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A Modern Perspective: Hamlet

By Michael Neill

The great Russian director Vsevolod Meyerhold used to maintain that “if all the plays ever written suddenly disappeared and only Hamlet miraculously survived, all the theaters in the world would be saved. They could all put on Hamlet and be successful.” 1 Perhaps Meyerhold exaggerated because of his frustration—he was prevented from ever staging the tragedy by Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin, who apparently thought it too dangerous to be performed—but Meyerhold’s sense of Hamlet ’s extraordinary breadth of appeal is amply confirmed by its stage history. Praised by Shakespeare’s contemporaries for its power to “please all” as well as “to please the wiser sort,” 2 it provided his company with an immediate and continuing success. It was equally admired by popular audiences at the Globe on the Bankside, by academic playgoers “in the two Universities of Cambridge and Oxford,” and at court—where it was still in request in 1637, nearly forty years after its first performance.

In the four centuries since it was first staged, Hamlet has never lost its theatrical appeal, remaining today the most frequently performed of Shakespeare’s tragedies. At the same time, it has developed a reputation as the most intellectually puzzling of his plays, and it has already attracted more commentary than any other work in English except the Bible. Even today, when criticism stresses the importance of the reader’s role in “constructing” the texts of the past, there is something astonishing about Hamlet ’s capacity to accommodate the most bafflingly different readings. 3

In the early nineteenth century, for instance, Romantic critics read it as the psychological study of a prince too delicate and sensitive for his public mission; to later nineteenth-century European intellectuals, the hero’s anguish and self-reproach spoke so eloquently of the disillusionment of revolutionary failure that in czarist Russia “Hamletism” became the acknowledged term for political vacillation and disengagement. The twentieth century, not surprisingly, discovered a more violent and disturbing play: to the French poet Paul Valéry, the tragedy seemed to embody the European death wish revealed in the carnage and devastation of the First World War; in the mid-1960s the English director Peter Hall staged it as a work expressing the political despair of the nuclear age; for the Polish critic Jan Kott, as for the Russian filmmaker Gregori Kozintsev, the play became “a drama of a political crime” in a state not unlike Stalin’s Soviet empire; 4 while the contemporary Irish poet Seamus Heaney found in it a metaphor for the murderous politics of revenge at that moment devouring his native Ulster:

I am Hamlet the Dane,

skull handler, parablist,

smeller of rot

in the state, infused

with its poisons,

pinioned by ghosts

and affections

murders and pieties 5

Even the major “facts” of the play—the status of the Ghost, or the real nature of Hamlet’s “madness”—are seen very differently at different times. Samuel Johnson, for example, writing in the 1760s, had no doubt that the hero’s “madness,” a source of “much mirth” to eighteenth-century audiences, was merely “pretended,” but twentieth-century Hamlets onstage, even if they were not the full-fledged neurotics invented by Freud and his disciple Ernest Jones, were likely to show some signs of actual madness. Modern readings, too, while still fascinated by the hero’s intellectual and emotional complexities, are likely to emphasize those characteristics that are least compatible with the idealized “sweet prince” of the Victorians—the diseased suspicion of women, revealed in his obsession with his mother’s sexuality and his needless cruelty to Ophelia, his capacity for murderous violence (he dies with the blood of five people on his hands), and his callous indifference to the killing of such relative innocents as Polonius, Rosencrantz, and Guildenstern.

Hamlet ’s ability to adapt itself to the preconceptions of almost any audience, allowing the viewers, in the play’s own sardonic phrase, to “botch the words up fit to their own thoughts” ( 4.5.12 ), results partly from the boldness of its design. Over the sensationalism and rough energy of a conventional revenge plot is placed a sophisticated psychological drama whose most intense action belongs to the interior world of soliloquy: Hamlet agrees to revenge his father’s death at the urging of the Ghost, and thus steps into an old-fashioned revenge tragedy; but it is Hamlet’s inner world, revealed to us in his soliloquies (speeches addressed not to other characters but to the audience, as if the character were thinking aloud), that equally excites our attention. It is as if two plays are occurring simultaneously.

