Author: cara oconnor

Hamlet Quotes

Foreshadowing
Horatio: “...in the gross and scope of mine opinion this bodes some strange eruption to our state.”
Claudius: “Young Fortinbras...thinking by our late dear brother’s death our state to be disjoint and out of frame...”
Hamlet: “All is not well. I doubt some foul play...Foul deeds will rise, though all the earth o’erwhelm them, to men’s eyes.”
Francisco: “’tis bitter cold, and I am sick at heart.” Prefigures the tension of the ensuing tragedy. The changing of the guards in the opening scene als parallels the tenuousness (feebleness; shakiness) of the political climate in Denmark. Just as the guards change, it mirrors the transition from one King to another and the arrival of the Prince who’s rightful place on the throne has been usurped.
Horatio: “What if it...deprive your sovereignty of reason and draw you into madness?”
Hamlet: “The time is out of joint.”

Natural/Unnatural Imagery
Horatio: “...a little ere the mighty Julius fell, the graves stood tenantless and the sheeted dead did squeak and gibber in the Roman streets / As stars with trains of fire and dews of blood, disasters in the sun, and the moist star...was sick almost to doomsday with eclipse.”
Hamlet: “ ‘Tis an unweeded garden that grows to seed. Things rank and gross in nature possess it merely.”
Hamlet: “...a beast that wants discourse of reason would have mourned longer!”
Hamlet: “The funeral baked meats did coldly furnish forth the marriage tables.”
Hamlet: “the earth, seems to me a sterile promontory; it appears no other thing to me than a foul and pestilent congregation of vapors.”

Hamlet Quotes

Techniques
Hamlet: “A little more than kin and less than kind.” (Too many family ties there for me.) PUN
Hamlet: “Not so, my lord. I am too much i’ the sun.” (Your son is out in the sun) PUN
Hamlet: “Denmark’s a prison.” METAPHOR
Ghost: “The serpent that did sting thy father’s life now wears his crown.” METAPHOR

Quotes on Grief
Claudius: “How is it that the clouds still hang on you?”
Gertrude: “Cast thy nighted colour off.”
Claudius: “Throw to earth this unprevailing woe...”
Hamlet: “Must I remember?”
Gertrude: “I doubt it is no other but the main: His father’s death and our o’erhasty marriage.”

Hamlet Quotes

Quotes on ‘Acting’/’Pretenses’
Hamlet: “Seems, madam? Nay, it is. I know not “seems”. ‘Tis not alone my inky cloak, good mother, nor customary suits of solemn black, nor windy suspiration of forced breath, no, nor the fruitful river in the eye...together with all forms, moods, shapes of grief...these indeed “seem”, for they are actions that a man might play. But I have that within which passeth show, these but the trappings and the suits of woe.”

Quotes on Gender
Claudius: “ ‘Tis unmanly grief.”
Hamlet: “Frailty, thy name is woman!”
Laertes: “Then weigh what loss your honour may sustain if with too credent ear you list his songs, or lose your heart, or your chaste treasure open to his unmastered importunity.”
Laertes: “The chariest maid is prodigal enough if she unmask her beauty to the moon.”
Polonius: “Set your entreatments at a higher rate than a command to parley.”
Hamlet: “O most pernicious woman!”

Hamlet Quotes

Quotes on the decaying values of Denmark’s monarchy.
Claudius: “No jocund health that Denmark drinks today but the great cannon to the clouds shall tell, and the king’s rouse the heavens shall bruit again, respeaking earthly thunder.” (Every merry toast I’ll drink today will be heard as far as the clouds overhead. My drinking will be echoed in the heavens.)
Hamlet: “The kind doth wake tonight and takes his rouse, keeps wassail and the swaggering upspring reels, and, as he drains his draughts of Rhenish down, the kettle-drum and the trumpet thus bray out the triumph of his pledge.”
Hamlet: “This heavy-headed revel east and west makes us traduced and taxed of other nations. They clepe us drunkards and with swinish phrase soil our addition. And indeed takes from our achievements...the dram of evil doth all the noble substance of a doubt, to his own scandal.”

Quotes on Suicide
Hamlet: “O, that this too, too sullied flesh would melt,
Thaw, and resolve itself into a dew, Or that the Everlasting had not fixed his canon ‘gainst self-slaughter!”

Hamlet Quotes

Ear Imagery
Ghost: “So the whole ear of Denmark is by a forged process of my death rankly abused.”
Ghost: “And in the porches of my ears did pour the leperous distilment.”
Polonius: “This in obedience hath my daughter shown me...as they fell out by time, by means, and place, All given to mine ear.”

Quotes on Revenge
Hamlet: “...that I, with wings as swift as meditation or the thoughts of love, may sweep to my revenge.”
Hamlet: “I’ll wipe away all trivial fond records, all saws of books, all forms, all pressures past...thy commandment all alone shall live within the book and volume of my brain, unmixed with baser matter.”
Hamlet: “O cursed spite, that ever I was born to set it right.”

Hamlet Word Bank

aphoristic (succinct, concise)
Hamlet is sensitive, poetic, artistic and loving. He’s also vindictive, callous and highly intelligent.
malaise (depression, melancholy)

Hamlet Critic’s Views

“Scholars universally recognise Hamlet as the one character in the Shakespeare canon that best exemplifies Shakespeare’s ability to express the universal awareness of human existence.”