Critical Views on Hamlet

C.S Lewis: We sometimes speak as if the characters in whose mouths Shakespeare puts great poetry were poets: in the sense that Shakespeare was depicting men of poetical genius. But surely this is like thinking that Wagner’s Wotan is the dramatic portrait of a baritone?

G. Wilson Knight: Hamlet is inhuman. He has seen through humanity....Instinctively the creatures of earth—Laertes, Polonius, Ophelia, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, league themselves with Claudius: they are of his kind. They sever themselves from Hamlet... He has no friend except Horatio, and Horatio, after the ghost scenes, becomes a queer shadowy character who rarely gets beyond "E’en so, my lord," "My lord—," and suchlike phrases. But Hamlet is not of flesh and blood, he is a spirit of penetrating intellect and cynicism and misery, without faith in himself or anyone else, murdering his love of Ophelia, on the brink of insanity, taking delight in cruelty, torturing Claudius, wringing his mother’s heart, a poison in the midst of the healthy bustle of the court. He is a superman among men. And he is a superman because he has walked and held converse with Death, and his consciousness works in terms of Death and the Negation of Cynicism. He has seen the truth, not alone of Denmark, but of humanity, of the universe: and the truth is evil. Thus Hamlet is an element of evil in the state of Denmark. The poison of his mental existence spreads outwards among things of flesh and blood, like acid eating into metal. They are helpless before his very inactivity and fall one after the other, like victims of an infectious disease. They are strong with the strength of health —but the demon of Hamlet’s mind is a stronger thing than they. Futilely they try to get him out of their country; anything to get rid of him, he is not safe. But he goes with a cynical smile, and is no sooner gone than he is back again in their midst, meditating in graveyards, at home with Death. Not till it has slain all, is the demon that grips Hamlet satisfied. 

It was the devil of the knowledge of death, which possesses Hamlet and drives him from misery and pain to increasing bitterness, cynicism, murder, and madness. He has indeed bought converse with his father’s spirit at the price of enduring and spreading hell on Earth. But however much we may sympathize with Ophelia, with Polonius, Rosencrantz, Guildenstern, the Queen, and Claudius, there is one reservation to be made. It is Hamlet who is right. What he says and thinks of them is true, and there is no fault in his logic. His own mother is indeed faithless, and the prettiness of Ophelia does in truth enclose a spirit as fragile and untrustworthy as her earthly beauty; Polonius is "a foolish prating knave"; Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are timeservers and flatterers; Claudius, whose benevolence hides the guilt of murder, is, by virtue of that fact, "a damned smiling villain."

Elaine Showalter: The madwoman is a heroine

Salvador de Madariaga: This procrastination cannot be due to an instinctive and fastidious repugnance to killing, for Hamlet kills Polonius, and Laertes, and in the end the King himself; and he dispatches Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to their doom with true alacrity

unhand me gentlemen,
By heaven I’ll make a ghost of him that lets me!

When it comes to doing what he is determined to do, he will not hesitate to kill even his closest friend

"But, in the beaten way of friendship, what make you at Ellsinore?" R+G are put out. Very likely they had not expected this alertness in a Hamlet the King had depicted

So much from th’understanding of himself.
They try to plot a concerted answer, but in the end are honest to him; and to his direct question they return a direct answer: "My lord, we were sent for."

The King was their legitimate sovereign
Hamlet's behavior towards Rosencrantz and Guildenstern is rude in the extreme. "This courtesy is not of the right breed," says Guildenstern - the scene shows an exhibition of complete selfcenteredness and of utter disregard for the feelings of others - His egotism shows.