Although Hamlet is often thought of as the most personal of Shakespeare’s tragedies, Shakespeare did not invent the story of revenge that the play tells. The story was an ancient one, belonging originally to Norse saga. The barbaric narrative of murder and revenge—of a king killed by his brother, who then marries the dead king’s widow, of the young prince who must pretend to be mad in order to save his own life, who eludes a series of traps laid for him by his wicked uncle, and who finally revenges his father’s death by killing the uncle—had been elaborated in the twelfth-century Historiae Danicae of Saxo Grammaticus, and then polished up for sixteenth-century French readers in François de Belleforest’s Histoires Tragiques. It was first adapted for the English theater in the late 1580s in the form of the so-called Ur- Hamlet , a play attributed to Thomas Kyd (unfortunately now lost) that continued to hold the stage until at least 1596; and it may well be that when Shakespeare began work on Hamlet about 1599, he had no more lofty intention than to polish up this slightly tarnished popular favorite. But Shakespeare’s wholesale rewriting produced a Hamlet so utterly unlike Kyd’s work that its originality was unmistakable even to playgoers familiar with Kyd’s play.

The new tragedy preserved the outline of the old story, and took over Kyd’s most celebrated contributions—a ghost crying for revenge, and a play-within-the-play that sinisterly mirrors the main plot; but by focusing upon the perplexed interior life of the hero, Shakespeare gave a striking twist to what had been a brutally straightforward narrative. On the levels of both revenge play and psychological drama, the play develops a preoccupation with the hidden, the secret, and the mysterious that does much to account for its air of mystery. In Maynard Mack’s words, it is “a play in the interrogative mood” whose action deepens and complicates, rather than answers, the apparently casual question with which it begins, “Who’s there?” 6

“The Cheer and Comfort of Our Eye”: Hamlet and Surveillance

The great subject of revenge drama, before Hamlet , was the moral problem raised by private, personal revenge: i.e., should the individual take revenge into his own hands or leave it to God? Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy (and, one assumes, his lost play about Hamlet as well) captured on the stage the violent contradictions of the Elizabethan attitudes toward this form of “wild justice.” The surprising thing about Shakespeare’s Hamlet is that it barely glances at the ethical argument raised by a hero’s taking justice into his own hands—an argument central to The Spanish Tragedy. Of course, the controversy about the morality of private revenge must have provided an important context for the original performances of the play, giving an ominous force to Hamlet’s fear that the spirit he has seen “may be a devil” luring him to damnation ( 2.2.628 ). But Shakespeare simply takes this context for granted, and goes on to discover a quite different kind of political interest in his plot—one that may help to explain the paranoiac anxieties it was apparently capable of arousing in a dictator like Stalin.

Turning away from the framework of ethical debate, Shakespeare used Saxo’s story of Hamlet’s pretended madness and delayed revenge to explore the brutal facts about survival in an authoritarian state. Here too the play could speak to Elizabethan experience, for we should not forget that the glorified monarchy of Queen Elizabeth I was sustained by a vigorous network of spies and informers. Indeed, one portrait of Elizabeth shows her dressed in a costume allegorically embroidered with eyes and ears, partly to advertise that her watchers and listeners were everywhere. Shakespeare’s Elsinore, too—the castle governed by Claudius and home to Hamlet—is full of eyes and ears; and behind the public charade of warmth, magnanimity, and open government that King Claudius so carefully constructs, the lives of the King’s subjects are exposed to merciless inquisition.

It is symbolically appropriate that the play should begin with a group of anxious watchers on the battlemented walls of the castle, for nothing and no one in Claudius’s Denmark is allowed to go “unwatched”: every appearance must be “sifted” or “sounded,” and every secret “opened.” The King himself does not hesitate to eavesdrop on the heir apparent; and his chief minister, Polonius, will meet his death lurking behind a curtain in the same squalid occupation. But they are not alone in this: the wholesale corruption of social relationships, even the most intimate, is an essential part of Shakespeare’s chilling exposure of authoritarian politics. Denmark, Hamlet informs Rosencrantz and Guildenstern accurately enough, is “a prison” ( 2.2.262 ); and the treachery of these former school friends of Hamlet illustrates how much, behind the mask of uncle Claudius’s concern, his court is ruled by the prison-house customs of the stool pigeon and the informer. How readily first Ophelia and then Gertrude allow themselves to become passive instruments of Polonius’s and Claudius’s spying upon the Prince; how easily Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are persuaded to put their friendship with Hamlet at the disposal of the state. Even Laertes’s affectionate relationship with his sister is tainted by a desire to install himself as a kind of censor, a “watchman” to the fortress of her heart ( 1.3.50 ). In this he is all too like his father, Polonius, who makes himself an interiorized Big Brother, engraving his cautious precepts on Laertes’s memory ( 1.3.65 ff.) and telling Ophelia precisely what she is permitted to think and feel:

I do not know, my lord, what I should think.

