A Critical History of

HamletBy: Leslie Baker

Jacob Mories

Michael Young

Gabrielle Fowler

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.