Delay

Johnson: “Hamlet is an instrument rather than an agent

“Of the feigned madness of Hamlet, there appears no such cause”

Hazzlit: “He is, as it were, wrapped in up in his own reflections”

Bradley: “The main cause for Hamlet's delay is melancholic disgust and apathy”

Voltaire: “Hamlet becomes crazy in the second act”

Eliot: “Dominated by an expression which is inexpressible"

Freud: "Hamlet's madness merely disguised the truth in the same way dreams disguised
conscious realities”

Jones: “Hamlet’s moral fate is bound up with his uncle’s, for good or ill. In reality his uncle
incorporates the deepest and most buried parts of his own personality, so that he cannot kill
him without also killing himself.”

Coleridge: "Hamlet is brave and careless of death; but he vacillates from sensibility, and
procrastinates from thought, and loses the power of action in the energy of resolve"
"Hence we see a great, an almost enormous intellectual activity, and a proportionate
aversion to real action"

Taine: "The heated imagination, which explains Hamlet's nervous disease and his moral
poisoning, explains also his conduct."
"You recognise him in a poet's soul, made not to act, but to dream, which is lost in
contemplating the phantoms of its creation."

Crutwell: "Was Hamlet a good man or a bad one?" - “doubting, self-contemplating

intellectual."
"It is the whole life of action, violence, intrigue and public duty that he is reluctant to enter;
he would rather be in Wittenberg, with his books."

Masefield: "Hamlet is neither 'weak' nor 'unpractical,' as so many call him. What he
hesitates to do may be necessary, or even just, as the world goes, but it is a defilement of
personal ideals, difficult for a wise mind to justify. It is so great a defilement, and a world so
composed is so great a defilement that death seems preferable to action and existence
alike."
“the knowledge that the sword will not reach the real man, since damnation comes from
within, not from without.” (regarding the chapel scene, when Hamlet doesn’t kill Claudius)

Goethe: “the effects of a great deed laid upon a soul unequal to the performance of it.”
D.G. James: “The explanation, therefore, of the delay and self-frustration exhibited in the
endeavour to fulfil his father’s demand for vengeance is that to Hamlet the thought of incest
and parricide combined is too intolerable to be borne”
‘Thus conscience does make cowards of us all’- from Hamlet

Hazlitt: “cannot be well at ease while he sees evil hovering near him like a spectre; whose
powers of action have been eaten up by thought”
“diverts him from his previous purposes”

Gardner: “the question which arises out of the play itself, is how are we to find the
consistence between the fact of Hamlet’s delay, with which he bitterly reproaches himself…
and the tone of the close of the play?”
Did “Shakespeare intend his audience to regard Hamlet as having made a mess of things?”
“Hamlet’s agony of mind and indecision are precisely the things which differentiate him
from that smooth, swift plotter Claudius, and from the coarse, unthinking Laertes, ready to
dare damnation and cut his enemy’s throat in a church”
“Do we really wish to see Hamlet stab a defenceless kneeling man? This opportunity is no
opportunity at all; the enemy is within touching distance but out of reach”
“When Hamlet has gone and Claudius has risen from his knees, and not before, we know
that Claudius has not found grace. The opportunity which Hamlet awaits, Claudius will now
provide”
“Hamlet is fittingly borne ‘like a soldier to the stage’, because in the secret war which he has
waged, he has shown a soldier’s virtues”

Corruption
S. T. Coleridge:
“he seems to have wished to exemplify the moral necessity of a due balance between our
attention to the objects of our senses and our meditation on the workings of our minds”
“an equilibrium between the real and imaginary worlds”

