DEATH – Chris R Hassel Junior | ‘Though Hamlet’s sadness has…to do with the “wicked speed” of his mother’s remarriage, his father’s death, his own death – all death – is unnaturally abhorrent to him’ |
FAMILY – Rebecca Smith | ‘Gertrude’s apparent betrayal of his idealised Hyperion father, not the actual death, has given rise to Hamlet’s melancholy state’ |
LOYALTY – Reta A Terry: Hamlet… | ‘is a man of honour, a noble man, and now that the vow is spoken he has no choice but to carry it through’ |
REVENGE – Catherine Belsey | ‘the act of vengeance, in excess of justice, a repudiation of conscience, hellish in its mode of operation, seems to the revenger… an overriding imperative’ |
ACTION AND INACTION – Claude CH Williamson: Hamlet… | ‘is a man too intellectual to be practical; he thinks too much and does too little’ |
MADNESS – Elaine Showalter: Ophelia dies… | ‘deprived of thought, sexuality [and] language.’ |
MADNESS – Alexander W Crawford | ‘there is much evidence in the play that Hamlet deliberately feigned fits of madness in order to confuse and disconcert the king and his attendants.’ |
THE COURT AND POLITICS – Joe Sutcliffe: The Danish court | ‘fails to meet the necessary standards of honourable public life’ |
CORRUPTION AND DECAY – Stephen Barker | “If the time is out of joint for Hamlet, it is not simply because of his father’s death but because of the chaos, the disorder implicit in Claudius’s regicide and usurpation.” |
DEATH – Ewan Ferne | Ewan Ferne”[Hamlet’s] choice to be, at a deeper level, represents a profound and confirmed preference for not being.” |
FATE – Stephen Barker | “Hamlet intuits that no grand Christian metanarrative of sin, guilt and redemption is to be found, but that he is a player in a kind of cosmic joke.” |
LOYALTY – Amanda Mabillard | Amanda Mabillard comments that “Horatio feels deeply; he loves Hamlet with all his heart.” |
REVENGE – Ewan Ferne | “Hamlet wages war against cliché. It turns its own established genre of revenge tragedy inside out…” |
ACTION AND INACTION – Catherine Belsey | “the question whether it is nobler to suffer in Christian patience or to take arms against secular injustice is not resolved…” |
REVENGE – Glyn Austen | “a tragic hero who knows action is required of him, but whose purpose is blunted by an inability to act.” |
RELIGION (guilt, sin and redemption) – Stephen Barker | “Despite the obsession throughout Hamlet with what happens to humans after death – a central Christian concern – by the end Hamlet no longer maintains any faith in an afterlife, let alone redemption or salvation.” |
THE COURT AND POLITICS – Joe Sutcliffe: Claudius is presented as a | “dissolute, gaudy king, with his nouveau riche duel, [who] presides over a shallow, grasping, materialistic culture where feudal patterns are sharply unravelling.” |
ACTION AND INACTION – D.J. Snider | “…Hamlet’s obstacle was chiefly in himself, that he could not for himself do the deed, though the most powerful impulsion from without was urging him forward.” |
ACTION AND INACTION – Claude C.H. Williamson | “There is an inner contradiction in Hamlet’s personality – that he sensitively shrinks from carrying out the revenge indicated by the Ghost, and yet will do all sorts of bloody deeds on his own account.” |
WW Lawrence | ‘the elder Hamlet appears as a reckless champion, risking his life and lands on personal valour, rather than as a careful guardian of his domain’ |
Hamlet Critics’ Quotes
August 12, 2019