Emily on
| Traditional Criticism (pre1960s):
Focused primarily on Hamlet’s character, treating him as a real person
Focused on ‘Hamartia hunting’ (Hamlet’s fatal flaw; introduced by the idea of ‘vicious mole’
Supernatural and mysterious explanations
| Early Interpretations: 17th C
Hamlet is a revenge tragedy (popular genre in 16th/ 17thC)
Features a character who was wronged seeking revenge
moral/ political themes of Elizabethan/ Jacobean England which was marked by power struggles
| Romantic Interpretations: 18th C
Hamlet is read as a poem rather than a play
Focused on existential or moral dilemmas and Hamlet’s alienation
How Hamlet’s internal struggles influence his actions
Connections between the supernatural world and Hamlet’s inner world
| Freudian interpretations/ psychoanalytic: 20th C
Hamlet’s struggle stems from internalised Oedipal feelings
He has unconscious, repressed desires - guilt and conflict which reflect the human condition
| Political criticism:
Hamlet explores a society in the process of change (stability to unsettled)
| Modern Criticism (post 1960s)
The flaw is in society, political, social and economic factors
Readings that are subversive of existing social structures
| New Historicist Interpretations: 21st C
Largely American
Place the play within its historical/ cultural context
Literature can both reinforce and subvert dominant ideologies
Shakespeare is a propagandist for the state
| Cultural materialists:
Largely British
Focuses on today’s world
Shakespeare is on the side of the rebels
| Feminist interpretations: 21st C
Power dynamics within the play’s patriarchal society
Dominant male characters and limited agency of female characters
| Postcolonial interpretations: 21st C
Examines the play in context of colonialism/ imperialism
Hamlet reflects cultural/ political dynamics of Shakespeare’s time
| Postmodern criticism
Shows little regard for consistency in character/ coherence in the story.
Abandons any notions of unity in the play, rejects the assumption of clear patterns/ themes.
| Performance criticism
Acknowledges Hamlet as a play
Sees Hamlet as a revenger, Ophelia as bait, Gertrude as rebuking mother and Polonius as eavesdropper
Critics/ theorists:
Samuel Johnson (18th C)
Says that there are different genres mixed up in Hamlet
‘The incidents are so numerous, … the scenes are interchangeably diversified with merriment and solemnity’
Goethe (late 18thC)
Says Hamlet is a spirit, too delicate and tender to carry out the demands of action
Likened him to an oak tree in a vase, which grows and shatters the vase.
Hamlet has a ‘lovely pure and most moral nature’
William Hazlitt (19th C) 1817
Hamlet is a poet and the play should be read as a poem
‘There is no play that suffers so much from being transferred to the stage’
‘Not a character marked by strength of will or even of passion, but by refinement of thought or sentiment … his powers of action have been eaten up by thought’
‘It is we who are Hamlet’
Samuel Taylor Coleridge: (1827)
Late 1700s/ early 1800s
Romantic poet
‘I have a smack of Hamlet in myself if I may say so’
‘He does not want [lack] courage, skill, will, or opportunity, but every incident sets him thinking’
Charles Lamb (19th C)
Sceptical about stage performance
Hamlet’s ‘profound sorrows’ cannot be portrayed by a ‘gesticulating actor, who comes and mouths them out before an audience’
A.C. Bradley: early 20th C - 1904 = Shakespearean Tragedy
Applied Aristotle’s view of tragedy to Hamlet
Talked about Hamlet’s fatal flaw
Described Hamlet’s madness as ‘melancholia’ (male intellectual madness)
Hamlet is so sad about the state of the world that he is disarmed
Blamed Hamlet’s mother for this melancholia
Talks about the characters like they are real human beings.
‘For Shakespeare, the fundamental tragic trait is some marked imperfection or defect’
‘State of profound melancholy’
L. C. Knights (early 20th C)
Hamlet ‘cannot break out of the closed circle of loathing and self-contempt’
Bertolt Brecht (early 20thC)
Idea of ‘fracture point’ in society
Between medieval and Protestant
Hamlet learned to reject notions of revenge at the `protestant University of Wittenberg
T.S. Eliot 1919
Hamlet’s disgust is excessive
Gertrude’s behaviour is insufficient to justify its extent
Thinks of this as a flaw in Shakespeare’s writing
‘Full of some stuff that the writer could not drag to light, contemplate, or manipulate into art’
Gertrude = ‘negative and insignificant’
G. Wilson Knight (1930)
Called Hamlet an ‘ambassador of death’ and an ‘element of evil’
Said that Claudius has a ‘host of good qualities’ and the ghost is ‘devilish’
Caroline Spurgeon (1935)
First female traditional critic
Had to be careful in her criticism (conformed to ‘ladylike criticism)
Wrote about language rather than characters
‘Iterative imagery’ and ‘image clusters’
decay/ dislocation/ corruption
‘Partly due to the number of images of sickness, disease, or blemish of the body … the idea of an ulcer or tumour, as descriptive of the unwholesome condition of Denmark morally, is, on the whole, the dominating one’
John Dover Wilson (1935)
Was concerned by Claudius’ lack of reaction to the play within a play
Looked at the Elizabethan context of times
‘Shakespeare never let us forget that Hamlet is a failure, and has failed through weakness of character’
Ernest Jones: (1949)
Directly applies ideas of Freud to Hamlet
Says he has an Oedipus complex
This paralyses Hamlet because Claudius has acted out his suppressed desires
His reading had great influence on Laurence Olivier’s film where Gertrude’s bed was omnipresent, and the relationship between Hamlet and Gertrude suggested something sexual.
