Romanticism

Romanticism

1. Romanticism as a Reaction Against Scientific Reason

   • This analysed characters psychological states and the relationships between them
   • Romanticism focused on beauty and the individual and encouraged people to value their emotions.
   • They looked mainly at the characters of Hamlet and his psychological state
   • Romantic critics were usually authors who wrote about how the individual could be affected by things like isolation, melacholy and personal misery

2. Romantic Critics Linked Hamlet's Delay to his Intellect

   • They preferred to study the play as a text
   • William Hazlitt said "there is no play that suffers so much in being transferred to the stage"
   • Romantic critics started considering the issue of Hamlet's delay for the first time.
     • Hamlet's impressive intellect explained his delay and that his hesitation was important to his character
   • Goethe suggested that Hamlet can't balance his thoughts and actions because he's so highly intelligent
   • Samuel Coleridge argued that Hamlet was a psychological study of an over-imaginative person with an unwillingness to act - Hamlet thinks too much
     • Coleridge also argued that the play's message was that we should act, rather than delay

3. Romantics treatment of the character of Hamlet as separate from the text made them realise that his complexities made him lifelike