Marry, I will teach you. Think yourself a baby. . . .

( 1.3.113 –14)

Polonius is the perfect inhabitant of this court: busily policing his children’s sexuality, he has no scruple about prostituting his daughter in the interests of state security, for beneath his air of senile wordiness and fatherly anxiousness lies an ingrained cynicism that allows him both to spy on his son’s imagined “drabbing” in Paris and to “loose” his daughter as a sexual decoy to entrap the Prince.

Hamlet’s role as hero at once sets him apart from this prison-house world and yet leads him to become increasingly entangled in its web of surveillance. To the admiring Ophelia, Hamlet remains “Th’ observed of all observers” ( 3.1.168 ), but his obvious alienation has resulted in his being “observed” in a much more sinister sense. He is introduced in Act 1, scene 2, as a mysteriously taciturn watcher and listener whose glowering silence calls into question the pomp and bustle of the King’s wordy show, just as his mourning blacks cast suspicion on the showy costumes of the court. Yet he himself, we are quickly made to realize, is the object of a dangerously inquisitive stare—what the King smoothly calls “the cheer and comfort of our eye” ( 1.2.120 ).

The full meaning of that silky phrase will be disclosed on Claudius’s next appearance, when, after Hamlet has met the Ghost and has begun to appear mad, Claudius engages Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to probe his nephew’s threatening transformation ( 2.2.1 –18). “Madness in great ones,” the King insists, “must not unwatched go” ( 3.1.203 ):

         There’s something in his soul

O’er which his melancholy sits on brood,

And I do doubt the hatch and the disclose

Will be some danger.                  ( 3.1.178 –81)

But of course Hamlet’s madness is as much disguise as it is revelation; and while the Prince is the most ruthlessly observed character in the play, he is also its most unremitting observer. Forced to master his opponent’s craft of smiling villainy, he becomes not merely an actor but also a dramatist, ingeniously using a troupe of traveling players, with their “murder in jest,” to unmask the King’s own hypocritical “show.”

The scene in which the Players present The Murder of Gonzago , the play that Hamlet calls “The Mousetrap,” brings the drama of surveillance to its climax. We in the audience become participants in the drama’s claustrophobic economy of watching and listening, as our attention moves to and fro among the various groups on the stage, gauging the significance of every word, action, and reaction, sharing the obsessional gaze that Hamlet describes to Horatio:

Observe my uncle. . . . Give him heedful note,

For I mine eyes will rivet to his face,

And, after, we will both our judgments join

In censure of his seeming.             ( 3.2.85 –92)

“The Mousetrap” twice reenacts Claudius’s murder of his brother—first in the dumb show and then in the play proper—drawing out the effect so exquisitely that the King’s enraged interruption produces an extraordinary discharge of tension. An audience caught up in Hamlet’s wild excitement is easily blinded to the fact that this seeming climax is, in terms of the revenge plot, at least, a violent anticlimax. Kyd’s Spanish Tragedy had developed the play-within-the-play as a perfect vehicle for the ironies of revenge, allowing the hero to take his actual revenge in the very act of staging the villain’s original crime. Hamlet’s play, however, does not even make public Claudius’s forbidden story. Indeed, while it serves to confirm the truth of what the Ghost has said, the only practical effect of the Prince’s theatrical triumph is to hand the initiative decisively to Claudius. In the scenes that follow, Hamlet shows himself capable of both instinctive violence and of cold-blooded calculation, but his behavior is purely reactive. Otherwise he seems oddly paralyzed by his success—a condition displayed in the prayer scene ( 3.3.77 –101) where he stands behind the kneeling Claudius with drawn sword, “neutral to his will and matter,” uncannily resembling the frozen revenger described in the First Player’s speech about Pyrrhus standing over old Priam ( 2.2.493 ff.). All Hamlet can do is attempt to duplicate the triumph of “The Mousetrap” in his confrontation with Gertrude by holding up to her yet another verbal mirror, in which she is forced to gaze in horror on her “inmost part” ( 3.4.25 ).

