There can be no question about the extent of Hamlet’s failure. ibid.
It is abundantly clear that Claudius seduced Gertrude in the old king’s lifetime. ibid.
That there can be a distinction between a violence which purifies, and is acceptable, and all other forms of violence, which are outlawed, must seem to us the most dangerous concept possible. Only among terrorist circles are differences of kind among acts of violence accepted. ibid.
Is Hamlet’s sense of mission divine or demonic? ibid.
The treatment of the Ghost raises rather trickier problem. There is no doubt that the Ghost ought to thrill even a blasé, sophisticated modern audience. Often it doesn’t; the key to doing so may be found in something Charles Marowitz wrote in his Introduction to his College Hamlet; ‘What is frightening about a ghost is not its unearthiness, but its earthliness: its semblance of reality divorced from existence’. Peter Davidson, The Comedy of ‘Hamlet’
To producers such as Peter Hall in 1965, the Ghost assumed super-human proportions, standing 8 to 12 feet high depending on which theatre critic one read. ibid.
The tonal ambiguity matches to perfection – or rather, realises dramatically in performance – the uncertainties attendant on the Ghost for Hamlet and us. Shakespeare keeps prompting our uncertainty by his choice of words, and his requirements for stage movement. ibid.
When the play opens Claudius has obtained the crown of Denmark by secretly poisoning the King his brother. One month after the funeral and coronation he is married to Gertrude, the wife of his dead brother and the mother of Hamlet. A Ghost, in the shape of the dead King, appears on the battlements of the castle of Elsinore. It discloses the crimes of Claudius, and commands Hamlet to revenge his father’s murder. In the play Hamlet’s problems develop from the fact that he does not immediately obey this command by killing the King his uncle. Nigel Alexander, ‘Poison, Play, and Duel’
The wrong sentry challenges, and the other corrects the oddity instantly. Francisco is sick at heart, but neither he nor Bernardo gives any sign that further comment might be in order ... Audiences want their bearings and expect them to be given. Stephen Booth, On the Value of Hamlet
Throughout the play, the audience gets information or sees action it once wanted only after a new interest has succeeded the old. ibid.
The Ghost itself, passing back and forth between otherworld and this world, breaks down the borders between life and death and between fantasy and reason. James L Calderwood, Verbal Presence: Conceptual Absence
Gertrude, in Shakespeare’s Hamlet, has traditionally been played as a sensual, deceitful woman ... The famous film versions of Hamlet illustrate the standard presentation, wherein Gertrude is a vain, self-satisfied woman of strong physical and sexual appetites. Rebecca Smith, A Heart Cleft in Twain: The Dilemma of Shakespeare’s Gertrude
One finds little that hints at hypocrisy, suppression, or uncontrolled passion and their implied complexity. ibid.
Since the beginning of the play, Hamlet has been obsessed with Claudius’s and Gertrude’s guilt, and it is this which precipitates his distempered behaviour. ibid.
The nurturing, loving, careful mother and wife – malleable, submissive, totally dependant, and solicitous of others at the expense of herself. This is still a stereotype, but a more positive one than that of the temptress and destroyer – self-indulgent and soulless. And certainly it more accurately reflects the Gertrude that Shakespeare created. ibid.
The play opens in murky light, on a cold battlement, and its first line is a question. Soon, a ghost appears, but he does not speak. He speaks to no one, throughout the play, but Hamlet. By revealing the ghost to eyes other than Hamlet’s – indeed to the audience – Shakespeare establishes its objective reality, validates its existence. The presence of the sceptical, rational Horatio emphasises that the ghost is not a figment hallucinated by a fevered mind. The ghost is as real as a ghost can be.
What is ambiguous is the import of the ghost, not just whether it is a ‘spirit of health or goblin damn’d’, but what its message really means. Maynard Mack and Harry Levin have pointed out that the entire play occurs in an atmosphere of ambiguity, irony, and interrogation. Marilyn French, Chaste Constancy in ‘Hamlet’
First he recounts the overall fact of the murder, and the cover story given out ... And within a few lines, the ghost is attacking not Claudius, but his queen. ibid.
In general, the world that surrounds Hamlet is as morally ambiguous as the actual world. Claudius is a good ruler; he loves his wife and is patient with her difficult son. ibid.
G Wilson Knight suggest that ‘the question of the relative morality of Hamlet and Claudius reflects the ultimate problem of the play’. But that relativity embraces others too. ibid.