Clemen: “The image of the leprous ailment emphasises the malignant, disabling, slowly
disintegrating nature of the process.”
“Perusing the description which the ghost of Hamlet's father gives of his poisoning by
Claudius one cannot help being struck by the vividness with which the poisoning, the
malicious spreading of the disease, is portrayed.”
“the poison invades the body during sleep and how the healthy organism is destroyed from
within, not having a chance to defend itself against attack."
“The corruption of land and people throughout Denmark is understood as an imperceptible
and irresistible process of poisoning."
“poisoning reappears as a leitmotif in the action as well- as a poisoning in the 'dumb show',
and finally, as the poisoning of all the major characters in the last act. Thus imagery and
action continually play into each other's hands and we see how the term 'dramatic imagery'
gains a new significance."
"The imagery appears to be influenced by yet another event in the action underlying the
play: Hamlet feels himself to be sullied by his mother's incest which, according to the
conception of the time, she committed in marrying Claudius. For him this is a poisoning idea
which finds expression in his language."
"the idea [of rot and corruption] is present in Hamlet's mind at many moments when images
of decay and rot appear in his language."
"Images of rot and decay and corruption are especially numerous in the long second scene
of the second act."

‘Thus conscience does make cowards of us all’- from Hamlet

Death
H.A. Taine:“He [Hamlet] killed Polonius, he caused Ophelia's death, and has no great
remorse for it.”

L.C. Knights: “fascinated not merely by the 'dread of something after death', but by the
whole process of earthly corruption.”
“Death... is presented simply as relaxing of tension and an abandonment of the struggle”
“quality of moral relaxation”
“Hamlet finally accepts death in words of a peculiarly haunting quality...but it is from the
standpoint of a life that has been largely emptied of significance”

Patrick Crutwell: “Hamlet is deeply admired- more than that, he is loved”

Harry Levin: “explicit upon this point”

S.J. Cole: “For the most part, they see the Ghost’s injunction to “Remember Me” not as
reinforcing the Prince’s will to revenge but ultimately undercutting it. Taken together, they
in effect provide a new reason for Hamlet’s delay: denied normal outlets for mourning his
father”

M. Neill: “Numerous characters are linked with remembering and misremembering”

K. Cartwright: “We become Hamlet’s memory, as Hamlet had been the ghost”

G. Wilson Knight: “It is usual for the main theme to be reflected in subsidiary incidents,
persons and detailed suggestion throughout”
“Hamlet is a figure of nihilism (The rejection of all religious and moral principles, often in the
belief that life is meaningless) and death.”
“He is in fact the poison in the veins of the community.”
“The ambassador of death walking amid life”

A.C. Bradley: “For the immediate cause of that is simply that his habitual feeling is, one of
disgust at life and everything in it, himself included- a disgust which varies in intensity, rising
at times into a longing for death, sinking often into weary apathy, but is never dispelled for
more than brief intervals”
“Hamlet most brings here to us a sense of the soul’s infinity”
George Bernard Shaw: “When he finds he cannot kill in cold blood he can only ask “Am I a
coward?”

Johnson: “Almost every main character and relationship suffers from some form of physical
or metaphorical death”

O’Toole: “Hamlet is a play about death. Or rather, it is a play about the survival of the
individual in the face of death."

C.S. Lewis: “In Hamlet we are kept thinking about it (death) all the time whether in terms of
the soul's destiny or the body’s”

Appearance vs reality
Samuel Johnson: “Of the feigned madness of Hamlet there appears no adequate cause, for
he does nothing which he might not have done with the reputation of sanity”

A.C. Bradley: “One would judge that by temperament, he was inclined to nervous
instability, too rapid and perhaps extreme changes of feeling and mood and that he was
disposed to be, for the time, absorbed in the feeling or mood that possessed him, whether it
was joyous or depressed.”