Hamlet’s sudden loss of direction after the “Mousetrap” scene lasts through the fourth act of the play until he returns from his sea voyage in that mysteriously altered mood on which most commentators remark—a kind of fatalism that makes him the largely passive servant of a plot that he now does little to advance or impede. It is as if the springing of the “Mousetrap” leaves Hamlet with nowhere to go—primarily because it leaves him with nothing to say. But from the very beginning, his struggle with Claudius has been conceived as a struggle for the control of language—a battle to determine what can and cannot be uttered.

Speaking the Unspeakable: Hamlet and Memory

If surveillance is one prop of the authoritarian state, the other is its militant regulation of speech. As Claudius flatters the court into mute complicity with his theft of both the throne and his dead brother’s wife, he genially insists “You cannot speak of reason to the Dane / And lose your voice” ( 1.2.44 –45); but an iron wall of silence encloses the inhabitants of his courtly prison. While the flow of royal eloquence muffles inconvenient truths, ears here are “fortified” against dangerous stories ( 1.1.38 ) and lips sealed against careless confession: “Give thy thoughts no tongue,” Polonius advises Laertes, “. . . Give every man thy ear, but few thy voice . . . reserve thy judgment” ( 1.3.65 –75). Hamlet’s insistent warnings to his fellow watchers on the battlements “Never to speak of this that you have seen” ( 1.5.174 ) urge the same caution: “Let it be tenable in your silence still . . . Give it an understanding but no tongue” ( 1.2.269 –71). What for them is merely common prudence, however, is for the hero an absolute prohibition and an intolerable burden: “. . . break, my heart, for I must hold my tongue” ( 1.2.164 ).

Hamlet has only two ways of rupturing this enforced silence. The “pregnant” wordplay of his “mad” satire, as Polonius uneasily recognizes ( 2.2.226 –27), is one way, but it amounts to no more than inconclusive verbal fencing. Soliloquy is a more powerful resource because, since it is heard by no one (except the audience), its impenetrable privacy defines Hamlet’s independence from the corrupt public world. From his first big speech in the play, he has made such hiddenness the badge of his resistance to the King and Queen: “I have that within which passes show” ( 1.2.88 ), he announces. What is at issue here is not simply a contrast between hypocrisy and true grief over the loss of his king and father: rather, Hamlet grounds his very claim to integrity upon a notion that true feeling can never be expressed: it is only “that . . . which passes show ” that can escape the taint of hypocrisy, of “acting.” It is as if, in this world of remorseless observation, the self can survive only as a ferociously defended secret, something treasured for the very fact of its hiddenness and impenetrability. Unlike Gertrude, unlike Ophelia, unlike those absorbent “sponges” Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, Hamlet must insist he is not made of “penetrable stuff.”

If Hamlet’s “antic disposition” is the guardian of his rebellious inwardness, soliloquy is where this inwardness lives, a domain which (if we except Claudius’s occasional flickers of conscience) no other character is allowed to inhabit. Hamlet’s soliloquies bulk so large in our response to the play because they not only guarantee the existence of the hero’s secret inner life; they also, by their relentless self-questioning, imply the presence of still more profoundly secret truths “hid . . . within the center” ( 2.2.170 –71): “I do not know / Why yet I live to say ‘This thing’s to do,’ / Sith I have cause, and will, and strength, and means / To do ’t” ( 4.4.46 –49). The soliloquies are the focus of the play’s preoccupation with speaking and silence. Hamlet is set apart from those around him by his access to this region of private utterance: in it he can, as it were, “be bounded in a nutshell and count [himself] a king of infinite space” ( 2.2.273 –74).

Yet there is a paradox here: the isolation of soliloquy is at once his special strength and the source of peculiar anguish. It saves him from the fate of Ophelia, who becomes “Divided from herself and her fair judgment” ( 4.5.92 ) by her grief at Polonius’s death and hasty burial; accustomed to speak only in the voice that others allow her, dutifully resolved to “think nothing, my lord” ( 3.2.124 ), she is left with no language other than the disconnected fragments of her madness to express outrage at a murder which authority seems determined to conceal. Hamlet, by contrast, finds in soliloquy an arena where the unspeakable can be uttered. But the very fact that these are words that others do not hear also makes soliloquy a realm of noncommunication, of frustrating silence—a prison as well as a fortress in which the speaker beats his head unavailingly against the walls of his own cell. Thus the soliloquy that ends Act 2 reproaches itself for a kind of speechlessness—the mute ineffectuality of a “John-a-dreams,” who, unlike the Player, “can say nothing”—and at the same time mocks itself as a torrent of empty language, a mere unpacking of the heart with words ( 2.2.593 –616). For all their eloquence, the soliloquies serve in the end only to increase the tension generated by the pressure of forbidden utterance.

