Hamlet: Critical Views

Stephen Greenblatt

Hamlet is obsessed with the ‘disturbing carnality of his mother’

Dodsworth

‘Fortinbras enters as it were Hamlet's blessing’

Prosser

‘His past actions give little assurance that he will be a temperate and judicious ruler’

Emma Smith

Hamlet the play is ‘preoccupied with the past’

William Hazlitt

Hamlet is the ‘prince of philosophical spectators’

Richard Vardy

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.’

Emma Smith

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

Stephen Greenblatt

‘A Protestant son haunted by a Catholic father’

Laurence Lerner

Not only is Hamlet ‘a man who has to avenge his father’ but ‘a man who has been given a task by a ghost’.

Richard Vardy

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

Stephen Greenblatt

Ophelia demonstrates ‘dismayingly compliant obedience to her father’.

Carol Rutter

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

Elaine Showalter

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

Stephen Greenblatt

'Hamlet is at once the saddest and funniest of all Shakespearian tragic heroes.’

Maynard Mack

‘In madness Hamlet is privileged to say things.’

Maynard Mack

‘Hamlet when mad shows intuitive, unformulated awareness.’

Edwards

Hamlet shows ‘a parade of fashionable melancholy.’

William Hazlitt

Hamlet is ‘the most amiable of misanthropes.’

A. C. Bradley

Tragedy is ‘essentially a tale of suffering and calamity conducting to death.’

DeGrazia

Hamlet is Shakespeare’s most modern play because its debate about corruption on a familial and political level differentiates it from the medieval.

S T Coleridge

Hamlet ‘procrastinates from thought and loses the power of action in the energy of resolve.’

Harold Bloom

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

John Kerrigan

‘Rememberance haunts Hamlet, even to the point of madness.’

John Kerrigan

‘The Prince attempts to replace a dead love object (father) with a living one (Ophelia).’

Freud

‘Hysterics suffer mainly from reminiscences.’

Janet Adelman

‘The main psychological task that Hamlet seems to set himself is not to avenge his father’s death, but to remake his mother into the image of the Virgin Mother, who could guarantee his father’s purity, and his own.’

Janet Adelman

‘The Murder of Gongoza is in fact designed to catch the conscience of the queen.’

William Hazlitt

‘Yet he is sensible of his own weakness, taxes himself with it, and tries to reason himself out of it.’

John Kerrigan

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

Lawrence Olivier

Hamlet is the tragedy of a man who ‘could not make up his mind.’

Janet Adelman

Hamlet is ‘essentially a family drama’.

Janet Adelman

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

Janet Adelman

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

Francis Bacon

‘Revenge is a form of wild justice.’

Eagleton

‘It is difficult to read Shakespeare without feeling that he was almost certainly familiar with the writings of Hegel, Marx, Nietszche, Freud, Wittgenstein and Derrida.’

Arden Edition Intro

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

Gaston Bachelard

In the ‘Ophelia Complex’ he sees a symbolic connection between women, water and death, seeing drowning as an appropriate merging into the female element for women, who are always associated with liquids: blood, milk, tears and amniotic fluid.

David Leverenz

‘Hamlet sees Gertrude give way to Claudius and Ophelia give way to Polonius’.

David Leverenz

‘Gertrude’s inconstancy not only brings on disgust and incestuous feelings, it is also the sign of diseased doubleness in everyone who has accommodated to his or her social role.’

R. D. Laing

‘The divided self: in her madness, there is no one there. She is not a person. There is no integral selfhood expressed through her actions or utterances… She has already died. There is now only a vacuum where there once was a person.’

David Leverenz

‘…there are many voices in Ophelia’s madness speaking through her… none of them her own. She becomes the mirror for a mad-inducing world.’

David Leverenz

‘[Ophelia’s] history is an instance of how someone can be driven mad by having her inner feelings misrepresented, not responded to, or acknowledged only through chastisement and repression. From her entrance on, Ophelia must continually respond to commands which imply distrust even as they compel obedience.’

David Leverenz

‘[Ophelia] has no choice but to say ‘I shall obey, my lord’’.

David Leverenz

‘Not allowed to love and unable to be false, Ophelia breaks. She goes mad rather than gets mad. Even in her madness she has no voice of her own, only a discord of other voices and expectations, customs gone awry.’

