Hamlet Critical Essays Flashcards
1
Q
David Scott Kastan (5)
A
- ‘They come more from medieval articulations of the genre than classical ones.’ — (about tragedy)
- ‘Idea of tragedy as the fall from prosperity to wretchedness became commonplace.’
- ‘Universal and inexplicable’ — (about tragedy)
- ‘Uncertainty is the point.’
- ‘Genre of uncompensated suffering.’
2
Q
A. D. Nuttall (3)
A
- ‘Grief and fear become in their turn matters for enjoyment.’
- ‘The pleasure of tragedy’
- ‘If people go again and again to see such things, they must in some way enjoy them.’
3
Q
A. C. Bradley (6)
A
- ‘The story of one person, the ‘hero’.’
- ‘Tale of suffering and calamity conducting to death.’
- ‘They befall a conspicuous person/contrasted with previous happiness or glory.’ — about suffering/calamity.
- ‘Make the whole scene a scene of woe.’ — About tragic waste.
- Medieval mind: Tragedy was meant to ‘appeal strongly to commons human sympathy’ but Shakespeare tragedy is ‘larger than this idea’.
- ‘His fate affects the welfare of a whole nation.’
4
Q
Maynard Mack (5)
A
- ‘Madness is to some degree a punishment.’
- ‘Madness has a further dimension, as insight.’
- ‘Hamlet wears the guise of the madman’/‘presumed to have intuitive unformulated awareness.’
- ‘Privileged in madness to say things — Hamlet about the corruption of human nature.’
- ‘Madness was dramatically useful.’
5
Q
John Kerrigan (8)
A
- ‘Hamlet never promises to revenge, only to remember.’
- ‘Hardly has it begun than it pauses to celebrate Old Hamlet as a representative of that lost and epic age in which political issues were decided by fierce, single combat.’
- ‘True, false, and cynical remembrances all reflect on the play’s chief link with the past.’
- ‘Remembrance haunts him/to the point of madness.’
- ‘When comfort is found in the past’ it only ‘makes the present more desolate.’
- ‘Show the prince attempting to replace a dead love-object with a living one.’ — about Ophelia.
- ‘In this she is no better than Gertrude’ — about Ophelia.
- ‘His inky cloak is ambiguous…indicates his desire to eventually detach himself from him.’
6
Q
Janet Adelman (8)
A
- With Hamlet, Shakespeare ‘in effect rewrites the story of Cain and Abel as the story of Adam and Eve.’
- ‘She is kept ambiguously innocent.’ — about Gertrude.
- (About Gertrude) ‘She plays the role of the missing Eve…her sexuality the poisonous weed that kills him.’
- ‘Remake her in the image of the Virgin Mother.’
- ‘Throughout the play, the covert drama of reformation vies for priority with the overt drama of revenge.’
- ‘This shift, from avenging the father to saving the mother’ accounts for ‘why the confrontation of Hamlet with Gertrude in the closet scene is much more central.’
- The play is meant to ‘catch the conscience of the Queen.’
- ‘Mother’s moral reclamation’
7
Q
William Hazlitt (5)
A
- (About the play Hamlet) ‘It abounds most in striking reflections on human life.’
- Hamlet is ‘not a character marked by strength of will or even passion, but by refinement of thought and sentiment.’
- ‘He seems incapable of deliberate action.’
- ‘At other times, when he is most bound to act, he remains puzzled, undecided, and sceptical, dallies with his purposes, till the occasion is lost, and finds out some pretence to relapse into indolence and thoughtfulness again.’
- ‘Prince of philosophical speculators.’
8
Q
Kate Flint (1)
A
‘Textbook-type of the melancholic’ (Hamlet)
9
Q
Carol Thomas Neely — Ophelia (3)
A
- ‘Ophelia becomes alienated, acting into the madness only Hamlet plays at.’
- ‘Somatised/eroticised’
- ‘Must be watched, contained within the family.’