Yet when feminist criticism allows Ophelia to upstage Hamlet, it also brings to the foreground the issues in an onging theoretical debate about the cultural links between femininity, female sexuality, insanity, and representation. Elaine Showalter, ‘Representing Ophelia: Women, Madness and the Responsibilities of Feminist Criticism’
‘Of all the characters in Hamlet’, Bridget Lyons has pointed out, ‘Ophelia is most persistently presented in terms of symbolic meanings ... Ophelia’s symbolic meanings, moreover, are specifically feminine’. ibid.
Clinically speaking, Ophelia’s behaviour and appearance are characteristic of the malady the Elizabethans would have diagnosed as female love-melanchology, or erotomania ... On the stage, Ophelia’s madness was presented as the predictable outcome of erotomania. ibid.
These Pre-Raphaelite images were part of a new and intrinsic traffic between images of women and madness in late nineteenth-century literature, psychiatry, drama, and art. ibid.
On the Victorian stage, it was Ellen Terry, daring and unconventional in her own life, who led the way in acting Ophelia in feminist terms as a consistent psychological study in sexual intimidation, a girl terrified of her father, of her love, and of life itself. ibid.
‘Who’s there?’ Bernardo’s anxious shout, which begins Shakespeare’s most problematic play, raises the fundamental question of Hamlet’s identity ... The separation of role from self is clear in the opening scene. Anxiety precipitates a genuine question, ‘Who’s there?’ David Leverenz, The Women in Hamlet
Yet the not-so-long-lived king has just died, and the new king, who was to have been Hamlet the younger, has been displaced by the old king’s brother. Who is the rightful king? ibid.
But for now these jagged interchanges, like the half-lines staggered on the page and the roles confused by the guards, seem simply ‘out of joint’ with no clear perspective on who has been guarding what, why Bernardo seems scared, and why Francisco feels sick at heart. ibid.
Yet why is father in Purgatory? Not because of his heroic or virtuous strength but because of the ‘foul crimes done in my days of nature’ (I.v.12.). So in these first few lines the father has 1) told his son not to pity, yet encouraged him to pity, 2) accentuated his son’s earthy weakness and his own immortal strength yet told Hamlet of ‘foul crimes’, and (3) equated pity with frivolity and dutiful hearing with seriousness, while picturing Hamlet’s feelings in language that dismembers the body in its exaggerated seriousness. ibid.
Her change from ‘seeming virtuous’ behaviour to ‘lust’ puts the Ghost into a paroxysm of disgust, not so much at the vile seducer as at the women who could move from ‘a radiant angel’ who preys ‘on garbage’ (I.v.46.55-7). The king of foul crimes presents himself as an angel now. ibid.
‘The rest is silence’ (V.ii.347). That gnomic phrase could mean that there is no afterlife, despite Hamlet’s earlier scruples; that ‘rest’ is equivalent to silence: that my rest is silence; or that the rest of my story is untold. ibid.
Hamlet is not so much a full-throated tragedy as an ironic stifling of a hero’s identity by structures of rule that no longer have legitimacy. ibid.
In the revenge-plays in the half-century before the civil war it is the sovereign’s failure to administer justice which inaugurates the subject’s vengeance. Catherine Belsey, Revenge in ‘Hamlet’
The Ghosts in revenge plays consistently resist unequivocal identifications, are always ‘questionable’ in one of the senses of the word. Dead and not living, visitants at midnight (the marginal hour) from a prison-house which is neither heaven or hell, visible to some figures on the stage but not to others, and so neither real nor unreal, they inaugurate a course of action which is both mad and sane, correct and criminal. ibid.
Rather than authorising the state, then, Shakespeare lines up the benign image of carnival – a populist support – in opposition to Claudius. When Laertes returns to demand justice for the murder of his father, he exhibits the same features of popular authority which Shakespeare gave the heroes of his history plays and attributed to Hamlet as well. Leonard Tennenhouse, Power in ‘Hamlet’
More than simply painting a bloody backdrop for his tragedy of revenge, in the manner of Webster, Shakespeare seems to be methodically deconstructing the body. John Hunt, A Thing of Nothing: The Catastrophic Body in ‘Hamlet’
Since Wolfgang Clemen’s book on Shakespeare’ imagery, it has become a commonplace in Hamlet criticism that the motif of ulcerous infection and corruption that runs throughout the play centres on the speech in which Hamlet is told how poison was poured into his father’s ears, coursed through his blood, and ate away his body from within, covering it with sores. ibid.
The Ghost calls Hamlet deep into this world of disruption. Its invitation to decapitate the body politic seems a horrific charge. ibid.