HAMLET CRITICISM

Multiplicity of Meaning in the Last Moments of Hamlet
by John Russel Brown - Elizabethan and Jacobean tragedies have had an even more durable life than comedies. Especially at the Globe Playhouse, a varied audience crowded to see the rise and fall of kings, or the working out of revenge and passion. They watched horrific stories concluding with an ultimate test in which the hero, and sometimes the heroine, faced violence and disaster . . . .

Hamlet
by Philip Burton - Just as every actor is supposed to want to play Hamlet, it would seem that every author wants to write about him. He has received more performances in the theatre and more explication on the printed page than any other character of Shakespeare. Theatergoers collect Hamlets as philatelists do stamps, and in both cases, it would seem, the rarer and stranger the specimen the more it is cherished . . .

Wordplay, Madplay, Inner-Play
by James L. Calderwood - A great many truths interest Hamlet, but the ones he must find a voice for are of two kinds. There are the fundamental truths imparted to him by the ghost: the secret facts about his father's murder and his mother's faithless remarriage. Then there are the truths about the human condition that seem entailed by these primary facts: all the melancholy distresses that Hamlet registers about a mutable world in which the cosmetics of lies and false seeming conceal the moral ugliness of evil. These latter truths Hamlet both tells and untells in his wordplay, engaging in a verbal balancing act between silence and noise that is paralleled by his assuming an antic disposition that lies between inaction and action . . .

Essays on Hamlet
by - J.Dover Wilson: Antic Disposition; Ernest Jones: Hamlet and Oedipus ; Lewis: Hamlet --The Prince or the Poem? ; Knight: Embassy of Death ; Salvador de Madariaga: Rosencrantz and Guildenstern; ; Peter Alexander: The Complete Man.

The Interpretation of Dreams (3rd edition)
by Sigmund Freud (Translated by A. A. Brill - 1911) - Another of the great poetic tragedies, Shakespeare's Hamlet, is rooted in the same soil as Oedipus Rex. But the whole difference in the psychic life of the two widely separated periods of civilization, and the progress, during the course of time, of repression in the emotional life of humanity, is manifested in the differing treatment of the same material. In Oedipus Rex the basic wish-phantasy of the child is brought to light and realized as it is in dreams; in Hamlet it remains repressed, and we learn of its existence- as we discover the relevant facts in a neurosis- only through the inhibitory effects which proceed from it . . .

Hamlet
by Paul A. Jorgensen - As the world’s most famous play, Hamlet draws upon an almost shameless quantity of popular themes. Most of these, moreover, are sensational and sufficient to compel the groundlings to stand throughout Shakespeare’s longest play. But the revenge tradition that underlies it, and that gives it gripping excitement, would have struck contemporary audiences as profoundly different from such bloody tragedies as they were used to. It was a hero who, because of his sensitive, moral nature, suffers keenly from his task.

Hamlet and His Problems
by T.S. Eliot - Few critics have even admitted that Hamlet the play is the primary problem, and Hamlet the character only secondary. And Hamlet the character has had an especial temptation for that most dangerous type of critic: the critic with a mind which is naturally of the creative order, but which through some weakness in creative power exercises itself in criticism instead. These minds often find in Hamlet a vicarious existence for their own artistic realization. Such a mind had Goethe, who made of Hamlet a Werther; and such had Coleridge, who made of Hamlet a Coleridge; and probably neither of these men in writing about Hamlet remembered that his first business was to study a work of art . . .

Hamlet
by Boris Pasternak -Shakespeare’s use of rhythm is clearest in Hamlet, where it serves a triple purpose. It is used as a method of characterization, it makes audible and sustains the prevailing mood, and it elevates the tone and softens the brutality of certain scenes.

The characters are sharply differentiated by the rhythm of their speech. Polonius, the King, Guildenstern and Rosencrantz speak in one way, Laertes, Ophelia, Horatio, and the rest in another. The credulity of the Queen is shown not only in her words but also by her singsong manner of drawing out her vowels.

Edgar Allan Poe on Hamlet
In all commentating upon Shakespeare there has been a radical error never yet mentioned. It is the error of attempting to expound his characters – to account for their actions – to reconcile his inconsistencies – not as if they were to coinage of a human brain, but [as] if they had been actual existencies upon earth. We talk of Hamlet the man, instead of Hamlet the dramatis persona – of Hamlet that God, in place of Hamlet that Shakespeare, created.

George Santayana
To the common public ‘Hamlet’ is a famous piece by a famous poet, with crime, a ghost, battle, and carnage; and that is sufficient. To the youthful enthusiast ‘Hamlet’ is a piece handling the mystery of the universe, and having throughout cadences, phrases, and words full of divinest Shakespearean magic; and that, too, is sufficient.