Hamlet critical quotes Flashcards
Witt: metatheatricality and development
Through contact with theatre, Hamlet learns the complexity of the ‘relationship between inner and outer’
T.S Eliot
Hamlet fails as it eschews action [central to classical theatre]
De Grazia
Shakespeare ‘internalises plot’- action becomes ‘psychological’
Nietzsche
His ‘knowledge kills action’
Belsey
‘most discontinous….not a unified subject’
Grendler
‘collisions between emergent and residual discourses’
Fowler - mirror
Provides ‘moral mirror’ for audience, especially highlighted by metadrama
Fowler - Elizabethan Drama
Structured ‘by scenes not acts…by ideas as much as plots’
‘profound realism’ - realistic to emotions, not reality
Fowler - Ophelia
Adds an ‘additional viewpoint’ encouraging ‘reflexiveness’
Fowler - realism
‘Profound realism’ - to emotions, not reality
‘what may seem gaps [to a modern audience] are really transitions between perspectives’
Believes that these perspectives can be ‘synthesised’ - dispute this
May have some naturalistic realism (modernism) but also ‘relates morally or psychologically rather than causally’ (still influenced by Cycle Plays/medieval realism)
Emma Smith - context
Looks at issue of inheritance obliquely through Hamlet not succeeding to throne
‘A play that looks backwards: theatrically, structurally, psychologically, and religiously’
Emma Smith - repetition
‘Re-venge, like re-membering, takes on the quality of repetition’
A.C. Bradley
Diagnosed Hamlet with Freudian melancholy
Gillian Woods: lesson in…
Hamlet interprets everything as a lesson in performance; yet cannot himself escape ‘the human impulse to perform’, for him ‘performance is part of reality’
Auerbach
Notes ‘mixed style’ in Hamlet - embraces the everyday as well as the elevated
