Hamlet quotes

Feigned madness (Hamlet’s pledge, as political cover, wordplay, Polonius’ discernment, confession to Gertrude, clarity towards end x2)

‘antic disposition’ / ‘Madness in great ones must not unwatched go’ / ‘You are a fishmonger’ / ‘Though this be madness, yet there is method in it’ / ‘I am essentially not in madness/But mad in craft’ / ‘There’s a divinity that shapes our ends’ ‘the readiness is all’

Explicable madness (Ophelia’s misperception, disruption to familial unit, gravity of incest, confrontation of Gertrude)

‘as if he had been loosed out of hell’ / ‘a little more than kin, a little less than kind’ / ‘A bloody deed, almost as bad, good mother/As kill a king and marry with his brother’ / ‘In the rank sweat of an enseamed bed/Stewed in corruption’

Genuine madness (inconsistency with Ophelia, Ophelia’s response, killing of Polonius)

‘I did love you once…I loved you not’ / ‘O what a noble mind is here o’erthrown!’ / ‘A rat? Dead for a ducat, dead!’

Ophelia’s madness (symptomatic of, grieving Polonius)

‘One woe doth tread upon another'‘s heel/So fast they follow’ / ‘He is dead and gone’

Claudius’ machiavellianism (insensitivity, expediency, duplicity, profession of guilt and greed x3, irony in manipulation, pretence)

‘with mirth in funeral and dirge in marriage’ / ‘You are the most immediate to our throne’ / ‘O villain, villain, smiling, damned villain!’ / ‘O my offence is rank, it smells to heaven’ ‘the effects for which I did my murder’ ‘my crown, my own ambition, and my queen’ / ‘Desperate diseases grown/By desperate appliance are relieved’ / ‘defend me, friends’

Claudius as relative to his brother x2

‘Hyperion to a satyr’ / ‘like a mildewed ear/Blasting his wholesome brother'

Corruption in Denmark (pervasive, sexual)

‘an unweeded garden…things rank and gross in nature’ / ‘A couch for luxury and damned incest’

Revelation and intuition of corruption

‘Foul deeds will rise’ / ‘Something is rotten in the state of Denmark’

Hamlet’s own political/intellectual ambition

‘Denmark’s a prison’/’Then is the world one’ / ‘Tis too narrow for your mind’

Soliloquy - nihilistic sentiment, suspicion of corruption, contempt of Gertrude

1.1 ‘how weary, stake, flat and unprofitable seem to me all the uses of this world!’ / ‘unweeded garden’ / ‘Frailty, thy name is woman’

Soliloquy - having witnessed the players

2.2 ‘in a fiction, in a dream of passion/Could force his soul to his own conceit’

Soliloquy - justifying lack of action re Claudius

3.3 ‘hire and salary’

Soliloquy - accepts ghost’s revenge imperative whilst foregrounding reluctance

1.5 ‘O cursed spite,/That ever I was born to set it right’

Soliloquy - devises plan to confirm ghost’s account with Mousetrap

2.2 ‘The play’s the thing/wherein I’ll catch the conscience of the King’

Soliloquy - turning point after witnessing the conviction of Fortinbras’ army so disproportional to the prospective reward. Also building suspense to climax.

4.4 ‘O, from this time forth,/My thoughts be bloody, or be nothing worth’

Soliloquy - proto-existentialist

3.3 - ‘Whether ‘tis nobler in the mind to suffer/the slings and arrows of an outrageous fortune,/Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,/And by opposing end them’

Soliloquy - eschatological uncertainty, contrast to previous?

3.1 - ‘undiscover’d country’ / 1.2 - ‘Or that the Everlasting had not fixed/His canon against self-slaughter’

Soliloquy - juxtaposition of conscience with action

3.1 - ‘And thus the native hue of resolution/is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought’

Old King and Hamlet relationship (ambiguity of ghost’s character, Horatio’s warning, ultimatum, imperative, reiteration before Gertrude)

‘a spirit of health ‘a goblin damned’ / ‘which might deprive your sovereignty of reason/And draw you into madness’ / ‘If thou didst ever thy dear father love’ / ‘Revenge his foul and most unnatural murder’ / ‘whet thy almost blunted purpose’

Old King and Hamlet (idealisation of father, Yorick)

‘My father’s brother, but no more like my father/Than I to Hercules’ / ‘a fellow of infinite jest, of excellent fancy’

Polonius and Laertes’ relationship (hypocrisy, Reynaldo, filial loyalty)

