Key Critical Views Hamlet

5 per theme 5 per character (apart from Hamlet lol)

William Hazlitt (Hamlet)

Hamlet is the ‘prince of philosophical spectators’

William Hazlitt (Hamlet)

Hamlet is ‘the most amiable of misanthropes.’

Maynard Mack (Hamlet)

‘In madness Hamlet is privileged to say things.’

Edwards (Hamlet)

Hamlet shows ‘a parade of fashionable melancholy.’

Harold Bloom (Hamlet)

‘Hamlet is a mortal god in an immortal play.’

John Kerrigan (Hamlet)

‘Hamlet never promises to revenge, only to remember.’

Ernest Jones (Hamlet)

‘Was ever a figure so torn and tortured!

G. Wilson Knight (Hamlet)

‘Hamlet is an element of evil in the state of Denmark.’

Charles Marowitz (Hamlet)

‘Hamlet is the most conscience-stricken but paralyzed liberal.’

Freud (Hamlet)

Hamlet has an "Oedipal desire for his mother and the subsequent guilt [is] preventing him from murdering the man [Claudius]

Catherine Belsey (Hamlet)

‘In the Graveyard scene Hamlet seeks to gain control over death.’

Stephen Greenblatt (Ophelia)

Ophelia demonstrates ‘dismayingly compliant obedience to her father’.

Carol Rutter (Ophelia)

Discusses the ‘patronising prettification of Ophelia’. She experiences ‘direct suffering as a result of the male gaze.’

Elaine Showalter (Ophelia)

‘Ophelia is deprived of thought, sexuality and language… she represents the strong emotions that Elizabethans thought womanish.’

Elaine Showalter (Ophelia)

‘Ophelia may have no usable past but she has an infinite future.’

Arden Edition (Ophelia & Hamlet)

‘Hamlet and Ophelia have become respectively the iconic representatives of male and female instability.’

A C Bradley (Horatio)

‘Hamlet’s last words leave us dissatisfied…but Horatio’s benediction provide the seal the audience wishes.’

Verity (Horatio)

‘Horatio serves as a foil to Hamlet not for what he does but for what he is.’

Lily B Campbell (Horatio)

‘Horatio is one of the two characters in the play in whom reason has swayed passion.’

Thomas M Kettle (Horatio)

Horatio is ‘a mere reporter of events and auditor for the protagonist.’

Ramsay (Horatio)

‘The sober, common sense of Horatio gives greater prominence to, and heightening the effect of the character of Hamlet.’

Janet Adelman (Gertrude)

Gertrude is a ‘site for fantasies larger than she is’.

Janet Adelman (Gertrude)

Hamlet’s relationship with Gertrude is the foreground needed for ‘masculine identity to free itself from the contaminated female body’

Rebecca Smith (Gertrude)

‘Gertrude, in Shakespeare’s Hamlet, has traditionally been played as a sensual, deceitful woman.’

Rebecca Smith (Gertrude)

‘…when one closely examines Gertrude’s actual speech and actions in an attempt to understand the character , one finds little that hints at hypocrisy, suppression, or uncontrolled passion and their implied complexity.’

Rebecca Smith (Gertrude)

‘Gertrude believes that quiet women best please men, and pleasing men is Gertrude’s main interest.’

Richard Vardy (Polonius)

Polonius is ‘an intruding fool’.

He is ‘at the heart of the rotten danish state and embodies the new realpolitik.

He represents a modern age typified by political ruthlessness, surveillance and secrecy.

Diane Dreher (Polonius)

“Polonius is by far the most reprehensible father in Shakespeare’s plays.

He’s a patriarch, a misogynist, an authoritarian who dominates Ophelia’s will and decimates her verve for life.”

Jeffrey. R. Wilson (Polonius)

‘Polonius isn’t a good father. Good fathers don’t make good drama. But he is a good character, more complex than critics usually recognize.’ (dad jokes).

Richard Vardy (Polonius)

‘Hamlet’s confrontations with Polonius are the confrontations of a tragic hero against a representative of a flawed political and social fabric.’

Kittredge (Laertes)

‘Laertes appears as the typical avenger and serves as a complete foil to Hamlet in this regard.

Hudson (Laertes)

‘Wild sword-law becomes his (Laertes’) religion.’

MacDonald (Laertes)

‘Laertes is a ranter, false everywhere… he has no principle but revenge and does not delay even to inquire into the facts of his father’s fate,

Hall (Laertes)

Laertes, in his intense desire to avenge his father’s murder, falls readily into the king’s plot.’

Emma Smith (Religion)

‘Ghost is a symbol of ‘residual Catholicism in the play’

Stephen Greenblatt (Religion)

‘A Protestant son haunted by a Catholic father’

Emma Smith (the past)

Hamlet the play is ‘preoccupied with the past’