Hamlet Critics

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Sagar

Although Shakespearean audiences would have accepted the reality of the ghost, its words cannot be trusted.

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Emily Graf, Eastern Michigan University

Instead of marrying Claudius because of her lack of self control… Gertrude is in fact protecting her son from the man who murdered her husband, the King of Denmark.    

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Oedipal Complex

Derived from Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannus, during which Oedipus learned that he was cursed to kill his father and sleep with his mother.

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Earl of Essex

Hamlet compared to Earl of Essex, executed for rebelling against Queen. Scholars looked into Essex at the Elizabethan ideas of madness to connect this with Hamlet. Elizabethans saw Essex as mad and he admitted to insanity before his death. In same way, Hamlet might really be as mad as he is pretending to be, looking at the historical context. Due to his madness, he questions everything from his revenge to death and is therefore unable to trust himself.

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Performance elements

David Tennant used real skull of Tchaikovsky

Olivier film of the play; castle battlements surrounded by swirling mists. Patrick Stewart plays both Claudius and old Hamlet/the Ghost.

RSC version with David Tennant; CCTV cameras used.

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G. Wilson Knight

Death is over the whole play. Polonius and Ophelia die during the action, and Ophelia is buried before our eyes. Hamlet arranges the deaths of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. The plot is set in motion by the murder of Hamlet’s father, and the play opens with the apparition of the Ghost.    

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A.C. Bradley

In his first speech of the play, ‘Oh that this too solid flesh,’ Hamlet seems on verge of total despair, kept from suicide by simple fact of spiritual awe. Wishing for death yet fearing it intensely. This double pressure gives the play much of its drama.

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Ann Thompson

The Warrant of Womanhood, Shakespeare and Feminist Criticism, Ann Thompson: Male characters in Shakespeare have limited perception of female characters. Shakespeare sympathetic to women in this area. Lets audience know he intended for male character to misunderstand female, consequences often tragic.

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The Spanish Tragedy

Most popular revenge tragedy of Elizabethan period The Spanish Tragedy main character goes mad in build up to revenge, Hamlet unique because madness ambiguous.

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Elaine Showalter

Deprived of thought, sexuality, language, Ophelia’s story becomes the Story of O – the zero, the empty circle or mystery of feminine difference, the cipher of female sexuality to be deciphered by feminist interpretation.

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Elizabethan slang

Elizabethan slang: nothing a term for female genitalia. ‘That’s a fair thought to lie between maids’ legs’ ‘What is, my lord?’ ‘Nothing’

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T.S. Eliot

Few critics have ever admitted that Hamlet the play is the primary problem, and Hamlet the character only secondary.

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Puritans

Hamlet’s puritanical nature. Like the Puritans whose presence was growing in England of the time, severely puritanical about love and sex.

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Aristotle

Aristotle defined tragic hero with Oedipus as archetype a great man at the pinnacle of his power who, through a flaw in his own character, topples, taking everyone in his jurisdiction with him. Invoke us in a deep sense of pity and fear, we learn from him how not to conduct our lives.

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Gareth Lloyd Evans

Hamlet’s arguments for not killing Claudius at prayers are both subtle and logical – too subtle, in fact, considering the enormity of Claudius’ deed and the virtual certainty that Hamlet possesses of his guilt. Yet he holds back his sword – his heart does not seem to lie in its blade.

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Villainy

Unlike the earlier antiheroes of the revenge or morality plays popular in Elizabethan and Jacobean culture, Shakespearean criminals lack the simple clarity of absolute evil.

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Loske

On the whole, then, there emerges a King who is well qualified for his office… there continually appears on the stage a man who is utterly unlike the descriptions, and this in turn gives to Hamlet’s words their real value.

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Harley Granville-Barker

We have in Claudius the makings of the central figure of a tragedy.

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Biblical allusion

Claudius and biblical allusion, aligned with Cain (committed first murder ever, brother). Even Claudius admits his ‘offense is rank [and] smells to heaven [because] It hath the primal edlest curse upon’t A brother’s murder.’ Biblical story of the Fall ‘[t]he serpent that did sting [Hamlet’s] father’s life Now wears his crown.’ Claudius a distillation of the most basic, fundamental evil in a Christian worldview.

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William Camden

William Camden said in 1586 that Richard III – another of Shakespeare’s tricky kings – was a ‘bad man, but a good king.’

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Niccolò Machiavelli

Claudius seems to be a pretty diligent student of one Niccolò Machiavelli, whose prince was basically a self help guide for rules looking to get and maintain power. According to Machiavelli’s theory, being a successful ruler has nothing to do with being a nice person or doing the right thing. Instead, it’s about being inventive, charismatic, wilful and manipulative.

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Johnson

Polonius: ‘His mode of oratory is designed to ridicule the practice of those times, of prefaces that made no introduction, and of method that embarrassed rather than explained.’ ‘Such a man is positive and confident, because he knows that his mind was once strong, and knows not that it has become weak. Such a man excels in general principles, but fails in particular application. He is knowing in retrospect, and ignorant in foresight.’ ‘The idea of dotage encroaching upon wisdom will solve all the phenomena of the character of Polonius.’ – Johnson.