10
Q
Carol Thomas Neely — Hamlet (5)
A
- ‘His restored identity is validated, symbolically as well as literally.’
- ‘It manifest itself in social criticism…viewed as politically dangerous.’
- ‘Politicised in form and content.’
- ‘Fashionably introspective and melancholy.’
- ‘Detached from family and from sexuality, seemingly free from passivity and loss of control, capable of philosophical contemplation and revenge.’
11
Q
John Dixon Hunt (5)
A
- ‘The human body forms human experiences, being the medium through which men suffer and act.’
- ‘The body also deforms human beings and threatens ultimately to reduce them to nothing.’
- ‘The eyes of the mind, if they are open, behold in the play’s language a spectacle of ruined bodies fully as grim as what their physical counterparts behold on stage.’
- ‘’The body politic’’ is more than a metaphor for social organisation in this play; it describes a tightly integrated world where reality stems palpably from the centres of political and religious authority.’
- ‘Shakespeare seems to methodically deconstructing the body.’
- ‘The attitude towards corporeal existence inherent in the play’s imagery…contributes to his inability to ‘act’ by challenging what he regards as the integrity of his being.’
12
Q
Catherine Belsey (6)
A
- ‘When the frozen soil was unresponsive, people filled the dark evenings with games and pastimes, along with storytelling.’ — AO3 for ghost stories.
- The conventions governing winter’s tale override an a an emerging realism.’
- ‘Hamlet gathers up a range of threads of distinct traditions to weave a tale that continues to haunt the imagination of the modern world.’
- ‘Ghost defy the laws of nature as well as the principles of logic.’
- ‘The unknown has intruded into the familiar.’
- ‘The uncertainty deepens the enigma that surrounds the Ghost’s identity.
13
Q
G Wilson Knight (3)
A
- ‘Hamlet is a living death in the midst of life.’
- ‘That sepulchral cataclysm at the beginning is the key to the whole play.’
- ‘This play is so rich in death.’
14
Q
Andrew Brown (8)
A
- ‘How much has that consciousness been formed by the distance that he chooses to put between himself and the society in which he lives?’
- ‘Hamlet explicitly rejects his heritage.’
- ‘Exposes the self-destructiveness of the marital ethos that prevails in these Northern kingdoms.’
- ‘Hamlet seems distanced from his father.’
- ‘He is a thinker in a society of do-ers.’
- ‘Hamlet never questions why his father did not nominate him as heir to the throne.’
- ‘The tragedy of Hamlet is not his single death…it’s that the possibilities he represents die with him.’
- ‘The hegemony of the state is such that it can reconcile a a nation to its enemy and stifle the emergent new order which Hamlet represents.’
15
Q
Camille Paglia (6)
A
- ‘For the head of state is to be at ease on leisurely afternoons means the nation is at peace.’
- ‘A king napping would symbolise the harmony of nature and society.’ (AO3 body politics — if the king is diseased, the whole nation is).
- ‘Shows civilisation collapsing into the realm of gross matter.’
- ‘Unnerving intensity and overbearing paternal authority.’ (Ghost’s relationship with Prince Hamlet)
- ‘Magnificent flight of strange, lurid poetry.’
- ‘Presses his heavy revelation on his son.’
16
Q
Janet Clare (3)
A
- ‘We feel a more extensive period of time elapsing as Hamlet ages from a young adult, fresh from Wittenberg, to the mature, 30 year old man of the graveyard scene.’
- ‘Hamlet’s personal space is occupied together with Horatio.’
- ‘The Ghost in Hamlet is unlike any Senecan/neo-Senecan fury, yet its message is unequivocal.’ — AO3: Revenge Renaissance tragedies having Senecan (Seneca — stoic philosopher of Ancient Rome) inspirations (depictions of tormented/indicative ghosts from the underworld + mythic structures of relentless revenge).