It is from this pressure that the first three acts of the play derive most of their extraordinary energy; and the energy is given a concrete dramatic presence in the form of the Ghost. The appearance of a ghost demanding vengeance was a stock device borrowed from the Roman playwright Seneca; and the Ur- Hamlet had been notorious for its ghost, shrieking like an oysterwife, “Hamlet, revenge!” But the strikingly unconventional thing about Shakespeare’s Ghost is its melancholy preoccupation with the silenced past and its plangent cry of “Remember me” ( 1.5.98 ), which makes remembrance seem more important than revenge. “The struggle of humanity against power,” the Czech novelist Milan Kundera has written, “is the struggle of memory against forgetfulness”; and this Ghost, which stands for all that has been erased by the bland narratives of King Claudius, is consumed by the longing to speak that which power has rendered unspeakable. The effect of the Ghost’s narrative upon Hamlet is to infuse him with the same desire; indeed, once he has formally inscribed its watchword—“Remember me”—on the tables of his memory, he is as if possessed by the Ghost, seeming to mime its speechless torment when he appears to Ophelia, looking “As if he had been loosèd out of hell / To speak of horrors” ( 2.1.93 –94).

For all its pathos of silenced longing, the Ghost remains profoundly ambivalent, and not just because Elizabethans held such contradictory beliefs about ghosts. 7 The ambivalence is dramatized in a particularly disturbing detail: as the Ghost pours his story into Hamlet’s ear (the gesture highlighted by the Ghost’s incantatory repetition of “hear” and “ear”), we become aware of an uncanny parallel between the Ghost’s act of narration and the murder the Ghost tells about:

’Tis given out that, sleeping in my orchard,

A serpent stung me. So the whole ear of Denmark

Is by a forgèd process of my death

Rankly abused. . . .

Upon my secure hour thy uncle stole

With juice of cursèd hebona in a vial

And in the porches of my ears did pour

The leprous distilment. . . .               ( 1.5.42 –71)

If Claudius’s propaganda has abused “the whole ear of Denmark” like a second poisoning, the Ghost’s own story enters Hamlet’s “ears of flesh and blood” (line 28) like yet another corrosive. The fact that it is a story that demands telling, and that its narrator is “an honest ghost,” cannot alter the fact that it will work away in Hamlet’s being like secret venom until he in turn can vent it in revenge.

The “Mousetrap” play is at once a fulfillment and an escape from that compulsion. It gives, in a sense, a public voice to the Ghost’s silenced story. But it is only a metaphoric revenge. Speaking daggers and poison but using none, Hamlet turns out only to have written his own inability to bring matters to an end. It is no coincidence, then, that he should foresee the conclusion of his own tragedy as being the product of someone else’s script: “There’s a divinity that shapes our ends, / Rough-hew them how we will” ( 5.2.11 –12).

“To Tell My Story”: Unfinished Hamlet

In the last scene of the play, the sense that Hamlet’s story has been shaped by Providence—or by a playwright other than Hamlet—is very strong: the swordplay with Laertes is a theatrical imitation of dueling that becomes the real thing, sweetly knitting up the paralyzing disjunction between action and acting; at the same time, revenge is symmetrically perfected in the spectacle of Claudius choking on “a poison tempered by himself,” Laertes “justly killed with his own treachery,” and the Queen destroyed in the vicious pun that has her poisoned by Claudius’s “union.” Yet Hamlet’s consoling fatalism does not survive the final slaughter. Instead, he faces his end tormented by a sense of incompleteness, of a story still remaining to be told:

You that look pale and tremble at this chance,

That are but mutes or audience to this act,

Had I but time (as this fell sergeant, Death,

Is strict in his arrest), O, I could tell you—

But let it be.                                     ( 5.2.366 –70)

Within a few lines Hamlet’s distinctive voice, which has dominated his own tragedy like that of no other Shakespearean hero, will be cut off in midsentence by the arrest of death—and “the rest is silence” ( 5.2.395 ).

