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Hamlet criticism
Wilson Knight
Claudius is not a criminal
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He has no choice on his further actions as H is an actual threatHamlet enjoys torturing C’s conscience…
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In the decades after it was first staged, Hamlet was popular but not especially so
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The Earl of Shaftesbury spoke of it in 1711 as the shakespeare play that ‘appears to
have most affected English hearts’ and was perhaps the most ‘often acted’, which likely
owed much to the popularity of Thomas Betterton, on of the great Hamlets
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Hamlet was a fantastic exploration of inner consciousness,
struggles and thoughts on life and death
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Whose powers of action have been eaten up
by thought’
Byron- ‘We love Hamlet, even as we love ourselves’
Shakespeare lost his son, Hamnet, at the age of 11
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Nobody accepts anyone else’s reading of Hamlet
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Hamlet identifies the ‘form and pressure’ of ‘the
time’
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In early 1800s, as
trad
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Edward Dowden- ‘Shakespeare was touched by the shadow of some of the deep
mysteries of human existence’
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Freud, searching for confirmation of the
Oedipus complex theory, said ‘the same thing might be at the bottom of Hamlet as well
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’ Freud then went on to say that the oedipus complex provided
an explanation for Hamlet’s delay- he was guilty for wanting to kill his father out of
passion for his mother
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New Historicists refocused attention on the politics of Hamlet, including the triumph of
the opportunistic Fortinbras
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New Historicism has come to an end- curious about what the next generation will make
of Hamlet
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He is instead the finely drawn
embodiment of a moral order that is collapsing under the weight of its own
contradictions
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Refers to the romantics- Hamlet in black tights, gorgeous in a feather hat
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Fintan O’toole looks at DIFFERENT CRITICISM and then takes it apart, doesn’t form many
original ideas, but discusses other ideas from trad
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● The play happens not in the castle of Elisnore, but in the soul of Hamlet
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● Play about a hero with a fatal flaw, and inevitable doom- is Hamlet a tragedy?
PROBLEMS- critics fit it to the structure of the tragedy, discard the possibility that S was
writing something new and amazing
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● Hamlet the play is illogical
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● Far from having a neat ending, it is a wild heap of bodies
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S
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What has happened
to Hamlet is not enough to explain all the reactions he has
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● Romantic criticism looked at, david wilson, wilson knight- all looked at
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● Pg 37- a clinical report on hamlet that has nothing to do with the play
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● ‘Claudius is none other than Hamlet himself’- some other critic (not Fintan O’toole) Are
they interchangable?
● 38- ‘I despise Hamlet’ ‘he gives me a pain in the ass’- Charles Marowitz (american
director)
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But his quest is folly- straw and futility) How could Fortinbras offer an
acceptable role model for Hamlet? Laertes and Fortinbras- just doubles of Hamlet? They

certainly allow for Hamlet’s development as we see a juxtoposition
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You could measure Hamlet against them to see how he
compares masculine-wise
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One version when Fortinbras comes in and shoots Horatio at the endgets rid of any purpose of Hamlet’s life as it isn’t going to be told
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Last line is ‘go bid the soldiers shoot’- no value for human life, makes sense if Horatio is
shot though
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5
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From Holderness: Are shapespeare’s tragic heros fatally flawed?
● No critic has had any more success than the other characters in the play in their efforts
to analyse Hamlet’s ‘character’
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● Hamlet is INTENSELY aware of himself as an ‘actor’ who is continually being cast by
other people into roles with which he partially engages, but which he ultimately resistsREVENGE HERO, LOVER, NOBLE MIND, PRINCE
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● Hamlet sees himself stranded between the two worlds, unable to emulate the heroic
values of his father, unable to engage with the modern world of political diplomacy
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This is the source of his tragedy
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She identifies the characteristic features of Ophelia’s
disturbed language and argues that they reveal the nature of male oppression of women
in the play- Ophelia has no control over her life or body
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It must be defined from
some framework
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Madness
began to be secularized, medicalized, psychologized, and gendered
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Shakespeare dramatises language primarily through a peculiar language
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Spectators read this
language, trying to make ‘sense’ of it, translating it into the discourse (communication) of sanity
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The mad are not themselves
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The prose used for mad speech has disorderly shape, associates madness with POPULAR
TRADITION
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​ Laertes: ‘A document in madness, thoughts and ​remembrance​ fitted’
Ophelia’s madness is demonstrated almost entirely through fragmentary, communal, and
thematically coherent quoted discourse
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Quotation in social ‘formulas’ of greeting and leave-taking: ‘well, God dild you’ ‘good
night, ladies, good night’- coherence
Religious formulas of grace and benediction: ‘God be at your table!’
Her songs enact rites of passage in life- song of the ‘truelove’
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This imagined ‘deflowering’ or loss of virginity
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They enable
Ophelia to mourn her father’s death, enact his funeral, encounter his dead body, and find
consolation for her loss
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The context of her disease is sexual frustration, social helplessness, and enforced control over
women’s bodies
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Laertes’s anguished response
to Ophelia as a ‘document in madness’ ‘she turns to favour and to prettiness’
Gender distinctions in the contrasts between Hamlet and Ophelia- scenes featuring both of
them
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His discourse never has the ‘fragmented’ quality of Ophelia’s
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Henceforth in the play, Hamlet is presented as introspective
and melancholy, while Ophelia becomes alienated, acting out the madness Hamlet only plays
at
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Hamlet’s melancholy is
POLITICIZED in form and content
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Ophelia’s genuine madness allows Hamlet to resurface as a sane, autonomous individual and a
tragic hero in the last act
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