Hamlet Critics

Barbara Bleiman

"Daughters would have been expected to be entirely obedient to their fathers, yet Shakespeare's daughters challenge patriarchal authority at every turn"

A C Bradley 1

"Gertrude's marriage provided a violent shock to [Hamlet's] moral being which caused him to sink into melancholy"

Cedric Watts

"The Ghost seeks to impose a stereotype on the prince, that of a dedicated revenger; but Hamlet repeatedly displays a very credible resistance to that stereotype"

Lee Edwards

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

Stoll

"[contains] common conventions of Elizabethan Revenge plays"

A C Bradley

"a tragedy of thought; his [Hamlet] downfall is connected rather with his intellectual nature"

Belsey

"women were everything men were not: silent, submissive, powerless"

Goethe in 1795

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

Coleridge in early 1800

Hamlet is a man incapable of acting because he thinks too much

Wilson Knight

Hamlet is an element of evil in the state of Denmark

Scofiled

Clausius is morally empty

Showalter

Ophelia is chiefly interesting in what she tells us about Hamlet

Greenblat

Hamlet is a protestant man haunted by a Catholic ghost

Maynard Mack

‘privilege in madness’

Elaine Showalter, 1994

from 1580, melancholy was "a fashionable disease among young men [...] associated with intellectual and imaginative genius" while "women's melancholy was seen as biological and emotional in its origins"

Juliana Peragine, 2016

"Ophelia feigns madness in order to speak her mind more freely"