David Leverenz

‘[Ophelia] is a play within a play, or a player trying to respond to several imperious directors at once. Everyone has used her: Polonius, to gain favour; Laertes, to belittle Hamlet; Claudius, to spy on Hamlet; Hamlet to express rage at Gertrude; and Hamlet again, to express his feigned madness with her as a decoy. She is valued only for the roles that further other people’s plots.’

Elaine Showalter

‘For most critics of Shakespeare, Ophelia has been an insignificant minor character in the play, touching in her weakness and madness but chiefly interesting, of course, in what she tells us about Hamlet.’

Lee Edwards

‘We can imagine Hamlet’s story without Ophelia, but Ophelia literally has no story without Hamlet.’

Elaine Showalter

‘Since the 1970s… we have had a feminist discourse which has offered a new perspective on Ophelia’s madness as protest and rebellion. For many feminist theorists, the madwoman is a heroine, a powerful figure who rebels against the family and the social order…’

Rebecca Smith

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

Rebecca Smith

‘…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 appears in only ten of the twenty scenes that comprise the play; furthermore she speaks very little, having less dialogue than any other major character in Hamlet… she speaks plainly, directly, and chastely when she does speak… Gertrude’s brief speeches include references to honour, virtue [etc]; neither structure nor content suggests wantonness.’

Rebecca Smith

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

Rebecca Smith

‘Gertrude has not moved toward independence or a heightened moral stance; only her divided loyalties and her unhappiness intensify.’

DON’T KNOW NAME

‘Fortinbras represents a simple, primitive level of existence – much like Pyrrhus and Priam: violence with violence – willing to sacrifice everything for glory and honour.’

A. C. Bradley

‘The whole story turns upon the peculiar character of the hero.’

Ernest Jones

‘Was ever a figure so torn and tortured!’

D. H. Lawrence

‘I had always felt an aversion from Hamlet: a creeping, unclean thing he seems, on stage… his nasty poking and sniffing at his mother, his setting traps for the king, his conceited perversion with Ophelia makes him always intolerable. The character is repulsive in its conception, based on self-dislike and a spirit of disintegration.’

G. Wilson Knight

‘The story of a ‘sweet prince’ wrenched from life and dedicate alone to death.’

G. Wilson Knight

‘Hamlet denies the existence of romantic values.’

G. Wilson Knight

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

A. J. A Waldock

‘The difficulty, in ultimate terms, is to know what the play is really about.’

T. S. Eliot

‘Hamlet is dominated by an emotion which is inexpressible, because it is in excess of the facts as they appear.’

C. S. Lewis

‘I would not cross the room to meet Hamlet. It would never be necessary. He is always where I am.’

C. S. Lewis

‘Hamlet is a dishevelled man whose words make us at once think of loneliness and doubt and dread, of waste and dust and emptiness, and whose hands, or from our own, we feel the richness of heaven and earth and the comfort of human affection slipping away.’

Harry Levin

‘Hamlet is probably the most problematic play ever written by Shakespeare or any other play-wright.’

Charles Marowitz

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

Kenneth Muir

‘Hamlet is first to last a creature of circumstance, neither good nor bad, because direction by pure eventuality excludes responsibility and leaves only a conditioned machine, a tortured automaton.’

A. P Rossiter

‘Hamlet is… so much too good for his fate. This is the central conflict of the play: the clash between what we feel for the intelligence, generosity, fineness of Hamlet, and the fortuitousness, meanness and clumsiness of the forces by which he is destroyed.’

Frank Kermode

‘The whole idea of dramatic character is changed for ever by this play… no one much like Hamlet has ever existed before… The new mastery is a mastery of the ambiguous, the unexpected, of conflicting evidence and semantic audacity.’

Elaine Showalter

‘Ophelia has increasingly become a female counterpart to Hamlet as a portrait of surviving conflict and stress.’

Elaine Showalter

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

Francis Gentleman

‘This advice from Laertes his sister is a prudent caution; the fair fruit of good sense and fraternal affection.’

J. Anthony Burton

‘As the audience should already know from the manner in which Claudius has deflected Laertes’ rebellion, the young man has not come home from the cultural centre of Europe as a sophisticated courtier, but as an uncultured patsy.’ (eg. using the name Lamord - a trap like the moustrap).

Stewart (1914)

‘Hamlet’s mood is not one of sorrow or of love for Ophelia, but purely of rage at Laertes who would thus ‘outface him’, and of distain for Laertes’ expressions of grief.’

