Freud (Psychological) - Oedipus Complex; anything but vengence
“Hamlet is able to do anything—except take vengeance on the man who did away with his father”
Freud (Psychological) - Oedipus Complex; active energy and paralysis
“Hamlet represents the type of man whose active energy is paralysed by…his intellect.”
Ernest Jones (Psychological) - Psychoanalytic Expansion (unconscious guilt); conflict = psychological
“The conflict is not moral, but deeply psychological.”
A.C. Bradley (Psychological) - Melancholy (Depression) and Moral Sensitivity; melancholy and inaction
“Hamlet’s melancholy is the cause of his inaction.”
A.C. Bradley (Psychological) - Melancholy (Depression) and Moral Sensitivity; paralysis and reflection
“paralysed by excess of reflection.”
Stephen Greenblatt (Modern Reading) - Depression + Trauma
“Hamlet’s mind is the true battlefield of the play.”
Elaine Showalter (Feminist) - Women as Other; result of patriarchy
“Ophelia’s madness is the product of patriarchal pressures”
Elaine Showalter (Feminist) - Women as Other; obedience v desire
“conflict between obedience and desire.”
Elaine Showalter (Feminist) - Women as “Other”; women = constructed
“The female characters in Hamlet are constructed”
Germaine Greer - Patriarchy and Female Oppression; destructive potential
“Ophelia’s fate demonstrates the destructive potential of patriarchal expectations.”
Janet Adelman (Feminist) - Female Characters as Mirrors of Male Desire; women = instruments
“Women in Hamlet are instruments through which male conflicts are dramatized.”
William Hazlitt (Romantic) - Hamlet as the Sensitive Spirit; fascinated by Hamlet
“We are fascinated by Hamlet…for what he thinks and suffers.”
Lois Potter (Contextual) - Political Criticism; Hamlet = dramatic version of Elizabethan England
“Hamlet dramatizes the political anxieties of succession and sovereign authority”
