Hamlet critics
- Created by: __Jess
- Created on: 12-02-23 11:49
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- Hamlet critics
- Morality
- "[Polonius is] a cold-hearted devil." - Walter
- "The story of moral poisoning." - Taine
- Women
- "[Gertrude] inspires uxorious passion first in King Hamlet and later in Claudius." - Bloom
- "Ophelia is deprived of thought, sexuality and language." - Showalter
- "Drowning too was associated with the feminine." - Bachelord
- "Pleasing men is Gertrude's main interest." - Smith
- Madness
- "Gives [Hamlet] the licence of a fool to speak cruel truths." - Flint
- "Hamlet is emotionally unstable, not insane." - Campbell
- Supernatural
- "Ghosts of departed persons are not wandering souls of men but the unquiet walks of the devil." - Browne's Religious Medici (1643)
- "[King Hamlet] serves as a symbol for the religious ambivalence present in England." - O' Connor
- Action and inaction
- "Hamlet is a man incapable of acting because he thinks too much." - Coleridge
- "Knowledge kills action, action requires the veil of illusion." - Nietzsche
- Revenge
- "Hamlet assumes without any questioning that he ought to avenge his father." - Bradley
- "With the strongest purposes of revenge, he is irresolute and inactive." - Mackenzie
- "Revenge exists as a margin between justice and crime." - Belsey
- "Hamlet never promises to revenge, only to remember." - Kerrigan
- Violence
- "Awful linguistic violence." - Critchley
- "[Hamlet] is a conscript of war." - Cutwell
- Control
- "[Hamlet's] contemplation of madness has left him vulnerable to control." - Tome
- New historicist lens - 16th Century women controlled by strict gender roles, and couldn't act in theatres
- Love
- "Polonius seems to love his children; he seems to have the welfare of the kingdom in mind." - Smith
- "Rosencrantz and Guildenstern sacrifice the bond of human friendship to a social property." - French
- Appearance v reality
- "Claudius is a mirror of Hamlet himself." - Rubenfeld
- "No-one in this play knows or understands anyone else." - Charnes
- Masculinity
- "Hamlet becomes temporarily obsessed with the image of warrior masculinity which Pyrrhus represents." - Mangan
- "Hamlet is presented as fashionably introspective and melancholy." - Sienfield
- Morality
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