Hamlet critics and performances

Feigned madness

Wilson: categorisation of Hamlet as mad/not mad inapplicable to Shakespearean era; what makes Hamlet a hero is that ‘his mind is impaired, [but] his nobility remains untouched’

Explicable madness (disruption to familial unit)

(turn of 20th century) Bradley: in Hamlet’s first soliloquy, what informs his grief is not suspicion of Claudius, but rather ‘the sudden ghastly disclosure of his mother’s true nature’

Explicable madness production and critic

1948 Laurence Olivier: Hamlet moves from his head in Gertrude’s lap into a passionate French kiss. Captures the Oedipal tension that Freud hypothesised - his anger towards Claudius is for having achieved what he desires yet represses: to usurp the father and win the mother

Not madness, but disproportionate

Eliot: Hamlet is ‘dominated by an emotion that is inexpressible’ as it is ‘in excess of the facts as they appear’. Even Hamlet cannot rationalise the extent of his disgust towards Claudius and Gertrude’s coupling. It is ‘less than madness and more than feigned.’

Genuine madness (killing of Polonius) production

2026 RSC Hiran Abesekeyra: believes himself to be wielding an imaginary gun, does not realise or reveal to the audience that it is a real firearm until Polonius has been shot. Is deeply remorseful.

Genuine madness - temporal context

An Elizabethan audience would’ve associated the revenge plot with the Earl of Essex’s rebellion against the Queen, for which he was executed. Seen as out of his mind and admitted to insanity on the scaffold before death.

Ophelia’s madness - production and critic

(21st century feminist) Neely: ‘whereas her madness is somatised and its content eroticised, Hamlet’s melancholy is politicised in form and content’.

2008 RSC David Tennant: Ophelia strips down to her bra in front of Claudius and Gertrude immediately moves to cover her. The latitude afforded to her in madness is minimal.

Claudius’ guilt - production

2008 RSC David Tennant: kneels before surveillance cameras, impression of being watched and judged compounds perceptions of guilt

Claudius’ death - production

2008 RSC David Tennant: Claudius knows the chalice is poisoned before he drinks, either does so out of guilt or cannot bear being outed as a fraud

Claudius relative to his brother - production

1948 Laurence Olivier - Hamlet compares images of old King and Claudius fastened around his and Gertrude’s necks respectively

Hamlet’s ambition

(21st century) JD Wilson: Shakespeare influenced by Renaissance conceptions of melancholy as not only one prone to spectral visitations, but aggravated in his condition by thwarted ambition

Critics subverting conventional presentation of H and C

(20th century) Knight: Claudius is a ‘good and gentle king’ whilst Hamlet is an ‘ambassador of death’ and an ‘element of evil in the state of Denmark’

Political critic

(Cold War context) Kott: considers Hamlet a ‘drama of political crime’; Hamlet is a dissident in Claudius’ totalitarian regime. Rejects Hamlet as a moral agent, drawing attention instead to the systemic corruption in the state of Denmark whereby power trumps ethics

3.3 - production

1996 Kenneth Branaugh - Hamlet enters slowly, looking into a mirror, indicative of interiority and reflective capacity. However, it is a one-way mirror and audience sees that Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are watching from the other side, indicative of a surveillance theme.

Source of Hamlet’s shock

James - the strength of the emotional shock Hamlet has suffered is equalled by the weaknesss of his mind in the face of difficult moral and metaphysical issues. ‘It is tragedy not of excessive thoughts but of defeated thought’

Revenge burden

Kerrigan: ‘the revenger who assumes the burden of another person’s resentment suspends his own identity’

Old King and Hamlet’s relationship - production

1948 Laurence Olivier - ghost appears to Hamlet as robed figure in mist, masked and wearing crown, perhaps indicative of a distant relationship in life and how his role as king took precedence over that of father

Polonius and Ophelia’s relationship

Rebecca Smith: Polonius has ‘trained his daughter to be obedient and chaste and is able to use her as a piece of bait of spying’. However, does argue he loves his children and cares for the welfare of his kingdom; it’s his means of action that are corrupt.

Polonius and Ophelia’s relationship (negative) - production

1948 Laurence Olivier: in 3.1 Ophelia is sobbing on the floor, but neither Polonius nor Claudius try to console her, preoccupied with the implications of Hamlet’s speech

Polonius and Ophelia’s relationship (positive)

2026 RSC Hiran Abesekeyra - familial bonds strong, Laertes and Ophelia find their father’s advice to be an old man’s ramblings but still endearing

Gertrude pivot at the end - production

1948 Laurence Olivier - Gertrude knows the chalice is poisoned and drinks anyway, spends her last moments gazing lovingly at Hamlet

Hamlet’s disillusionment with romantic love - critic

Traub: Hamlet’s resentment towards Gertrude’s incestuous adultery creates a fear of sexually threatening women, which he paranoiacally projects onto Ophelia. She is sexually desirable once more when she is dead, then fetishised by both Hamlet and Laertes.