The play is full of such unfinished, untold, or perhaps even untellable tales, from Barnardo’s interrupted story of the Ghost’s first appearance to the Player’s unfinished rendition of “Aeneas’ tale to Dido” and the violently curtailed performance of The Murder of Gonzago. In the opening scene the Ghost itself is cut off, before it can speak, by the crowing of a cock; and when it returns and speaks to Hamlet, it speaks first about a story it cannot tell:

                 But that I am forbid

To tell the secrets of my prison house,

I could a tale unfold whose lightest word

Would harrow up thy soul, freeze thy

 young blood . . .                   ( 1.5.18 –21)

Even the tale it is permitted to unfold is, ironically, one of murderous interruption and terrible incompleteness:

Cut off , even in the blossoms of my sin,

Unhouseled, disappointed, unaneled,

No reck’ning made, but sent to my account

With all my imperfections on my head.

( 1.5.83 –86)

Act 5 at last produces the formal reckoning of this imperfect account, yet it leaves Hamlet once again echoing the Ghost’s agony of frustrated utterance.

But what, we might ask, can there be left to tell, beyond what we have already seen and heard? It seems to be part of the point, a last reminder of Hamlet’s elusive “mystery,” that we shall never know. The Prince has, of course, insisted that Horatio remain behind “to tell my story”; but the inadequacy of Horatio’s response only intensifies the sense of incompleteness. All that his stolid imagination can offer is that bald plot summary of “accidental judgments [and] casual slaughters,” which, as Anne Barton protests, leaves out “everything that seems important” about the play and its protagonist. 8 Nor is Fortinbras’s attempt to make “The soldier’s music and the rite of war / Speak loudly for [Hamlet]” ( 5.2.445 –46) any more satisfactory, for the military strongman’s cannon are no better tuned to speak for Hamlet than the player’s pipe.

It would be a mistake, of course, to underestimate the dramatic significance of Horatio’s story or of the “music and the rite of war”—these last gestures of ritual consolation—especially in a play where, beginning with the obscene confusion of Claudius’s “mirth in funeral” and including Polonius’s “hugger-mugger” interment and Ophelia’s “maimed rites,” we have seen the dead repeatedly degraded by the slighting of their funeral pomps. In this context it matters profoundly that Hamlet alone is accorded the full dignity of obsequies suited to his rank, for it signals his triumph over the oblivion to which Claudius is fittingly consigned, and, in its gesture back toward Hamlet’s story as Shakespeare has told it (so much better than Horatio does), it brings Hamlet’s story to a heroic end.

“The Undiscovered Country”: Hamlet and the Secrets of Death

How we respond to the ending of Hamlet —both as revenge drama and as psychological study—depends in part on how we respond to yet a third level of the play—that is, to Hamlet as a prolonged meditation on death. The play is virtually framed by two encounters with the dead: at one end is the Ghost, at the other a pile of freshly excavated skulls. The skulls (all but one) are nameless and silent; the Ghost has an identity (though a “questionable” one) and a voice; yet they are more alike than might at first seem. For this ghost, though invulnerable “as the air,” is described as a “dead corse,” a “ghost . . . come from the grave,” its appearance suggesting a grotesque disinterment of the buried king ( 1.4.52 –57; 1.5.139 ). The skulls for their part may be silent, but Hamlet plays upon each to draw out its own “excellent voice” (“That skull had a tongue in it and could sing once”; 5.1.77 –78), just as he engineered that “miraculous organ” of the Ghost’s utterance, the “Mousetrap.”

There is a difference, however: Hamlet’s dressing up the skulls with shreds of narrative (“as if ’twere Cain’s jawbone . . . This might be the pate of a politician . . . or of a courtier . . . Why may not that be the skull of a lawyer”; 5.1.78 –101) only serves to emphasize their mocking anonymity, until the Gravedigger offers to endow one with a precise historical identity: “This same skull . . . was . . . Yorick’s skull, the King’s jester” ( 5.1.186 –87). Hamlet is delighted: now memory can begin its work of loving resurrection. But how does the Gravedigger know? The answer is that of course he cannot; and try as Hamlet may to cover this bare bone with the flesh of nostalgic recollection, he cannot escape the wickedly punning reminder of “this same skull” that all skulls indeed look frightfully the same. Ironically, even Yorick’s distinctive trademark, his grin, has become indistinguishable from the mocking leer of that grand jester of the Danse Macabre , Death the Antic: “Where be your gibes now? . . . Not one now to mock your own grinning?”; so that even as he holds it, the skull’s identity appears to drain away into the anonymous memento mori sent to adorn “my lady’s” dressing table. It might as well be Alexander the Great’s; or Caesar’s; or anyone’s. It might as well be what it will one day become—a handful of clay, fit to stop a beer barrel.