17
Q
John Dover Wilson (2)
A
- ‘Without a doubt, the greatest of all puzzles in the play.’ — Ophelia and Hamlet’s relationship.
- ‘Shakespeare’s ghost emanates fr
18
Q
T.S Elliot (1)
A
‘Hamlet is up against the difficulty that his disgust is occasioned by his mother, but that his mother is not an adequate equivalent for it…To have heightened the criminality of Gertrude would have been to provide the formula for a totally different emotion in Hamlet; it is just because her character is so negative and insignificant that she arouses in Hamlet the feeling which she is incapable of representing.’
19
Q
Elaine Showalter
A
‘Since the 1970s…we have had a feminist discourse which has offered a new perspective on Ophelia’s madness as protest and rebellion. For many feminist theorists, the madwoman is a heroine, a powerful figure who rebels against the family and the social order.’
2. ‘For most critics of Shakespeare, Ophelia has been an insignificant minor character in the play, touching in her weakness and madness but chiefly interested, of course, in what she tells us about Hamlet.’
20
Q
Rebecca Smith (4)
A
- ‘Gertrude, in Shakespeare’s Hamlet, had traditionally been played as a sensual, deceitful woman.’
- ‘She speaks plainly, directly, and chastely when she does speak…Gertrude’s brief speeches include references to honour, virtue…neither structure nor content suggests wontonness.’
- Gertrude believes that quiet woman best please men, and pleasing men is Gertrude’s main interest.’
- ‘Gertrude has not moved toward independence or heightened moral stance; only her divided loyalties and her unhappiness intensify.’
21
Q
Graham Holderness (2)
A
- ‘Have Hamlet and the Ghost between them succeeded in setting the world to rights, or rather in plunging it into chaos, wiping the entire Danish royal family and allowing the state to fall into the hands of a soldier of fortune?’
- ‘Does the play exhibit a pattern of retributive justice performed to the last letter of the law, or a chaotic orgy of reciprocal slaughter in which the innocent fall aimlessly beside the guilty?
22
Q
Ernest Jones
A
‘Hamlet’s long (repressed) desire to take his father’s place in his mother’s affection is stimulated to unconscious activity by the sight of Claudius usurping this place.’
23
Q
David Leverenz (4)
A
- ‘Gertrude’s inconstancy not only brings disgust and incestuous feelings, it is also the sign of a diseased doubleness in everyone who has accommodated to his or her social role.’
- ‘…there are many voices in Ophelia’s madness speaking through her…none of them are her own. She becomes the mirror for a mad-inducing world.’
- ‘Ophelia has no choice but to say ‘I shall obey, my lord’.
- ‘Not allowed to love and unable to be false, Ophelia breaks. She goes mad rather than gets mad. Even in her madness, she has no voice of her own, only a discord of other voices and expectations customs gone awry.’
24
Q
R D. Laing
A
- ‘The divided self: in her madness, there is no one there.’
- ‘She has already died. There is now only a vacuum where there once was a person.’
25
Q
Lee Edwards
A
‘We can imagine Hamlet’s story without Ophelia, but Ophelia literally has no story without Hamlet.’
26
Q
‘Privileged in ___ to say ___ — Hamlet about the ___ of ___ ___’
A
‘Privileged in madness to say things — Hamlet about the corruption of human nature’
Mack
27
Q
‘Befall a ___ ___’
A
‘Befall a conspicuous person’
Bradley
28
Q
‘Make the whole ___ a ___ of ___’
A
‘Make the whole scene a scene of woe’
- Bradley
29
Q
‘Larger than ___ ___’
A
‘Larger than this idea’
Bradley
30
Q
‘His ___ affects the ___ ___’
A
‘His fate affects the whole nation’
Bradley
31
Q
‘More like ___ ___ of the genre’
A
‘More like medieval articulations of the genre’
Kastan
32
Q
‘Fell from ___ to ___’
A
‘Fell from prosperity to wretchedness’
Kastan