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Feminist perspective

Feminist perspective, Polonius reveals differences between male and female roles in Elizabethan society as his treatment of Laertes and Ophelia differ greatly: he is over-protective of Ophelia and expects her compliance.

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Martin Orkin

Martin Orkin comments on the nature of Polonius’ speech: “Shakespeare’s first audience would recognise in Polonius’ predilection for such commonplace expressions of worldly wisdom a mind that runs along conventional tracks, sticking only to what is practically useful in terms of worldly self-advancement.”

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Grebainer

Grebainer states on the foolishness of Polonius’ speech: “Such guidance will do for those who wish to make the world their prey, but it is dignified by no humanity. Who can live humanly without ever borrowing or lending? Is one to turn his back on his best friend in an hour of need?”

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Grebainer

Grebainer states on the foolishness of Polonius’ speech: “Such guidance will do for those who wish to make the world their prey, but it is dignified by no humanity. Who can live humanly without ever borrowing or lending? Is one to turn his back on his best friend in an hour of need?”

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Joan Hartwig

Joan Hartwig comments on Polonius’ plan to spy on his son: “A Machiavellian schemer who takes his plotting to absurd proportions, Polonius pursues ‘indirection’ for its own sake. His efforts to discover Laertes’ reputation in Paris assume that Laertes will not follow his earlier advice; this, the later words become a comic reduction of his previous sermon to his son.”

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R.S. White

R.S. White believes Polonius should have considered other options for Hamlet’s madness: “But when saying that it is simply Ophelia’s rejection that has made Hamlet mad, he is ignorant of the predisposed mental state of the young man caused by his mother’s remarriage, the recent encounter with the ghost and the whole repressive machinery of Denmark’s social and political life.”

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Grebainer

Grebainer comments on the character of Polonius: “Nothing is left of his ability and shrewdness but a few tags, a few catch-phrases, to which, even when they do express some grains of truth, he pays scant heed in his own demeanour. It is he, for example, who utters the celebrated: ‘brevity is the soul of wit’ – a profound truth but no character in Shakespeare is so long winded as Polonius.”

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Leo Kirschbaum

 A fishmonger is a barrel, one who employs a prostitute for his businesss. Hamlet is obliquely telling the old councillor that he is using his own daughter for evil ends.

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Bert States

Bert States comments, “Polonius is not only the perfect foil for Hamlet’s wit (since irony is the mortal enemy of the order prone mind), but a shadow of Hamlet as well. Indeed, Polonius literally shadows Hamlet, or tails him and in shadowing him falls into a thematic parody of his own habits.”

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Elizabeth Oakes

Hamlet, realising he has killed Polonius says: Thou wretched, rash, intruding fool, farewell. I took thee for my better. Elizabeth Oakes comments, “Although Polonius is not in motley, Hamlet calls him a fool often enough, although nowhere more significantly than in the closet scene after the murder.” Protagonist’s opinion would greatly influence Elizabethan audience.

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Oakes

Oakes comments on Polonius’ role as the play’s fool: “He is suited for this role because of his incarnation of the fool, the one traditionally chosen as a substitute for the king in ritual.”

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Kay Stanton

Perhaps it may be granted… that what makes a woman a whore in Hamlet’s estimation is her sexual use by not one man but by more than one man… what seems to enrage (Hamlet) in the ‘nunnery’ interlude is that Ophelia has put her sense of love and duty for another man above her sense of love and duty for him, just as Gertrude… chose a brother over a dead Hamlet; Ophelia chooses a father over a living Hamlet: both choices can be read as additionally sexually perverse in being, to Hamlet, ‘incestuous.’

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Bradley

(Ophelia) Her whole character is that of simple unselfish affection.

In her wanderings we hear from time to time an undertone of the deepest sorrow, but never the agonised cry of fear or horror which makes madness dreadful or shocking. 

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Showalter

Ophelia’s madness made her a potent and obsessive figure in our cultural mythology… female insanity and female sexuality are inextricably intertwined. Women’s madness is relentlessly associated with their bodies and ****** desires. Women’s melancholy was seen as biological and emotional in its origins.

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Gaston Bachelard

Symbolic connections between women, water and death... drowning appropriate for women merging into female elements… always associated with liquids… blood, milk, tears and amniotic fluid.

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Freud

Commented on how during the dominance of the Soviet and Union and the Cold War, Hamlet was used as a political play enacting the possibility of dissent from various forms of totalitarianism.

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Jacqueline Rose

Puts politics back into Hamlet by tracing how influential male readers of the paly, Ernest Jones as well as T.S. Eliot have echoed Hamlet’s misogyny and blamed Geryrude for what they saw as the aesthetic and moral failings of the play overall.

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Olav Loske

Ghost ‘Of life of crown queen at once dispatched.’ Claudius ‘My crown mine own ambition and my queen of queen at once dispatched.’ Order of events pre play?

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