Wofford: “Hamlet may as well have been truly insane as well or at least perhaps in the
Elizabethan sense”

Ghose: “Hamlet’s life is filled with many identities. However, at the end of the play he
realises he has no true identity as a person”

Mack: “The most pervasive of Shakespeare’s image pattern evolved around the words
"show", "act" and “play”"
“The play within a play tends to dissolve the normal barriers between the fictive and the
real”
“In the graveyard scene, death puts the question, what is real? In its irreducible form and in
the end uncovers all appearances”
"the problematic nature of reality and the relation of reality to appearance"

Freud: “Hamlet was behaving as dreams do in reality, concealing the true circumstances
under a cloak of wit and unintelligibility”

Family drama
Voltaire: “It is a vulgar and barbarous drama”
“The prince slays the father of his mistress under the pretence of killing a rat”
Schlegel: “telling them unwelcome truths”
“But he is too much overwhelmed with his own sorrow to have any compassion to spare for
others”

Levin: “[the play is filled with] misconceptions, contrived and coincidental”

Hazlitt: “This play has a prophetic truth, which is above that of history”

S.T. Coleridge: “Thus it is a tragedy that presents a direct contrast to that of Macbeth”

Taine: “He killed Polonius, he caused Ophelia’s death, and has no great remorse for it”

Schucking: “a drama within a drama”

“The presentation of emotion as the chief aim of the stage”

Ernest Jones: “Hamlet is plunged into anguish at the thought of his father being replaced in
his mother’s affections by someone else”

Clemen: “These are no poetic similes, but keen observations of reality”

“Hamlet prefers to keep his language within the scope of reality”
“Images of rot and decay and corruption are especially numerous”
“The leitmotif occasionally appears in a disguised form at a point where it seems to have no
real connection with the main issue of the play”

Gardner: “he will do so not as an assassin but as executioner”

“The dark and devious world in which Hamlet finds himself”

Rebecca Smith: “Polonius seems to love his children; he seems to have the welfare of the
kingdom in mind. His means of action, however, are totally corrupt”
“Trained his daughter to be obedient and chaste and is able to use her as a piece of bait for
spying”
“Claudius... tells Laertes that one of the reasons for his toleration of Hamlet's behaviour is
his love for Gertrude"

Michael Pennington: Polonius is “a bad parent” “made palatable by the fact that he is
funny”

Freud: “Claudius has shown Hamlet the repressed wishes of his own childhood realized
which is to kill his own father and to take his father's place with his mother. With these
images Hamlet realizes that he is no better than the sinner whom he will punish”

Charles: “No one in this plays knows or understands anyone else”

Beltramini: “The dysfunctional families are essentially the cause of Hamlet's tragic nature”
“Although Hamlet shows clear distress about his mother's marriage to Claudius, his
relationship with her is positive”
 Gender
Rebecca Smith: “Although he clearly loves her- Claudius shares the Hamlets’ conception of
Gertrude as an object. She is possessed as one of the effects of his actions.”
“Gertrude has not moved in the play toward independence; only her divided loyalties and
her unhappiness intensify.”
“Female virtue is identical with chastity; thus Polonius (...) trained his daughter to be
obedient and chaste and is able to use her a piece of bait for spying.”

Das Pragati: “Hamlet develops a deep seeded hatred for women seeing his mother’s hasty
marriage”

Linda Bamber: “Although Hamlet sees his mother as a disgustingly sensual character the
relationship that we see between Gertrude and Claudius is domestic and ceremonial”

Howard: “Many feminist critics believe that since Hamlet believes that his mother is a
trollop due to her sudden marriage to Claudius, he loses his faith in all women, treating
Ophelia as if she were a trollop as well.”

Bloom: “Ophelia went mad with guilt because after Hamlet killed her father, it fulfilled her
sexual desire of Hamlet killing her father so that they can be together.”