Trust or lack thereof - production

2015 Maxine Peake: characters join hands together when Hamlet makes them swear to secrecy, but his hand is trembling and he holds a gun

Horatio - critic

Reed: ‘a sober-minded judicious character’

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern - critic

French: they ‘sacrifice the bond of human friendship to a social propriety’

Hamlet failing in revenger role

Kerrigan: revenge must possess a ‘recapitulative power’; Claudius ultimately dies for deaths of Gertrude and Laertes, rather than the old King. It is instead an act of ‘spontaneous retaliation’

Ophelia’s madness through time

Showalter: shifts in accordance with the evolving ideological nexus of female sexuality, femininity, and madness. 1) Elizabethan-Jacobean times: icon of emotional extremity, signifying love-malady or erotomania, 2) 18th century: mad scenes minimised in staging in accordance with rationalist ideologies of decorum, 3) Romanticism: Ophelia driven to picturesque madness, with long black veil emulating the female sexual mystery of a gothic novel, 4) 1960s: a whimsical madness, expression of the zeitgeist of youth alienated from older generation

Excess of knowledge as deterring action

(psychoanalytic modern) Critchley and Webster: Hamlet is ‘too much in the sun of knowledge’, as through the medium of the ghost, he has grasped the nature of himself, his family, and the corrupt political order. ‘The cost of self-reflexivity is incapacity of action’

Psychosexual interpretation for Hamlet’s inability to kill Claudius

Freud: No moral qualms/incapacity of action; rather, averse to the specific task of killing Claudius as' he shows him the repressed wishes of his own childhood realised’. The impetus to revenge is replaced by self reproach because Hamlet knows he is no better.

Defence of Hamlet as active

Gardener: ‘Hamlet’s vacillation represents not indecision but a tragic awareness of the consequences of action’

Criticism of Hamlet as inactive

Jones: ‘rather an instrument than an agent’

Hamlet perversely drawn to his own death - production

1948 Laurence Oliver: Hamlet’s performance begins as unnaturally constrained but picks up speed as we move closer to the ending, as if character is energised by imminent death.

Revenge as inherently disproportionate x2

Belsey: ‘the excess of justice seems to the revenger an overriding imperative’ / (17th century) Bacon: ‘revenge is a kind of wild justice’

Positive portrayal of Polonius

2026 RSC Hiran Abesekeyra: a bumbling, old fool who plays the ukelele

Hamlet’s Catholic sympathies

(late 20th) Greenblatt: note Shakespeare’s recusant family background, his education in Stratford under teachers affiliated with Campion and the Jesuits, has Claudius as the archetypal villain adopt the language of Protestant mourning

Hamlet as mourning a Catholic world

(21st century) Curran: not a secularist text but one mourning the loss of a Catholic worldview. The strictly Protestant world is one of ‘unmitigated determinism’, where human action is rendered meaningless by the doctrine of predestination. Hamlet longs for the ‘hopeful, Catholic idea of being’ but is forced to capitulate to the bleak, predestinarian reality around him’

Claudius’ inner conflict in 3.3 - production

1996 Kenneth Branagh: set in an opulent chapel, highlighting tension between greed and desire for repentance; decadence a facade for corruption in the court

Hamlet’s grief in 1.2 - production

1996 Kenneth Branagh: Hamlet standing alone in vast hall signifying isolation, dressed in black whilst rest of royal court are in red or white, surrounded by mirrors to signify a fragmented mental state

Hamlet’s narrative reliability

Holderness: Hamlet is ‘not a reliable judge’, not psychologically integrated. Idealises his father and thus, by logic of opposition, vilifies Claudius

Tragedy

Bradley: ‘there is no tragedy in the expulsion of evil: the tragedy is that it involves the waste of good’

Immensity and irrevocability of tragedy - production

2025 RSC Rupert Goold with nautical setting. Deck of ship tilts so all who die slide down to a watery grave

Political tragedy

Emma Smith: understated in the literature

Omission of Fortinbras’ entrance - production

2025 RSC Rupert Goold - last image imparted upon audience is that of Hamlet with arms outstretched in a Christlike position, seemingly embracing his imminent death

Hamle't’s performative nature

Holderness: Hamlet is a ‘chameleon creature’, aware of his own theatricality, indicative of a lack of psychological integration. Is cast by other people into roles in which he partially engages, but ultimately resists.

The ghost’s purpose / broader role of theatre in Shakespeare

Greenblatt: To a 17th Protestant audience, the ghost onstage is a secular replacement for the emotional functions which pre-reformation institutions (Catholic doctrine of purgatory) served. ‘The power of Shakespeare’s theatre is frequently linked to its appropriation of weakened or damaged institutional structures’.

Reminder of Hamlet’s tendency to self-theatricalise

2008 RSC David Tennant - frequently breaking the fourth wall, especially during soliloquies and other introspective moments.

Indicative of Hamlet’s solipsism - production

1948 Lawrence Olivier - Hamlet determined to assert his narrative of events with symbolic action even after fatal wound, walks up to the throne and is ‘coronated’ right before his death, with those surrounding venerating him as the rightful King of Denmark