Hamlet (Vol. 35) | Michael Cameron Andrews (essay date 1978)
Michael Cameron Andrews (essay date 1978)
SOURCE: "Hamlet: Revenge and the Critical Mirror," in English Literary Renaissance, Vol. 8, No. 1, Winter, 1978, pp. 9-23.
[Here, Andrews argues that in Hamlet Shakespeare was not necessarily leveling a moral judgment on revenge, and likely intended to arouse tragic emotions in his audience and their approval of his hero.]
Hamlet is a highly personal play. We bring to it all that we are. As L. C. Knights has observed, "more than with any other play, critics are in danger of finding reflected what they bring with them."1 The gratifications of interpretation may turn out to be gratifications of another sort; instead of serving the play, we are likely to make it serve us. Kenneth Muir, commenting on C. S. Lewis' view of Hamlet, emphasizes this danger: "It was inevitable, Lewis thinks, that Coleridge should ascribe to Hamlet his own weaknesses; it was equally inevitable...
[The entire page is 7141 words long]
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