among life

1990 Zeffirelli with Mel Gibson as Hamlet

Act 3 scene 4, Hamlet uses inappropriate body language, oedipal

1948 Laurence Olivier

shift between gentleness and violence with ophelia in act 3 scene 1, more like a warning? trying to convey something he is unable to say

1990 Zeffirelli with Mel Gibson as Hamlet

Ophelia’s madness depicted as deeply emotional and melancholic among others