Bernard Grebanier's The Heart of Hamlet (1960) A “Healthy” Hamlet
“To know how Hamlet feels about life we must watch not what he says about it so much as what he does living it. Look at him in this way, and you will find him not melancholy, not complex - ridden, not pessimistic, not even disillusioned basically - but a healthy, vigorous man, much in love with life, who, given the slightest opportunity, is happy, cheerful, companionable, and kind.”
Hamlet as an example of Aristotle's model tragic hero:
Goethe's Interpretation Of Hamlet As Nobly Weakwilled (1796)
“Shakespeare sought to depict a great deed laid upon a soul unequal to the performance of it. . . . A beautiful, pure, noble and most moral nature, without the strength of nerve which forms a hero, sinks beneath a burden which it can neither bear nor throw off; every duty is holy to him - this is too hard. The impossible is required of him - not the impossible in itself, but the impossible to him. How he winds, turns, agonizes, advances, and recoils, ever reminded, ever reminding himself, and at last almost loses his purpose from his thoughts, without ever again recovering his peace of mind.”
Coleridge's Interpretation Of Hamlet As Over - Intellectual
“He [Shakespeare] saw at once how consistent it was with the character of Hamlet, that after still resolving, and still deferring, still determining to execute, and still postponing the execution, he should finally, in the infirmity of his disposition, give himself up to his destiny, and hopelessly place himself in the power, and at the mercy of his enemies.”
“Such a mind as Hamlet's is near akin to madness . . . that greatness of genius, which led Hamlet to a perfect knowledge of his own character, which, with all strength of motive, was so weak as to be unable to carry into act his own most obvious duty.”
“The fact, however, is that Dr. Johnson did not understand the character of Hamlet, and censured accordingly: the determination to allow the guilty King to escape at such a moment is only part of the indecision and irresoluteness of the hero. Hamlet seizes hold of a pretext for not acting, when he might have acted so instantly and effectually. . . .”
“In Hamlet I conceive him [Shakespeare] to have wished to exemplify the moral necessity of a due balance between our attention to outward objects and our meditation on inward thoughts - a due balance between the real and the imaginary world. In Hamlet this balance does not exist - his thoughts, images, and fancy [being] far more vivid than his perceptions, and his perceptions instantly passing thro' the medium of his contemplations, and acquiring as they pass a form and color not naturally their own. Hence great, enormous, intellectual activity, and a consequent aversion to real action, with all its symptoms and accompanying qualities.”
Bradley's Interpretation Of Hamlet As Pathologically Melancholic
“The direct cause [of Hamlet's delay] was a state of mind quite abnormal and induced by special circumstances, [“the moral shock of the sudden ghastly disclosure of his mother's true nature”] - a state of profound melancholy. Now, Hamlet's reflectiveness doubtless played a certain part in the production of that melancholy, and was thus one indirect contributory cause of his irresolution. And, again, the melancholy, once established, displayed, as one of its symptoms, an excessive reflection on the required deed. But excess of reflection was not, as the theory makes it, the direct cause of the irresolution at all . . . it is to be considered rather a symptom of his state than a cause of it . . . it is downright impossible that the man we see rushing after the Ghost, killing Polonius, dealing with the King's commission on the ship, boarding the pirate, leaping into the grave, executing his final vengeance, could ever have been shrinking or slow in an emergency. Imagine Coleridge doing any of these things!”
Jones' Psychoanalytic Interpretation Of Hamlet As Having An Oedipus Complex
“The actual realization of his early wish in the death of his father at the hands of a jealous rival would then have stimulated into activity these 'repressed' memories, [that he had “secretly wished him out of the way so that he might enjoy undisputed and undisturbed the monopoly of” his mother's affection], which would have produced, in the form of depression and other suffering, an obscure aftermath of his childhood's conflict. . . . The explanation, therefore, of the delay and self - frustration exhibited in the endeavor to fulfill his father's demand for vengeance is that to Hamlet the thought of incest and parricide combined is too intolerable to be borne.” This leads to behavior which today “is given the name of psychoneurosis, and long ago the genius of Shakespeare depicted it for us with faultless insight.”
John Dover Wilson's What Happens in Hamlet (1935).
“In fine, we were never intended to reach the heart of the mystery. That it has a heart is an illusion; the mystery itself is an illusion; Hamlet is an illusion. The secret that lies behind it all is not Hamlet's, but Shakespeare's: the technical devices he employed to create this supreme illusion of a great and mysterious character. . . “
The Cosmic Mystery of Hamlet
H.D.F. Kitto (1956), Form and Meaning in Drama:
“What if Hamlet is a play which it would be reasonable to call 'religious drama,' as we are using the term here? What if the ingrained individualism of the last two centuries - to say nothing of romanticism - has blinded us to one aspect of the play without which it cannot possibly appear as a firm and coherent structure? . . . the architectonic pattern just indicated is so vast as to suggest at once that what we are dealing with is no individual tragedy of character, however profound, but something more like religious drama. . . . The conception which unites these eight persons in one coherent catastrophe may be said to this: evil, once started on its course, will so work as to attack and overthrow impartially the good and the bad; and if the dramatist makes us feel, as he does, that a Providence is ordinant in all this, that, as with the Greeks, is his way of universalizing the particular event.”