Hamlet Critics Quotes

slayyyyyyyyyyyy - Kastan, Paglia, Belsey, Ryan, Adelman, Kerrigan, Knight, Mack, Flint, Neely, Lyons

Kastan - Fate

“For Shakespeare, anyhow, the uncertainty is the point”

Kastan - Influences

“If any pressures influened Shakespeare’s work, they were medieval rather than classical”

Kastan - Catharsis

“Shakespeare’s tragedies provoke the questions about \[…\] pain and loss”

Paglia - Old Hamlet

“paternal authority”

Paglia - Images

“The well-managed garden, a major metaphor in *Hamlet,* is a paradigm of the wisely governed state”

Paglia - Presentation

“His armor warns of Norway’s looming threat but also signifies \[…\] those lifetime conflicts of Freudian family romance”

Belsey - Ghosts

“spectres are unnerving in so far as they shake the norms that allow us to understand what exists”

Belsey - Morals

“\[The Ghost’s\] moral status remains as unresolved as its identity”

Belsey - Understanding

“classification would bring the being of a ghost within a framework that would begin to make the apparition intelligible”

Ryan - Hatred

“the torrent of bitter misogyny and misogamy \[Hamlet\] subjects \[Ophelia\] to springs from the same utter disenchantment as his previous \[…\] misanthropy”

Ryan - Ophelia

“Ophelia is inescapably complicit with Polonius and Claudius and everything they stand for, which Hamlet rightly reviles”

Ryan - Masculinity

“The only thing that could save him from being an arrant knave like other men would be never having been born”

Adelman - Parents

“the loss of the father turns out in fact to mean the psychic domination of the mother”

Adelman - Goals

“to remake \[Gertrude\] in the image of the Virgin mOther who could guarantee his father’s purity”

Adelman - Focus

“the confrontation of Hamlet with Gertrude in the closet scene seems much more central \[…\] than any confrontation between Hamlet and Claudius”

Kerrigan - Pacing

“memories divert and slow the play, giving it an eddying, onward, inclusiveness which contrasts with the movement of Shakespeare’s other tragedies”

Kerrigan - Mystery

“We can show that remembrance haunts him, even to the point of madness, and call this the heart of his mystery. \[…\] In memory, Hamlet eludes us”

Kerrigan - Mourning

“His inky cloak is ambiguous: a mark of respect for his father, it also indicates his desire eventually to detach himself from him”

Knight - Hamlet

“Hamlet is a living death in the midst of life”

Knight - Ghost

“That sepulchral cataclysm at the beginning is the key to the whole play”

Knight - Consequences

“*Hamlet* begins with an explosion in the first act; the rest of the play is the reverberation thereof”

Mack - Functions

“It is equally obvious \[…\] that madness has a further dimension, as insight, and this is true also of Ophelia”

Mack - Liberty

“Hamlet can be privileged in madness to say things - Hamlet about the corruption of human nature \[…\] which Shakespeare could have hardly risked apart from this licence”

Mack - Cassandra

“Cassandra’s madness, like Lear’s and Hamlet’s \[…\] contains both punishment and insight”

Flint - Audience

“Shakespeare’s audience \[…\] would have little trouble identifying the attributes of melancholy”

Flint - Character

“\[Analysing Hamlet as a character, not a person\] allows us to focus on the impossibility of ever defining who or what a ‘real’ person is”

Flint - Challenge

“Hamlet uses his homily \[religious speech\] to drive home \[…\] the importance of stretching one’s mental faculties in life”

Neely - Contrast

“Hamlet is presented as fashionably introspective and melancholy while ~~Ophelia~~ becomes alienated

Neely - Expressions

“Whereas \[Ophelia’s\] madness is somatised and its content eroticised, Hamlet’s melancholy is politicised in form and content”

Neely - Infection

“the representation of Ophelia absorbs pathological excesses open to Hamlet and enables his reappearance as a sane autonomous individual”

__***EXTRA -***__ Lyons - Symbols

“Ophelia is most persistently presented in terms of symbolic meaning; her presence is more iconographical than physical”

Nuttall - Pleasure

“\[tragedies allow for\] a further mode of pleasure”

Nuttall - Discomfort

“enjoyed discomfort”

Bradley - Victim

“suffering and calamity \[…\] befall a conspicuous person”

Bradley - Impact

“his fall produces a sense of contrast, of the powerlessness of man”