Hamlet Critical interpretations

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preface to Shakespeare by Samuel Johnson, 1765

  • the pretended madness of Hamlet causes much mirth, the mournful distraction of Ophelia fills the heart with tenderness, and every personage produces the effect intended, from the apparition that in the first act chills the blood with horror, to the fop in the last that exposes affectation to just contempt. 
  • of the feigned madness of Hamlet there appears no adequate cause, for he does nothing which he might not have done with the reputation of sanity. 
  • he plays the madman most, when he treats Ophelia with so much rudeness, which seems to be useless and wanton cruelty. 
  • hamlet is, through the whole play, rather an instrument than an agent. after he has, by the stratagem of the play, convicted the King, he makes no attempt to punish him, and his death is at last effected by an incident which Hamlet has no part in producing.
  • the poet is accused of having shewn little regard to poetical justice, and may be charged with equal neglect of poetical probability. the apparition left the regions of the dead to little purpose; the revenge which he demands is not obtained but by the death of him that was required to take it; and the gratification which would arise from the destruction of a usurper and a murderer, is abated by the untimely death of Opheila, the young, the beautiful, the harmless and the pious.
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Goethe 1795-6

  • To me it is clear that Shakespeare meant, in the present case, to represent the effects of a great action laid upon a soul unfirt for the performance of it. 
  • A lovely, pure, noble and most moral nature, without the strength of nerve which forms a hero, sinks beneath a burden which it cannot bear and must not cast away. all duties are holy for him; the present is too hard. impossibilities have been required of him; not in themselves impossibilities, but such for him. He winds and turns and torments himself; he advances and recoils; is ever put in mind, ever puts himself in mind; at last does all but lose his purpose from his thoughts; yet still without recovering his peace of mind.
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Hazlitt 1817

  • the play has prophetic truth, which is that above history.
  • whoever has become thoughtful and melancholy through his own mishaps or those of others; whoever has borne about with him the clouded brow of reflection, and thought himself 'too much in the sun'; whoever has seen the golden lamp of day dimmed by envious mists rising in his own breast, and could find in the world before him only a dull blank with nothing left remarkable in it; whoever has known "the pangs of despised love, the insolence of office, or the spurns which patient merit of the unworthy takes"; he who has felt his mind sink within him, and sadness clings to his heart like a malady, who has had his hopes blighte and his youth staggered by the apparitions of strange things; who cannot be well at ease, while he sees evil hovering near him like a spectre; whose powers of action have been eaten up by thought , he to whom the universe seems infinite, and him-self nothing; whose bitterness of soul makes him careless of consequences, and who goes to a play as his best resource to shove off, to a second remove, the evils of life by a mock representation of them- this is the true Hamlet...
  • His ruling passion is to think, not to act: and any vague pretext that flatters this propensity instantly diverts him from his previous purpose.
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Coleridge 1818

  • Polonius is a man of maxims. whilst he is decanting on matters of past experience, as in that excellent speech to Laertes before he sets out on his travels, he is admirable;but when he comes to advise or project, he is a mere dotard. you see, Hamlet, as the man of ideas, despises him. 
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A.C Swineburne 1880

  • the signal characteristic of Hamlet's inmost nature is by no means irresolution or hesitation or any form of weakness, but rather the strong conflux of contending forces.
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A.C Bradley 1904

  • [his melancholy] accounts for the main fact, Hamlet's inaction.
  • but this melancholy is perfectly consistent also with that incessant dissection of the task assigned, 
  • all this, and whatever else passed in a sickening round through Hamlet's mind, was not the healthy and right deliberation of a man with such a task, but otiose thinking hardly deserving the name of thought, an unconscious weaving of pretexts for inaction, aimless tossings on a sick bed, symptoms of melancholy which only increased it by deepening self-contempt.
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T.S Elliot 1919

  • few critics have ever admitted that Hamlet the play is the primary problem, and Hamlet the character, only secondary . and Hamlet the character has had an especial temptation for that most dangerous type of critic .... these minds often find in Hamlet a vicarious existence for their own artistic realization. Such a mind had Goethe, who made of Hamlet a Werther; and such had Coleridge, who made of Hamlet a Coleridge; and probably neither of these men in writing about Hamlet remembered that his first business was to study a work of art.
  • the effect of 'madness' is not to lull but to arouse the king's suspicion 
  • the only way of expressing emotion in the form of art is by finding an 'objective correlative'; in other words, a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula of that particular emotion; such that when the external facts,which must terminate in sensory experience, are given, the emotion is immediately evoked.
  • Hamlet (the man) is dominated by an emotion which is inexpressible, because it is in excess of the facts as they appear. 
  • Hamlet is up against the difficulty that his disgust is occassioned by his mother, but that his mother is not an aequate equivalent for it; his disgust envelops and exceeds her. 
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George Bernard Shaw 1945

  • when the unlucky uncle poisons not only Hamlet's mother but his own accomplice and Hamlet himself, Hamlet actually does at last kill his enemy on the spur of the moment; but this is no solution of his problem: it cuts the Gordian knot instead of untying it...
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Voltaire from Dissertation sur la tragedie 1748

  • it is a vulgar and barbarous drama, which would not be tolerated by the vilest populace of France, or Italy/
  • Hamlet becomes crazy in the second act, and his mistress becomes crazy in the third; the prince slays the father of his mistress under the pretence of killing a rat, and the heroine throws herslef into the river, a grave is dug on the stage
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