Tomlinson (1889)

‘It is in the absence of Laertes that Polonius is killed and Ophelia goes mad and is drowned.’

MacDonald (1885)

‘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, but will act at once on hearsay. To make up one’s mind at once, without ground, is weakness and not strength.’

Tyler (1874)

‘The idol of Hamlet’s heart, the maiden whom he loved with a love greater than that of 40,000 brothers is distinguished by a high degree of moral purity.’

Hall (1869)

‘Satisfied with the assertions of the King that the guilt belongeth not to him, Laertes, in his intense desire to avenge his father’s murder, falls readily into the king’s plot.’

Hudson (1872)

‘In regard to the death of his father, Laertes snatches eagerly at the conclusion shaped for him by the King, without pausing to consider the grounds of it, because it offers a speedy chance of discharging his revenge.’

Hudson (1872)

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

Kittredge (1939)

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

Moberly

Compares Paris, ‘the centre of frivolous gaiety’ and Wittenberg ‘the university dear to the Protestant heart of Englans.’

Dryden (invented idea of comic relief)

 ‘A continued gravity keeps the spirit too much bent; we must refresh it sometimes.’

Bradley

‘The only Shakespearean tragic hero who doubles as a joker.’

Indira Ghose

‘Hamlet exploits the freedom of a licensed fool to skewer the culture of lies and the corruption of court society.’

Indira Ghose

‘Hamlet takes on the typical role of a fool. He shares many traits with Shakespeare’s other wise fools. He is an ironic outsider, a cynical commentator who delights in mocking forms of language game.’s.

Indira Ghose

‘In his rationalization for not killing Claudius, in his callous murder of Polonius, and in his castigation of his mother, he reveals a self-righteous, zealous streak that verges on the self-deluded.’

Catherine Belsey

‘In the Graveyard scene Hamlet seeks to gain control over death.’ (the skull he holds up is that of another fool).

Catherine Belsey

‘Hamlet is the tragic hero of humanism, subject of empiricist knowledge, who has taken the place of God, is an isolated figure, uncertain of the knowledge of the self, the world and others which legitimates its lonely dominion’

Kiernan Ryan

‘What would be the point of obtaining the private ‘wild justice’ of revenge for a king’s son who realises that the entire kingdom is founded on inequality and thus inherently unjust?’

Kiernan Ryan

‘In Hamlet Shakespeare deliberately sabotages the whole genre of revenge tragedy by creating a tragic protagonist who refuses, for reasons he can’t fathom himself, to play the stock role in which he’s been miscast by the world he happens to inhabit.’

Kiernan Ryan

‘As a Renaissance prince, steeped in the values of his class and culture, Hamlet is naturally appalled to find himself failing to play the prescribed royal part of righteous avenging son.’

Kiernan Ryan

‘Hamlet’s retreat into the dramatic limbo of his ‘antic disposition’ isn’t a symptom of some mysterious malaise that’s incapacitated him, but the only sane response to an insane predicament in a society that no longer makes sense.’

Freud

Hamlet has an "Oedipal desire for his mother and the subsequent guilt [is] preventing him from murdering the man [Claudius] who has done what he unconsciously wanted to do". Confronted with his repressed desires, Hamlet realises that "he himself is literally no better than the sinner whom he is to punish". Freud suggests that Hamlet's apparent "distaste for sexuality"—articulated in his "nunnery" conversation with Ophelia—accords with this interpretation.

Carolyn Heilbrun

Defends Gertrude, arguing that the text never hints that Gertrude knew of Claudius poisoning King Hamlet. By this account, Gertrude's worst crime is of pragmatically marrying her brother-in-law in order to avoid a power vacuum. This is borne out by the fact that King Hamlet's ghost tells Hamlet to leave Gertrude out of Hamlet's revenge, to leave her to heaven, an arbitrary mercy to grant to a conspirator to murder.

A C Bradley (1904)

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

Verity (1904)

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

Thompson (2004)

‘The least able to double is the actor playing Horatio … does this reinforce Hamlet’s own view of Horatio as an ever fixed mark who must be encouraged to go on being himself at the end of the play.’

Nuttall (2007)

‘Hamlet lost in a new subjective darkness, sees in Horatio an innocent stoic.’

Barker

‘The ghost makes a plea for Hamlet to ‘remember me’ - at the end of the play, the son now dying begs Horatio to tell the story: it is the most important thing.’