Introduction
Each generation makes Hamlet
it’s own interpretation
Painting’s, poetry, and films are
produced through each
generation
Popular Criticism’s
Elaine Showalter argues that Hamlet
shaped the ways femininity and
madness are understood
1623 First publication in folio form
told readers to prepare to read a
work that was already a classic
Shapes Western culture and values
First Folio
Ben Jonson compares Hamlet to great Greek
classical dramatists, and contemporary British
ones
Shakespeare transcends historical boundaries
Shakespeare commands cultural attention
Aspects of the plays were strictly Elizabethan
or Jacobean
New Historicist Critics
Shakespeare is more grounded in
history
Compares differently from sixteenth
and seventeenth-century British
citizens and for us
Crosses boundaries of time and
space
Human Nature
Some Critics today argue we question Shakespeare
on value
In 1808 A. W. Schlegel argued Hamlet’s tendency to
philosophize and meditate made him unable to act.
Inspired reader to ponder with Hamlet the great
questions of human existence.
William Hazlitt in 1817 depicts Hamlet as
transferring his distress to all humanity.
“It is we who are Hamlet”
Romantic Critics
19th century began to ask the
question of why Hamlet delays.
No longer seen as simply a plot
device
Sought an answer into the depths
of Hamlet’s character
A.C. Bradley
Greatest character critic
Began the debate about Hamlet’s madness
Started more specific questions the personalities of
the characters and about the unknown situations of
the play.
Hamlet is a character whose psychology must be
imagined to be as complete as that of any living man.
A.C. Bradley Continued
Discovers that Hamlet’s
melancholy is a sickness, not a
mood
Hamlet causes readers to
identify themselves with him.
Sigmund Freud
He psychoanalyzed Hamlet and compared it with the
play Oedipus the King
Also looked into the madness of Hamlet
Uses Hamlet to explain theories on dreams
Develops the Oedipus complex
Like Bradley he attempts to diagnose Hamlet’s
melancholy
Ernest Jones
One of Freud’s disciples
Wrote: Oedipus Complex as Explanation of
Hamlet’s Mystery
Along with Freud this theory greatly influenced
Florence Olivier’s film version of Hamlet
Olivier’s Film
Incorporates main elements of Freud and Jones
theory of the play
Emphasizes suggestive relationship between
Hamlet and Gertrude
Film was such an important landmark that it
cannot be watched without understanding of
this theory
http://www.youtube.com/watch
?v=XNxFydsvY1A
T.S. Elliot
Singled out analysis and essay about Hamlet
proposing his idea of objective correlative
Argues the only way of expressing emotion in the
form of art is by finding an objective correlative
Theory is situation or chain of events shall be
formula to particular motion
Suggest some similarities between his theory and
that of Freud and Bradley
Jacqueline Rose
Proposed hypothesis about Elliot’s hypothesis
that illustrates precisely the turn to questions of
gender and aesthetic politics and the focus on
Gertrude, provoking feminist thought into
Hamlet
Rose’s reading of the play goes on to establish
Gertrude as the “scapegoat”
Twentieth Century
Criticism
Can be as understood as “disengaging the play
from its Romantic association reaching an
independent association”
This shift involved a new assumption about how
to analyze dramatic texts challenging Bradley’s
views
G. Wilson Knight
Wrote an essay that’s view was that mortality itself
was the place more focus, and Hamlet himself as the
death bringer
Viewed Hamlet as a disease consciousness in an
otherwise healthy world whose presence infects the
kingdom
Hamlet’s poison he argues is “the poison of
negation, nothingness, threatening to a world of
positive assertion”
Stephanie Mallarme
He emphasized not only Hamlet’s solitariness
but his violence – he is a “killer who kills without
concern, and even if he does not do the killing –
people die.”
Mallarme’s sinister figure appears thereafter in a
number of influential twentieth-century
interpretations.
Margaret Ferguson
She wrote a recent essay that returns to Hamlet
as the death bringer by commenting on the way
kingship itself is associated in the play with the
power to kill.
A key example for Ferguson is when Hamlet
arranges Rosencrantz and Guildenstern killed
with a letter and he seals the letter with his
father’s signet ring, the sign of royal power.
Bertolt Brecht
He speaks on and emphasizes that Elizabethan
theater as being “full of alienation effects.”
“Alienation effects” was intended to require the
actor to express the distance he or she felt from
his or her role, and thus functioned to allow the
audience to maintain its critical judgment and
not to sink into passive acceptance of
conditions or plots that should, Brocht felt, be
resisted.
Roland Frye and Arthur
McGee
Their books picked up and extend the debates
already underway concerning moral and religious
questions about revenge in several comments about
Providence in act 5.
These scholars argue that one cannot talk
intelligently about why Hamlet delays if one does not
understand the issues that face Hamlet.
They discover how profoundly the text is shaped by
its complex reevaluation of revenge as plot and as
moral deed.
Conclusion
Hamlet’ has been and will continue to be
debated, and criticized.
Scholar’s of every era have formed opinions
about what the play means or does not mean
Shakespeare is the only person who truly knows
exactly what Hamlet is meant to portray.