‘Hamlet … bitterly resented having had to share his mother’s affection, even with his own father, had regarded him as a rival, and had secretly wished him away so that he might enjoy undisputed and undisturbed the monopoly of that affection’
Victor Kiernan (Marxist critic): (20th C)
Shakespeare is concerned with the poor
Partial reading (that Hamlet is Marxist)
Hamlet is ‘Shakespeare’s spokesman for common humanity’
Arnold Kettle: 20th C
Says Elsinore is the problem rather than Hamlet
Jan Kott (20th C)
Parallels between violence and cruelty of the modern world
Similar reading to Hegel in the belief of a pattern of history that repeats
Has a book that makes parallels between the play and things ongoing in history
Compares Elsinore to a totalitarian state, with Claudius as its dictator and Hamlet as the isolated individual caught up in this
Says history is the cause of tragedy
‘The genius of Hamlet consists in the fact that the play can serve as a mirror’
Hamlet is a sponge who ‘immediately absorbs all the problems of our time’
Rebecca Smith: 1980s
Criticises portrayal of Gertrude as the overly sexualised woman
Says she is a meek/ hopeless woman instead (replacing one stereotype with another)
‘The traditional depiction of Gertrude is a false one’ her words and actions actually create ‘a soft, obedient, dependent unimaginative woman, who is caught miserably at the centre of a struggle between two ‘mighty opposites’’
Gertrude is ‘merely a quiet, biddable., careful mother and wife’
Elaine Showalter (1985)
Looked at interpretations of Ophelia’s madness over time
Hysteria rather than melancholia
Expresses that gendered representation of mental illness is discriminatory
Ophelia has historically been dismissed as childish/ girly
However she is not speaking gibberish, but rather telling cutting truths about the nature of the Court
In the 18th C Ophelia was censored, some of her scenes cut
‘There is no ‘true’ Ophelia … but perhaps only a Cubist Ophelia of multiple perspectives, more than the sum of all her parts’
‘Hamlet was the prototype of melancholy male madness, associated with intellectual and imaginative genius; but Ophelia's affliction was erotomania, or love-madness.’
19th-century psychiatrists used Ophelia as a case study in hysteria and mental breakdown in sexually turbulent adolescence
Greenblatt (2001)
Says Shakespeare is a propagandist for the state
Tragedies criticising the state were allowed in Shakespearean England, due to their ending usually overcoming any threat to the authority
Harold Bloom 2003
Dismisses modern criticism
Says we didn’t know who we were until Shakespeare told us
Hamlet is ‘Shakespeare’s ideal son’
‘Categorising Hamlet is virtually impossible’
Emma Smith (2019)
Explored the idea of past vs present
Shakespeare “doubles the name Hamlet, both for the dead father and for the
living son. […] the first time we hear the word Hamlet in this play, it refers not to the living Prince, but to the dead former King”
‘Young Hamlet cannot form an independent identity for himself’
‘The appearance of the ghost pulls Hamlet into a past and away from the future’
Here, progress collapses, we look straight into the past, but also with it the future.’ (Hamlet and Yorick)
Kiernan Ryan (2021)
The flaw of the play lies in elsinore (from Kettle)
Doubling between characters
Hamlet has a superpower rather than a flaw; he is more perceptive than others
Says it would have been right for Hamlet to kill Claudius
Egalitarian
Laertes + Fortinbras = ‘textbook revengers’
‘Norm to which Hamlet strives in vain to conform’
Hamlet, ‘sworn to revenge is the mirror image not only of his fellow revengers, but also the king on whom he is doomed to wreak revenge’
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Aristotle
Noticed a pattern in tragedy plays of a high-born hero who has a flaw that leads to their corruption
Called this flaw ‘Hamartia’
Hegel (18th-19th C)
Sees tragedy as a clash of ideas/ values systems
God is presiding over the cycles, meaning that each cycle is an improvement of its predecessor