Peter Alexander: Dilemma of being humane without loss of toughness

J Dover Wilson: Everything that Hamlet here says is capable of an equivocal interpretation reflecting upon Polonius and Ophelia. "Fishmonger," as many commentators have noted, means a pander or procurer; "carrion" was a common expression at that time for "flesh" in the carnal sense; while the quibble in "conception" needs no explaining.
"Here in the lobby" is equivalent to a stage direction, and marks with practical certainty the moment at which Hamlet comes in and the place of his entry - long enough for him to take in the whole eavesdropping plot and to implicate Ophelia beyond possibility of doubt in his ears as one of his uncle’s minions

Ernest Jones: The association of the idea of sexuality with his mother, buried since infancy, can no longer be concealed from his consciousness
Feelings which once, in the infancy of long ago, were pleasurable desires can now, because of his repression’s, only fill him with repulsion. The long "repressed" desire to take his father’s place in his mother’s affection is stimulated to unconscious activity by the sight of someone usurping this place exactly as he himself had once longed to do. More, this someone was a member of the same family, so that the actual usurpation further resembled the imaginary one in being incestuous. Without his being in the least aware of it these ancient desires are ringing in his mind, are once more struggling. to find conscious expression, and need such an expenditure of energy again to "repress" them that he is reduced to the deplorable mental state he himself so vividly depicts.

A C Bradley: Her son was forced to see in her action not only an astounding shallowness of feeling, but an eruption of coarse sensuality, ‘rank and gross,’ speeding posthaste to its horrible delight.

Boris Pasternak: The characters are sharply differentiated by the rhythm of their speech. Polonius, the King, Guildenstern and Rosencrantz speak in one way, Laertes, Ophelia, Horatio, and the rest in another. The credulity of the Queen is shown not only in her words but also by her singsong manner of drawing out her vowels.

Hamlet is a tragedy of the will. Hamlet is not a drama of weakness, but of duty and self-denial.

Hamlet is a prince of the blood who never, for a moment, ceases to be conscious of his rights as heir to the throne; he is the spoilt darling of an ancient court, and self-assured in the awareness of his natural gifts. The audience, impressed by his brilliant prospects, is left to judge of the greatness of his sacrifice in giving them up for a higher aim.

Hamlet suppresses his love for Ophelia

T S Eliot:  The "madness" of Hamlet lay to Shakespeare's hand; in the earlier play a simple ruse, and to the end, we may presume, understood as a ruse by the audience. For Shakespeare it is less than madness and more than feigned. The levity of Hamlet, his repetition of phrase, his puns, are not part of a deliberate plan of dissimulation, but a form of emotional relief.

R C Evans:

• there is a need to recognise one's friends
• who to trust
• public allegiance and political friendhsips
• At first Hamlet has no friends he can speak to
• Francisco and Barnardo friends?
• Horatio says he and Marcellus are 'friends to this ground' - It is Marcellus who says that they are leigemen to the dane
• air of companionship between the four men at the beginning

Karen Cooledge: Ophelia is too good for this world

Clifford Davison: Friendship was a 'radiant ideal'

James L Calderwood:

• Two different kinds of truth - ghost's revelations and human truths
• How to act within a tainted world without becoming tainted oneself?
• He does not act but instead "acts," that is, plays mad, which plays his behavior in epoche, zoned off from the world of pragmatic affairs in which action and inaction have no meaning. Hamlet's antic disposition thus becomes a form of inactive action
• The way to resolve his uncertainties about the Ghost, about Claudius, and about his own imagination is, he decides, theatrical
• The silent truths about murder in the orchard and remarriage in hast will be made manifest to eyes and ears
• "The Murder of Gonzago" in its original form was presumably an artistic end in itself.  As revised by Hamlet, however, it becomes "The Mousetrap."  
• Dramatic art is transformed into pragmatic instrument, a weapon in the real world.  Suited mutually to one another to comprise the dramatic ensemble, words now act and acts speak, so that in one concerted motion the truth is conveyed to Claudius with the impact of a sword thrust.

Sigmund Freud: in Hamlet it remains repressed, and we learn of its existence- as we discover the relevant facts in a neurosis- only through the inhibitory effects which proceed from it. The plot of the drama shows us that Hamlet is by no means intended to appear as a character wholly incapable of action. On two separate occasions we see him assert himself: once in a sudden outburst of rage, when he stabs the eavesdropper behind the arras, and on the other occasion when he deliberately, and even craftily, with the complete unscrupulousness of a prince of the Renaissance, sends the two courtiers to the death which was intended for himself. Hamlet is able to do anything but take vengeance upon the man who did away with his father and has taken his father's place with his mother- the man who shows him in realization the repressed desires of his own childhood.