hamlet critics
memory and remembrance in Hamlet - Kerrigan 1996
‘though he admits that ‘the memory’ of his brother is ‘green’, Claudius insists of ‘remembrance of ourselves’’
‘remeberance haunts him, even to the point of madness’
‘his words to Horatio are consistent with a degree of suffering’
‘comfort is found in the past’
Bowlby - ‘because of the persistent and insatiable nature of yearning for the lost figure, pain is inevitable’
‘for the ‘tenders’ of ‘affection’ made to Ophelia ‘of late’ show the prince attempting to replace a dead love-object with a living one’
'his inky cloak is ambiguous: a mark of respect for his father, it also indicates his desire eventually to detach himself from him’
Claudius’ refusal to let him return to school in Wittenberg: this leaves the prince surrounded by people and places which remorselessly remind him of the dead King’
‘the ghost condemns Hamlet to an endless, fruitless ‘yearning for the lost figure’’
‘Ophelia wants to divest herself of every shred of attachment. In this she is no better than Gertrude, glad to forget her first husband’
‘Ophelia is forcing his to remember’
‘through the loss of Ophelia, Hamlet feels that of his father’
Hamlet: Avenging his father or saving his mother? - Adelman (1992)
‘the intimate unknown figure around whom these fantasies swirl’
‘she is kept ambiguously innocent as a character, but in the deep fantasy the structure the play’s imagery’
‘she plays out the role of the missing Eve: her body is the garden, sexuality the poisonous weed, the self for her son’
‘his disappearance in effect throws Hamlet into the domain of the engulfing mother’
‘the loss of the father turns out in fact to mean the psychic domination of the mother’
‘this shift of agency and of danger from male to female seems characteristic of the fantasy-structure of Hamlet’
‘the main psychological task that Hamlet seems to set himself is not to avenger his father’s death but to remake his mother’
‘remake her in the image of the Virgin mother who could guarantee his father’s purity, and his own, repairing the boundaries of his selfhood’
‘even as an avenger, Hamlet seems motivated more by his mother than by his father’
‘he manages to achieve his revenge only when he can avenge his mother’s death’
‘the playlet is in fact designed to catch the conscience of the queen’
the complexity of Hamlet - Hazlitt (1916)
Shakespearean tragedy - Kastan (2003)
the pleasure of tragedy - Nuttall (1996)
the Shakespearean tragic hero - Bradley (1991)
tragedy and madness - Mack (1993)