Elaine Showalter: “Ophelia…represents the strong emotions that the Elizabethans as well as
the Freudians thought womanish and unmanly.”
“For many feminine theorists, the madwoman is a heroine, a powerful figure who rebels
against the family and social order”

Lee Edwards: “We can imagine Hamlet’s story without Ophelia, but Ophelia literally has no
story without Hamlet”

Lacan: “What is the point of the character Ophelia? Ophelia is obviously essential. She is
linked forever, for centuries to the figure of Hamlet”

Jane Dall:
“Gertrude’s actions and body contribute far more to the story than her character”

Leverenz: “Hamlets disgust at the feminine passivity in himself in translated into violent
repulsion against women”

Bornstein: “Women are often given the advice that is given to servants; chastity, piety and
obedience”

Gardner: “Women are “pawns in the intrigues of men”

Neely: “[Her suicide] completes Ophelia’s separation from her roles as daughter,
sweetheart, subject, and from literal and metaphorical poison which kills the others in the
play”

Love
G.W. Knight: “He tortures both of them because he once loved them”

Rose: “The violence towards the mother is the effect of the desire for her”

Dawson: “He loved Gertrude deeply and genuinely”

Irving: “Profound affection for Hamlet’s father sounds through all discords of fate, love and
ambition”

Wilson: “Regards the love affair as a puzzle that’s greater than the puzzle of Hamlet's
procrastination”

Bradley: “Hamlet's love was not only mingled with bitterness, it was also weakened and
deadened by his melancholy”

Joshi: “Ophelia displays her innocent devotion to Hamlet by enduring his sharp and obscene
language”

Miller: “For Gertrude, passionate love is a binding, reckless emotion that leads her to do
foolish things. This drags down her whole family and kingdom”

Mackenzie: “While Hamlet is described as a passionate lover, he seems indifferent about

the objection of his affection”

Johnson: “He plays madman most, when he treats Ophelia with so much rudeness, which
seems to be useless and so much wanton cruelty" - "catastrophe not happily produced"

Showalter: “Hamlet’s disgust at the feminine passivity in himself is translated into violent
revulsion against women, and into his brutal behaviour towards Ophelia.”

Madness
Mack: “madness is to some degree a punishment to doom, corresponding to the adage"
“It is equally obvious however, that… the madness has a further dimension, as insight
“[This is also true of] Ophelia, mad, is able to make awards of flowers to the King and Queen
which are appropriate to frailties of which she cannot be supposed to have conscious
knowledge."
“he can be presumed to have intuitive unformulated awareness’s that reach the surface in
free (yet relevant) associations, like those of Polonius with a fishmonger, Ophelia with
carrion.”
“Hamlet can be privileged in madness to say things”
“madness verbally assigned to other Shakespearean tragic heroes- contains both
punishment and insight”
“doomed to know, by a consciousness that moves to measures outside out normal space
and time; doomed to never be believed because those to whom [he] speaks can hear only
the opposing voice”
“he is between the absolute and expedient”

Hazlitt: “His ruling passion is to think, not to act..”

A.C. Bradley: “But the retarding motives acquire an unnatural strength because they have
an ally in something far stronger than themselves, the melancholic disgust and apathy; while
the healthy motives, emerging with difficulty from the central mass of diseased feeling,
rapidly sink back into it and 'lose the name of action'."

Schlegel: “He acts the part of madness with unrivalled power, convincing the persons who
are sent to examine into his supposed loss of reason, merely by telling the, unwelcome
truths, and rallying the, with the most caustic wit”

S.T. Coleridge: “Hence we see a great, an almost enormous intellectual activity, and a
proportionate aversion to real action"

L.L. Schucking: “the intensification of emotion is carried to the verge of 'ecstatic' passion.”
"In other words, emotion is not allowed to take its usual course, but is shown as an
overwhelming torrent hurling the human spirit to the very brink of destruction - or beyond...
Hamlet resembles other great Shakespearian tragedies in that it cannot be comprehended
except as a study of passion."
"The presentation of emotion as the chief aim of the stage"

Freud: “Hamlet's madness merely disguised the truth in the same way dreams disguised
conscious realities”

Voltaire: “Hamlet becomes crazy in the second act”

Taine: “The heated imagination, which explains Hamlet's nervous disease and his moral
poisoning, explains also his conduct."

