Why does Hegel dislike Shakespeare and considers Hamlet as a melodrama?

Answer 1

Could you link your details to the source from which you have obtained this information? ......I shall do a search for myself at the same time.

So what in here is to be interpreted as negative critique?

http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/hegel/works/hp/hpplato.htm

"In his youth he cultivated poetry, and wrote tragedies — very much like young poets in our day — also dithyrambs and songs. Various specimens of the last are still preserved to us in the Greek anthology, and have as subject his various loves; we have amongst others a well-known epigram on a certain Aster, one of his best friends, which contains a pretty fancy, found also in Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet :

“To the stars thou look’st, mine Aster,
O would that I were Heaven,
With eyes so many thus to gaze on thee.”
[Diog. Laërt. III, 5,29.]"

http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/hegel/works/sl/slappear.htm

"Real works of art are those where content and form exhibit a thorough identity. The content of the Iliad, it may be said, is the Trojan war, and especially the wrath of Achilles. In that we have everything, and yet very little after all; for the Iliad is made an Iliad by the poetic form, in which that content is moulded. The content of Romeo and Juliet may similarly be said to be the ruin of two lovers through the discord between their families: but something more is needed to make Shakespeare's immortal tragedy."

http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/hegel/works/pr/printrod.htm

"Take the horrible law which permitted a creditor, after the lapse of a fixed term of respite, to kill a debtor or sell him into slavery. Nay, further, if there were several creditors, they were permitted to cut pieces off the debtor, and thus divide him amongst them, with the proviso that if any one of them should cut off too or too little, no action should be taken against him.

It was this malaise, it may be noticed, which stood Shakespeare’s Shylock in The Merchant of Venice in such good stead, and was by him most thankfully accepted. Well, for this law Caecilius adduces the good argument that by it trust and credit were more firmly secured, and also that, by reason of the very horror of the law, it never had to be enforced. "


http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/hegel/works/hp/hpboehme.htm

"As Prospero in Shakespeare's “Tempest”(6) threatens Ariel that he will “rend an oak and peg him in his knotty entrails . . . twelve winters,” Boehme's great mind is confined in the hard knotty oak of the senses — in the gnarled concretion of the ordinary conception — and is not able to arrive at a free presentation of the Idea."


"Spirit often seems to have forgotten and lost itself, but inwardly opposed to itself, it is inwardly working ever forward (as when Hamlet says of the ghost of his father, “Well said, old mole! canst work i' the ground so fast?”(1)) until grown strong in itself it bursts asunder the crust of earth which divided it from the sun, its Notion, so that the earth crumbles away."

http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/hegel/works/hp/hpfinal.htm

"is in nothing different from the equivocal sisters of fate,(7) who drive their victim to crime by their promises, and who, by the double-tongued, equivocal character of what they gave out as a certainty, deceive the King when he relies upon the manifest and obvious meaning of what they say. There is a type of consciousness that is purer than the latter(8) which believes in witches, and more sober, more thorough, and more solid than the former which puts its trust in the priestess and the beautiful god. This type of consciousness,(9) therefore, lets his revenge tarry for the revelation which the spirit of his father makes regarding the crime that did him to death, and institutes other proofs in addition — for the reason that the spirit giving the revelation might possibly be the devil."

references to MacBeth and Hamlet: The Phenomenology of Mind

C: Free Concrete Mind

(CC) B: Religion in the form of Art
c. The Spiritual Work of Art
http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/hegel/works/ph/phc3bc.htm

"Φ 333. The skull-bone is not an organ of activity, nor even a process of utterance. We neither commit theft, murder, etc., with the skull-bone, nor does it in the least distort its face to suit the deed in such cases, so that the skull should express the meaning in the language of gesture. Nor does this existential form possess the value even of a symbol. Look and gesture, tone, even a pillar or a post stuck up on a desert island, proclaim at once that they stand for something else than what they merely are at first sight. They forthwith profess to be symbols, since they have in them a characteristic which points to something else by the fact that it does not belong peculiarly to them. Doubtless, even in the case of a skull, there is many an idea that may occur to us, like those of Hamlet over Yorick's skull; but the skull-bone by itself is such an indifferent object, such an innocent thing, that there is nothing else to be seen in it or to be thought about it directly as it is, except simply the fact of its being a skull. It no doubt reminds us of the brain and its specific nature, and skull with other formations, but it does not recall a conscious process, since there is impressed on it neither a look or gesture, nor anything which would show traces of derivation from a conscious activity. For it is that sort of reality which, in the case of individuality, is intended to exhibit an aspect of another kind, one that would no longer be an existence reflecting itself into itself, but bare immediate existence."

http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/hegel/works/ph/phc1ac.htm

Answer 2

Hegel was a great influence on Marx. A play that was true to human nature would not please a rank empiricists, such as Hegel.