‘to thine own self be true’ / ‘By indirections find directions out’ / ‘That drop of blood that’s calm proclaims me bastard’

Laertes and Ophelia (Hamlet’s affections, Ophelia’s promise)

‘a fashion and a toy in blood’ / ‘‘Tis in my memory locked, and you yourself shall keep the key’

Polonius and Ophelia (reputational concerns, infantilisation, identifies double standards, Ophelia’s deference)

‘Tender yourself more dearly’ ‘you’ll tender me a fool’ / ‘Think yourself a baby’ / ‘with a larger tether may he walk/Than may be given to you’ / ‘I shall obey, my lord’

Gertrude and Hamlet (corroborates Claudius’ criticism, Hamlet’s respect, defence of Hamlet, struggle with guilt, last words)

‘Good Hamlet, cast thy nighted colour off’ / ‘I shall in all my best obey you, madam’ / ‘his father’s death and our oer’hasty marriage’ / ‘Thou turn’st mine eyes into my very soul/And there I see such black and grained spots’ / ‘O, my dear Hamlet’

Romantic love (Hamlet’s projection, the Mousetrap)

‘Get thee to a nunnery: why wouldst thou be a breeder of sinners?’ / ‘A second time I kill my husband dead/When second husband kisses me in bed’

Horatio’s friendship (self deprecation, Hamlet’s response, mourning)

‘poor servant’ / ‘I’ll change that name with you’ / ‘Good night, sweet prince’

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern (self-ingratiation, deception, mistrust')

‘give up ourselves, in the full bent’ / ‘You would play upon me’ / ‘Whom I will trust as I will adders fanged’

Hamlet’s moral aversion (?) to revenge

‘conscience does make cowards of us all’

Misogyny (association of femininity with moral weakness, verbosity, and excess sadness x2)

‘Frailty, thy name is woman!’ / ‘Must, like a whore, unpack my heart with words’ / ‘unmanly grief’ / ‘When these are gone/The woman will be out’

Gender (double standard)

‘Show me the steep and thorny way to heaven’ ‘Himself the primrose path of dalliance treads'

Claudius’ notion of revenge as imparted to Laertes (arguably internalised by Hamlet)

‘revenge should have no bounds’

The irony of Polonius’ pomposity and loquaciousness

‘brevity is the soul of wit’

Comedy (Hamlet’s sardonic wordplay x3)

‘I am too much in the sun’ / ‘You are a fishmonger’ / ‘What is the matter, my lord?/Between who?’

Catholic imagery (of purgatory, of ascent into heaven’

‘sulphurous and tormenting flames’ / ‘flights of angels sing thee to rest’

Imploration to Ophelia for forgiveness

‘Nymph, in thy orisons/Be all my sins remembered’

Existential nihilism x 2

‘Or that the Everlasting had not fixed/His canon against self-slaughter’ / ‘a consummation/Devoutly to be wished’

Arbitrary mass death (Laertes)

‘I am justly killed with mine own treachery’ / ‘Exchange forgiveness with me, noble Hamlet’

Gertrude’s redemption arc

‘Gertrude, do not drink’ / ‘I will my lord, I pray you pardon me’

Brutality of mass death - Horatio’s description to Fortinbras

‘carnal, bloody and unnatural acts…of deaths put on by cunning and forced cause’

Reflecting Hamlet’s solipsism/end of Danish lineage

‘The rest is silence’

Fortinbras (invader, expediency v Claudius’, warlike disposition)

‘I have some rights of memory in this kingdom’ / ‘with sorrow I embrace my good fortune’ ‘that we with wisest sorrow think on him/together with remembrance of ourselves’ / ‘What warlike noise is this?’

Hamlet’s endorsement of Fortinbras

‘he has my dying voice’

Theatricality and performance (Hamlet’s strategic survival, Ophelia veiled social commentary)

‘to put an antic disposition on’ / ‘Young men will do’t…By Cock, they are to blame’

Theatricality and performance (for revelation of truth- the players, the Mousetrap, Gertrude’s response to which betrays her)

‘in a fiction, in a dream of passion/Could force his soul to his own conceit’ / ‘The play’s the thing/wherein I’ll catch the conscience of the King’ / ‘The lady doth protest too much, methinks’

Hamlet’s self-theatricalisation (solipsism, Fortinbras restoring his princely status)

‘the rest is silence’ / ‘Bear Hamlet, like a soldier, to the stage’