Crutwell: “Was Hamlet a good man or a bad one?”

“doubting, self-contemplating intellectual.”
"How do we take his madness- feigned or real, or, if mixed, mixed in what proportions?"
"Those who like the prince and admire him as a good man will tend to see a part at least of
his madness as genuine; those who do not will see it all as feigned."
"It is the whole life of action, violence, intrigue and public duty that he is reluctant to enter;
he would rather be in Wittenberg, with his books."

Goethe: “the effects of a great deed laid upon a soul unequal to the performance of it.”
Showalter: “unlike Hamlet, she [Ophelia] does not struggle with moral choices or
alternatives"
"Her speeches are marked by extravagant metaphors, lyrical free associations, and
'explosive sexual imagery'. She sings wistful and bawdy ballads, and ends her life by
drowning"
“All of these conventions carry specific messages about femininity and sexuality. Ophelia’s
virginal and vacant white is contrasted with Hamlet's scholar's garb, his 'suits of solemn
black'. "
"On the stage, Ophelia's madness was presented as the predictable outcome of
erotomania."
“The figure of the madwoman permeates romantic literature”
"Ophelia's story as the female subtext of the tragedy, the repressed story of Hamlet."

Hazlitt: “cannot be well at ease while he sees evil hovering near him like a spectre; whose
powers of action have been eaten up by thought”
“diverts him from his previous purposes”

Harry Levin: “he is not his courtly, scholarly, soldierly self during the interval when we are
his witnesses”
“symptomatic of an underlying malaise”
“Madness, as the abandonment of reason is a constant danger throughout the play”
“Hamlet is clearly thoughtsick rather than brainsick- neurotic rather than psychotic, to state
the matter in more clinical terms”
“The main effect [of the antic disposition] is to isolate Hamlet from everyone…so that we
are continually and painfully reminded of his exceptional predicament”
“when he takes off his antic disposition in the Closet Scene, it is difficult for him to convince
Gertrude that he is sane”

Levin: “Why melancholy men are the wittiest is an inquiry which long ago evoked Aristotle’s
curiosity”

Political
Gardner: “Hamlet, speaking over the body of one of his victims, Polonius, speaks for all
those called on to attempt to secure justice, the supporting of ‘just wars’ as well as those
who fight in them.”
"If he cannot repent, he must, for his own safety, destroy Hamlet. He will do it in his own
characteristic way, by the hand of an accomplice and by the treacherous man's
characteristic weapon; poison." – imagery of poisoning could also be seen as political?

A.J.A. Waldock : “The difficulty, in ultimate terms, is to know what the play is really about”

Hudson: “Superannuated politicians, indeed, like him, seldom have any strength but as they
fall back upon the resources of memory: out of these, the ashes, so to speak, of extinct
faculties, they may seem wise after the fountains of wisdom are dried up within them”
(Claudius)
Hartwig: “A Machiavellian schemer who takes his plotting to absurd proportions, Polonius
pursues 'indirection' for its own sake” (Polonius)

Alexander: “The nature of the ghost is intended to be an open question”

McEvoy: “Claudius can be seen to be an effective, modern ruler”

G Wilson Knight: “a good and gentle king” (Claudius)

Denton: “Polonius deserved to die for his offences but Hamlet had no right to slay him”

Power
S.T. Coleridge: “Polonius is a man of maxims. While he is descanting on matters of past
experience, as in that excellent speech to Laertes before he sets out on his travels, he is
admirable; but when he comes to advise or project, he is a mere dotard. You see, Hamlet, as
the man of ideas, despises him”

A.C. Swinburne: “Hamlet will surely remain [...] the standing type and embodied emblem of
irresolution, half-heartedness, and doubt

G Wilson Knight: “a good and gentle king” (Claudius)

