critics

Bradley (1904)

Hamlet's concern with the process of death it what prevents him from inflicting it upon others. His ponderings on death on serves the further delay his 'already delayed revenge’.

Renaissance criticism

Concerned with the play's dramatization of madness/insanity - more violence in these earlier interpretations

Goethe in his 1795 novel referencing Hamlet

Hamlet has a 'lovely, pure, noble more moral nature, without the strength of nerve which forms a hero'. This represented a shift in criticism from the plot itself to the portrayal of character.

Romantic criticism

Henry Mackenzie argues that Hamlet has the 'strongest purposes for revenge, but this is awkward because he does nothing. Also, this period saw Hamlet as less plagued by melancholy and more as a rebel against politics

Anne Barton (1900) - evidence

"Hamlet lacks real evidence of his uncle's villainy"

David Leverenz - femininity/treatment of women

'Hamlet's disgust at the feminine passivity in himself is translated into violent revulsion against women and into his brutal behaviour towards Ophelia.’

Juliet Dusinberre - Ophelia

'Ophelia is stifled by the authority of the male world'

Maynard Mack

'The ghost is the supreme reality, representative of the hidden ultimate power'

Belsey

'Revenge is an act of injustice on behalf of justice'

Peter Davison

'humour is the key to the tonal quality of the play'

Kittredge - Laertes

‘the typical avenger’

Cedric Watts

"Gertrude isn't the stereotypical lustful woman of revenge drama, she's far more sympathetic"

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"

Elaine Showalter

"Drowning was a typically feminine death"

AC Bradley

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

Belsey

"the moral uncertainty persists to the end [...] Hamlet dies a revenger, a poisoner, but also a soldier and a prince”.