Critics Flashcards
(12 cards)
Gillian Woods, on breaking the fourth wall
‘Renaissance plays are particularly self-conscious about their own theatricality’
Francis Bacon
‘A wild kind of justice’
Emma Smith about the ghost
‘A dead man who will not lie down’
W H Auden on Ophelia
a ‘silly, repressed girl’
Doctor Johnson (1765)
‘too terrible to be read or uttered’
Hamlet’s treatment of Ophelia is ‘useless and wanton cruelty’
Jillian Luke on Ophelia
she ‘acts as the first feminist critic of Hamlet’
A C Bradley
Felt that a psychological approach should be taken, called Hamlet ‘the great procrastinator’, diagnosed him with ‘melancholy’
Emma Smith generally about Shakespeare plays
‘pretty terrible for women’
Sean McEvoy about time
‘Chronological confusion’
Keirnan Ryan about genre (sort of)
Hamlet ‘refuses to play the stock role in which he’s been miscast’
Ben Johnson about Shakespeare
‘not of an age but for all time’
John Dover Wilson
‘We were never intended to reach the heart of the mystery’
Hamlet is ‘at once mad and the sanest of geniuses’
