Hamlet Critics

Front 1

David Leverenz

Back 1

"Gertrude's inconstancy not only brings on disgust and incestuous feelings, it is also the sign of diseased doubleness in everyone who has accommodated to his or her social role."

Front 2

R.D. Laing

Back 2

"The divided self: in [Ophelia's] madness, there is no one there. She is not a person. There is no integral selfhood expressed through her actions or utterances... She has already died. There is now only vacuum where there once was a person."

Front 3

David Leverenz

Back 3

"...There are many voices in Ophelia's madness speaking through to her... none of them are her own. She becomes the mirror for a mad-inducing world."

Front 4

David Leverenz

Back 4

"[Ophelia's] history is an instance of how someone can be driven mad by having her inner feelings misrepresented, not responded to, or acknowledged only through chastisement and repression. From her entrance on, Ophelia must continually respond to commands which imply distrust even as they compel obedience."

Front 5

David Leverenz

Back 5

"[Ophelia] has no choice but to say 'I shall obey, my lord.'"

Front 6

David Leverenz

Back 6

"Not allowed to love and unable to be false, Ophelia breaks. She goes mad rather than gets mad. Even in her madness she has no voice of her own, only a discord of other voices and expectations, customs gone awry."

Front 7

David Leverenz

Back 7

"[Ophelia] is a play within a play, or a player trying to respond to several imperious directors at once. Everyone has used her: Polonius, to gain favour; Laertes, to belittle Hamlet; Claudius, to spy on Hamlet; Hamlet to express rage at Gertrude; and Hamlet again, to express his feigned madness with get as a decoy. She is valued only for the roles that further other people's plots."

Front 8

Elaine Showalter

Back 8

"For most critics of Shakespeare, Ophelia has been an insignificant minor character in the play, touching in her weakness and madness but chiefly interesting, of course, in what she tells us about Hamlet."

Front 9

Lee Edwards

Back 9

"We can imagine Hamlet's story without Ophelia, but Ophelia literally has no story without Hamlet."

Front 10

Elaine Showalter

Back 10

"Since the 1970s... We have had a feminist discourse which has offered a new perspective on Ophelia's madness as protest and rebellion. For many feminist theorists, the madwoman is a heroine, a powerful figure who rebels against the family and the social order."

Front 11

Rebecca Smith

Back 11

"Gertrude, in Shakespeare's Hamlet, has traditionally been played S a sensual, deceitful woman."

Front 12

Rebecca Smith

Back 12

"...when one closely examine Gertrude's actual speech and actions in an attempt to understand the character, one finds little that hints at hypocrisy, suppression, or uncontrolled passion and their further implied complexity."

Front 13

Rebecca Smith

Back 13

"Gertrude appears in only ten of the twenty scenes that comprise the play; furthermore she speaks very little, having less dialogue than any other major character in Hamlet... She speaks plainly, directly, and chastely when she does speak... Gertrude's brief speeches include references to honour, virtue [etc]; neither structure nor content suggests wantonness. "

Front 14

Rebecca Smith

Back 14

"Gertrude believes that quiet women best please men, and pleasing men is Gertrude's main interest."

Front 15

Rebecca Smith

Back 15

"Gertrude has not moved toward independence or a heightened moral stancs; only her divided loyalties and her unhappiness intensify."

Front 16

Jonathan Bate

Back 16

"Hamlet's apparent under-motivation keeps him alive long after the more obviously motivated revengers of the Elizabethan drama have become moribund."

Front 17

T.S. Eliot

Back 17

"The play is most certainly an artistic failure."

Front 18

T.S. Eliot

Back 18

Hamlet's behaviour and moods are "in excess of the facts".

Front 19

D.H. Lawrence

Back 19

"And Hamlet, how boring, how boring to live with, so mean and self-conscious, blowing and snoring his wonderful speeches, full of other folks' whoring"

Front 20

Nietzche

Back 20

Hamlet is not a man who thinks too much, but rather a man who thinks too well.

Front 21

James Shapiro

Back 21

"Shakespeare forced his contemporaries to experience what he felt and what his play registers so profoundly; the world had changed. Old certainties were gone, even if new ones had not yet taken hold."

Front 22

Rex Gibson

Back 22

"It mirrors the anxieties of Shakespeare's England. Claudius' murder of Old Hamlet was a political assassination to achieve political power... Polonius may be modelled on Lord Burghley who believed in close surveillance to maintain order... Shakespeare dress upon religious beliefs current in his day. Suicides were believed to go straight to hell... Hamlet refrains from killing Claudius at prayer for fear of sending him direct to heaven. His own father had been killed at a moment when he was unprepared for heaven... Hamlet richly displays Shakespeare's interest in the theatre..."

Front 23

Dover Wilson

Back 23

"It is vital to [Shakespeare's] purpose to make us believe Hamlet to be fundamentally sane, because he desires us not only to admire hid hero, but also to lament his defects."