Critic Quotes

Critic Quotes

1. "I have a smack of Hamlet myself, if I may say so" - Samuel Taylor Coleridge

2. "It is we who are Hamlet....whose powers of action have been eaten up by thought." - William Hazlitt

3. "Hamlet is obliged to act in the spur of the moment" - Samuel Taylor Coleridge

4. "Hamlet is an element of evil in the state of Denmark" - Wilson Knight

5. "He is in fact the poison in the veins of the community" - Wilson Knight

6. Hamlet is "rather an instrument than an agent" - Samuel Johnson

7. "Claudius shares the Hamlet's conception of Gertrude as an object" - Rebecca Smith

8. "Gertrude uses her dying words to warn Hamlet of the poison, but doesn't accuse Claudius" - Rebecca Smith

9. "Ophelia is deprived of thought, sexuality and language" - Elaine Showalter

10. "Hamlet’s disgust at the feminine passivity in himself is translated into violent revulsion against women and into his brutal behaviour towards Ophelia" - Elaine Showalter

11. Hamlet is "a great moraliser" - William Hazlitt

12. Shakespeare "was not of an age, but for all time" - Ben Johnson

13. "There is no play that suffers so much in being transferred to the stage" - William Hazlitt