'the old play began to disgust this refined age', monarchial plays unpopular after civil war
1 of 16
Lord Byron, 18th C
'We love Hamlet as we love ourselves'
2 of 16
Shelley, 18th C
Hamlet a 'profound phillosopher'
3 of 16
Samuel Johnson, 18th C
Hamlet is 'rather an instrument than an agent', he makes no actual attempt to kill Caludius
4 of 16
Samuel Johnson, 18th C
Hamlets sixth soliloquy is 'too horrible to be read or uttered'
5 of 16
Anna Jameson, 19th C
Jameson takes issue with the view that Ophelia is a 'cypher, incapable of inspiring the love of a man as complex as Hamlet', she views Ophelia as important but a victim currupted by those around her
6 of 16
A. C. Bradley, 19th C
'Hamlet demonstrates a strange lightning of the mind', a one happy, healthy Prince has turned into a 'passive onlooker'
7 of 16
A. C. Bradley, 19th C
Hamlets melancholy is so deep it ammounts to clinical depression
8 of 16
Swinburne, 19th C
'The single characteristic of Hamlet’s innermost nature is by no means irresolution or hesitation or any form of weakness, but rather the strong conflux of contending forces'
9 of 16
T. S. Eliot, early 20th C
The play was an artistic failure, the 'Mona Lisa of literature' because Hamlets emotional response was 'far in excess' of what was neccessary
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Freud, 20th C
'Hamlet is seen as a hysteric, a neurotic type who suffers from an Oedipus complex', beginning of psychoanalysis
11 of 16
Wilson Knight, 20th C
Claudius is a 'good and gentle king' and that Hamlet is the element of evil in Denmark
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marxist theories
Hamlet was a hero crushed not by his psychological state but by a corrupt society;his death was a heroic sacrifice for the sake of the future
13 of 16
Catherine Belsey, 20th/21st C
'Revenge is not justice. It is rather an act of injustice on behalf of justice','Revenge is always in excess of justice'
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Peter Millward, 20th/21st century
'Hamlet is a deeply religious play'
15 of 16
Emma Smith, Shakespeare for all time?, 21st C
Romantics- 'reinvention of Hamlet as the archetypal poet, a figure struggling to epress the beautiful melancholy of his inner life'
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