Criticisms

Criticisms

1. Joseph Addison

   • Calls Shakespeare a 'genius'

2. Shapiro

   • 'Old certainities were gone, even if new ones had not yet taken hold'
     • Shakespeare highlights what is being rushed around him
       • ie the theatre
     • In the Elizabethan Era the world is changing, religious views changed and science was renewed
     • Hamlet's world is crushing around him
       • Death of his father
   • 'Hamlet's 'heroic action' is much more complex

3. Thomas Rymers

   • Says he 'lacks meaning and expression'

4. Keats

   • 'Negative Capability'
     • Inability to create a variety of characters

5. Bloom

   • 'not as the man who thinks too much but rather as the man who thinks too well'
     • Thinks too morally
     • Thinks too sophisticatedly
     • Hesitation to kill Claudius
   • 'transcends the play'

6. Coleridge

   • Hamlet is all meditation, all resolution but all hesitation

7. Woolf

   • References to Gender comparing to women, refers to make-up
   • The idea that Ophelia is part of a patriarchal society

8. Byron

   • Hamlet is a colossal Enigma

9. Hazlett

   • 'It is WE who are Hamlet'
     • We project our own ideas onto Hamlet

10. T.S Eliot

    • Artistic Failure
      • His behaviours change the play completely

11. D.H Lawrence

    • 'Live too much in their head'
      • Doesn't take his action on his thoughts
      • Believes that Hamlet goes on too much
      • "So mean and self-conscious, blowing and snoring his wonderful speeches, full of other folks' 'whoring'
        • Hamlet's very self-obsessed
        • His soliloquys show that he is disgusted by many things wrong in the court including himself

12. Ernest Jones

    • Apply Freudian theories to the analysis of Hamlet
      • Oedipus Complex

13. Bate

    • 'Hamlet's apparent under motivation keeps him alive long after the more obviously motivated revengers [have died]
      • At time Hamlet wants to be the revenge hero, but he makes excuses and would rather complain
        • Shown from his soliloquys
      • The Closet Scene
      • The Confessional Scene

14. T.S Eliot

    • Hamlet's behaviour and moods are "in excess of the facts

15. Dover Wilson

    • "Hamlet is fundamentally sane"
      • He becomes too involved in the mad character

16. Rex Gibson

    • Hamlet "mirrors the anxieties of Shakespeare's England"

17. Olivier Film

    • 'The man who could not make up his mind'

18. Harold Jenkins' Arden Edition

    • 'Reluctant Revenger'

19. Nietzche

    • 'Knowledge kills action' - the idea that Hamlet's consciousness presents us with an idea of a man 'who rarely ceases to play'