| All duties seem holy to Hamlet | Goethe (Hamlet and Duty) |
| He has the persuasiveness and physical courage of a ruler, but is morally empty | Schofield (Claudius’ morality) |
| Hamlet is obliged to act on the spur of the moment | Coleridge in 1800 (on Hamlet killing Claudius and Polonius) |
| He loved Gertrude deeply and genuinely | Dawson (Claudius’ love for Gertrude) |
| The key comic element of the play is madness | Sir Herbert Tree (Madness and Humour) |
| a woman of exuberant sexuality, who inspires uxorious passion first in King Hamlet and later in Claudius | Bloom (Gertrude’s promiscuity) |
| Hamlet is haunted, not by a physical fear of dying, but of being dead | C.S Lewis (Hamlet’s fear of death) |
| Ophelia is deprived of thought, sexuality and language | Elaine Showalter (Ophelia’s deprivations) |
| Pleasing men is Gertrude’s main interest | Rebecca Smith (Gertrude’s interests) |
| He is being asked, as a son who (surely) loves his father, to avenge his father’s foul and unnatural murder | Gabriel Josipovici (Hamlet avenging his father) |
| Women are often given the same advice that is given to servants… Chasity, piety, obedience | Diana Bornstein (advice given to women) |
| With the strongest purposes of revenge, he is irresolute and inactive | Henry Mackenzie (Hamlet’s purposes of Revenge) |
| Cold-hearted devil | J.H Walter (Polonius) |
| A man whose moral compass is infinitely wobbly | Gabriel Josipovici (Polonius’ moral compass) |
| Unworthy of a hero | Thomas Hamner (Hamlet’s actions in Act 3, scene 3) |
| He himself is literally no better than the sinner whom he is to punish | Kate Flint (Hamlet’s inactivity in Act 3, scene 3) |
| The violence towards the mother is the effect of the desire for her | Jacqueline Rose (Hamlet’s violence towards his mother in Act 3, scene 4) |
| gives him the licence of a fool to speak cruel truths, transgressing the language of social decorum | Kate Flint (Hamlet’s madness) |
| a poetic and morally sensitive soul crushed by the barbarous task of murder | Goethe in 1795 (Hamlet as a tragic hero) |
| Comedy can be seen as “the grounds from which tragedy develops” | Susan Synder (Hamlet comedy and tragedy) |
| Ghosts of departed persons are not wandering souls of men but the unquiet walks of devil | Protestant Thomas Browne’s Religio Medici in 1643 |
| He identified Hamlet’s illness as Melancholy | Thomas Bright (1580) |
| Hamlet’s far fetched scruples are often mere pretexts to cover his want of determination | Schlegel (Hamlet’s indecision and masculinity) |
| Ophelia is portrayed as “an insignificant minor character” | Elaine Showalter (Ophelia as a character) |
| Hamlet is rather an instrument than an agent | Samuel Johnson in 1765 (Hamlet’s inactivity) |
| Hamlet “has no firm belief in himself or anything” | Coleridge in early 1800 (Hamlet’s beliefs) |
| Hamlet is a “vulgar and barbarous drama” | Voltaire in 1748 (opinion of Hamlet) |
| Hamlet is a man incapable of acting because he thinks too much | Coleridge in early 1800 (Hamlet’s thinking and action) |
| Hamlet is a merge of the tragic hero and the clown figure | Gabriel Josipovici (Hamlet’s character) |
| “Hamlet’s suffering and behaviour stem from the fact that he cannot find a play to be part of” | Gabriel Josipovici (Hamlet’s dilemma) |
| Claudius is a “good and gentle King” | Wilson Knight in 1930 (on Claudius) |
| Hamlet only possesses the word of an unreliable ghost and his own instinctive dislike of Gertrude’s second husband as a basis for revenge | Anne Barton (Hamlet’s basis for revenge) |
| Hamlet assumes without any questioning that he ought to avenge his father | A.C Bradley in 1904 (Hamlet on avenging his father) |
| we are never perfectly certain as to just who or what the ghost is | John Dover Wilson in 1935 (the origins of the ghost) |
| the story of moral poisoning | Hippolyte Taine in 19th century (moral poisoning) |
| Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are “just toadies to the king” | John Gielgud (Rosencrantz and Guildenstern) |
| Ophelia literally has no story without Hamlet | Lee Edwards (Ophelia) |
| Hamlet is a play about a father and a son who were weak because they were undone… by sexually treacherous women | Avi Ehrlich in 1977 (female sexuality) |
| Hamlet “thinks too deeply” | Nietzsche in 1872 (Hamlet’s thinking) |
| (Hamlet is) an element of evil in the state of Denmark | Wilson Knight in 1930 (Hamlet) |
| he is not a monster, he is morally weak | Amanda Mabillard (Claudius) |
| The world of Hamlet is a remarkably enclosed one | Alan Gardnier (Hamlet’s world) |
Hamlet Critic Quotes
July 10, 2019