Hamlet Critical Views

Polonius

• “palpably enjoys spying and surveillance” (Vardy)

• “embodies, in effect a secret police” (Vardy)

• “seems to love his children; he seems to have the welfare of the kingdom in mind. His means of actions, however, are totally corrupt” (Rebecca Smith)

• “trained his daughter to be obedient and chaste and is able to use her as a piece of bait for spying” (Rebecca Smith)

• “cold-hearted devil” (Walter)

• “a man whose moral compass is infinitely wobbly” (Josipovici)

Hamlet

• “a self-sacrificing hero who aims to cleanse the state of corruption and oppression” (Thompson and Taylor)

• “prince of philosophical spectators” (Hazlitt)

• exhibits “arrested development” (Smith)

• “the philosophical meditation of life and death that haunts Hamlet throughout the play” (Greenblatt)

• has a fascination with “the disturbing carnality” of his mother (Greenblatt)

• “Hamlet is at once the saddest and funniest of all Shakespearean tragic heroes” (Greenblatt)

• “the most amiable of misanthropes” (Hazlitt)

• “procrastinates from thought, and loses the power of action in the energy of resolve” (Coleridge)

• “all that matters is Hamlet’s consciousness of his own consciousness, infinite, unlimited, and at war with itself” (Bloom)

• “an angel of destruction” (Bloom)

• “for Hamlet himself, death is not tragic but an apotheosis” (Bloom)

• “was ever a tragic figure so torn and tortured” (Jones)

• “Hamlet is a dishevelled man whose words make us think of loneliness, of doubt and dread, of waste and dust and emptiness…we feel the richness of heaven and earth and the comfort of affection slipping away” (Lewis)

• “Hamlet is the conscience stricken, but paralysed liberal”

• “all duties seem holy for Hamlet” (Von Goethe)

• “Hamlet is unable to carry out the sacred duty, imposed by divine authority, of punishing an evil man by death” (Bradley)

• “Hamlet is obliged to act on the spur of the moment” (Coleridge)

• “Hamlet is…rather an instrument than an agent” (Johnson)

• “Hamlet is an element of evil in the state of Denmark” (Knight)

• “he is in fact the poison in the veins of the community” (Knight)

• “Hamlet is haunted, not by a physical fear of dying, but of being dead” (Lewis)

• “with the strongest purposes of revenge, he is irresolute and inactive” (Mackenzie)

• “he himself is literally no better than the sinner whom he is to punish” (Flint) (in Act 3, Scene 3)

• “the violence towards the mother is the effect of the desire for her” (Jacqueline Rose)

• “a poetic and morally sensitive soul crushed by the barbarous task of murder” (Goethe)

• “has no firm belief in himself or anything” (Coleridge)

• “Hamlet is a man incapable of acting because he thinks too much” (Coleridge)

• “a merge of the tragic hero and the clown figure” (Josipovici)

• “Hamlet assumes without any questioning that he ought to avenge his father” (Bradley)

• “the world of Hamlet is a remarkably enclosed one” (Gardnier)

Memory / the Past

• “the language of this play is full of “memory” and its cognates” (Kerrigan)

• a play “seeking comfort in the past”

Religion

• “residual Catholicism” (Smith)

• “this is a Protestant son haunted by the ghost of a Catholic father” (Greenblatt)

• “Catholic past casts a shadow” (Greenblatt)

• “all duties seem holy for Hamlet” (Von Goethe)

• “Hamlet is unable to carry out the sacred duty, imposed by divine authority, of punishing an evil man by death” (Bradley)

Revenge

• “revenge is not justice. It is rather an act of injustice on behalf on justice” (Belsey)

• “revengers create their own civil justice” (Brucher)

• “they play does not offer any conclusions about what is the right response to the questions it poses about human aggression” (Alexander)

• “revenge is always in excess of justice” (Belsey)

• “revenge exists on a margin between justice and crime” (Belsey)

• “wild justice” (Bacon)

• “the desire for vengeance is seen as part of a continuing pattern of human conduct” (Alexander)

• “Hamlet assumes without any questioning that he ought to avenge his father” (Bradley)

Madness

• “madness contained both punishment and insight” (Mack)

• “in madness Hamlet is privileged to say things” (Mack)

• in madness Hamlet shows “intuitive unformulated awareness” (Mack)

• “a parade of fashionable melancholy” intended to mislead Hamlet’s enemies (Edwards)

• “the key comic element of the plat is madness” (Herbert Tree)

• “gives him the licence of a fool to speak cruel truths, transgressing the language of social decorum” (Flint)

Claudius

• “Claudius, as he appears in the play, is not a criminal…he is…a good and gentle king, enmeshed by the chain of causality linking him with his crime” (Knight)

• “he has the persuasiveness and physical courage of a ruler, but is morally empty” (Schofield)

• “he loved Gertrude deeply and genuinely” (Dawson)

• “he is not a monster, he is morally weak” (Mabillard)

Ophelia

• “trained his daughter to be obedient and chaste and is able to use her as a piece of bait for spying” (Rebecca Smith)

• “Ophelia is deprived of thought, sexuality and language…she represents the strong emotions that the Elizabethans thought womanish” (Showalter)

• She is portrayed as “an insignificant minor character”

• “Ophelia literally has no story without Hamlet” (Lee Edwards)

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern

• “sacrifice the bond of human friendship to a coial propriety”

Corruption

• “articulates a crisis in the decay of a traditional social order in England” (Dollimore)

Gertrude

• “a woman of exuberant sexuality, who inspires uxorious passion in first King Hamlet and later in Claudius” (Bloom)

• “pleasing men is Gertrude’s main interest” (Rebecca Smith)