Richard D Attlick: “the cunning and lecherousness of Claudius’ evil has corrupted the whole
kingdom of Denmark”

Dollimore: “Articulates a crisis in the decay of a traditional social order in England”

Makhalik: “Corruption in William Shakespeare's Hamlet is represented as a chain of events

starting with greed, spreading by manipulation through unquestioning loyalty... and
concluding with the mad act of revenge”

Holleran: “Corruption of the court forecasts disaster”

D.H. Lawrence: “A sense of corruption in the flesh makes Hamlet frenzied, for he will never
admit that it is his own flesh”

McEvoy: “Claudius can be seen to be an effective, modern ruler”

Revenge
H. A. Taine: “He is not a master of his acts; occasion dictates them; he cannot plan a
murder, but must improvise it.”

L. L. Schucking: “Never before in Shakespeare’s work has the cry of a tortured soul so wrung
the hearts of his audience”
“emotion is not allowed to take its usual course, but is shown as an overwhelming torrent
hurling the human spirit to the very brink of destruction- or beyond”
“Hamlet resembles other great Shakespearian tragedies in that it cannot be comprehended
as a study of passion”

Clemen: "the idea [of rot and corruption] is present in Hamlet's mind at many moments
when images of decay and rot appear in his language."
“Perusing the description which the ghost of Hamlet's father gives of his poisoning by
Claudius one cannot help being struck by the vividness with which the poisoning, the
malicious spreading of the disease, is portrayed.”
“The corruption of land and people throughout Denmark is understood as an imperceptible
and irresistible process of poisoning."

Bradley:“Hamlet is unable to carry out the sacred duty, imposed by divine authority, of
punishing an evil man by death”

Belsey: “Revenge is not justice. It is rather an act of injustice on behalf of justice”

“Revenge is always in excess of justice”
“Revenge exists on a margin between justice and crime”

Alexander: “The desire for vengeance is seen as part of a continuing pattern of human
conduct”.

Brucher: “Revengers create their own civil justice, often in ways that imitate or even mock
divine justice and that compromise their own moral impulses.”

Samuel Johnson: “The apparition left the regions of the dead to little purpose; the revenge
which he demands is not obtained but by the death of him that was required to take it;
and the gratification which would arise from the destruction of an usurper and a murderer,
is abated by the untimely death of Ophelia, the young, the beautiful, the harmless and the
pious”

William Hazlitt: “Because he cannot have his revenge perfect, according to the most refined
idea his wish can form, he declines it altogether”

George Dawson: “It should be noted that Hamlet is the only protagonist in any Elizabethan
revenge play who can be considered a hero, aware of the moral implications involved in
exacting his revenge”

Bacon: “In taking revenge, a man is but even with his enemy. But in passing it over, he is
superior; for it is a Prince's part to pardon
“Revenge is a kind of wild justice”

Girad:“To seek singularity in revenge is a vain enterprise but to shrink from revenge, in a
world which looks upon it as a "sacred duty" is to exclude oneself from society, to become a
nonentity once more. There is no way out for Hamlet and he shifts endlessly from one
impasse to the other, unable to make up his mind because neither choice makes sense.”
Jamieson: “When he does enact his revenge and kills Claudius, it is too late for him to derive
any satisfaction from it; Laertes has struck him with a poisoned foil and Hamlet dies shortly
after”

Ryan: “What if Hamlet’s tormented resistance to performing the role of revenger expresses
a justified rejection of a whole way of life, whose corruption, injustice and inhumanity he
now sees clearly and rightly finds intolerable?”
“Whatever personal satisfaction killing Claudius might afford him would be purchased at the
price of complicity with a ruthless society that’s bound to foster crimes like Claudius’s.”

Hudson: “[Laertes] "snatches eagerly at the conclusion shaped for him”

McClure: “The King must be brought to justice. If Hamlet is the instrument of the Divine
Justice, since God operates in this world through human agencies, he is satisfied”