It is significant that (with the trivial exception of 4.4) the graveyard scene is the only one to take place outside the confines of Claudius’s castle-prison. As the “common” place to which all stories lead, the graveyard both invites narrative and silences it. Each blank skull at once poses and confounds the question with which the tragedy itself began, “Who’s there?,” subsuming all human differences in awful likeness: “As you are now,” goes the tombstone verse, “so once was I / As I am now, so shall you be.” In the graveyard all stories collapse into one reductive history (“Alexander died, Alexander was buried, Alexander returneth to dust”; 5.1.216 –17). In this sense the Gravedigger is the mocking counterpart of the Player: and the houses of oblivion that gravediggers make challenge the players’ memorial art by lasting “till doomsday” ( 5.1.61 ). Hamlet shares with the Gravedigger the same easy good-fellowship he extends to the play’s other great outsider, the First Player; but the Gravedigger asserts a more sinister kind of intimacy with his claim to have begun his work “that very day that young Hamlet was born” ( 5.1.152 –53). In this moment he identifies himself as the Prince’s mortal double, the Sexton Death from the Danse Macabre who has been preparing him a grave from the moment of birth.

If there is a final secret to be revealed, then, about that “undiscovered country” on which Hamlet’s imagination broods, it is perhaps only the Gravedigger’s spade that can uncover it. For his digging lays bare the one thing we can say for certain lies hidden “within” the mortal show of the flesh—the emblems of Death himself, that Doppelgänger who shadows each of us as the mysterious Lamord ( La Mort ) shadows Laertes. If there is a better story, one that would confer on the rough matter of life the consolations of form and significance, it is, the play tells us, one that cannot finally be told; for it exists on the other side of language, to be tantalizingly glimpsed only at the point when Hamlet is about to enter the domain of the inexpressible. The great and frustrating achievement of this play, its most ingenious and tormenting trick, the source of its endlessly belabored mystery, is to persuade us that such a story might exist, while demonstrating its irreducible hiddenness. The only story Hamlet is given is that of a hoary old revenge tragedy, which he persuades himself (and us) can never denote him truly; but it is a narrative frame that nothing (not even inaction) will allow him to escape. The story of our lives, the play wryly acknowledges, is always the wrong story; but the rest, after all, is silence.

• Dmitri Shostakovich, Testimony: The Memoirs of Dmitri Shostakovich , as related to and edited by Solomon Volkow, trans. Antonina W. Bouis (London: Faber, 1981), p. 84.
• See F. E. Halliday, A Shakespeare Companion, 1564–1964 (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1964), pp. 435, 209; see also pp. 262 and 403.
• The most lucid guide to this critical labyrinth, though he deals with no work later than 1960, is probably still Morris Weitz, Hamlet and the Philosophy of Literary Criticism (London: Faber, 1964).
• Jan Kott, Shakespeare Our Contemporary (London: Methuen, 1964).
• Excerpt from “Viking Dublin: Trial Pieces” from Poems, 1965–1975 by Seamus Heaney. Copyright © 1975, 1980 by Seamus Heaney. Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Inc. Permission for use of these lines from North by Seamus Heaney, published by Faber and Faber Limited, is also acknowledged.
• See Mack’s classic essay, “The World of Hamlet,” Yale Review 41 (1952): 502–23; Mack’s approach is significantly extended in Harry Levin’s The Question of Hamlet (New York: Oxford University Press, 1959).
• The most balanced treatment of this and other contentious historical issues in the play is in Roland M. Frye, The Renaissance Hamlet (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984).
• Introduction to T. J. B. Spencer, ed., Hamlet (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1980), p. 52. See also James L. Calderwood’s To Be and Not To Be: Negation and Meta-drama in “Hamlet” (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983).

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Home › Drama Criticism › Analysis of William Shakespeare’s Hamlet

Analysis of William Shakespeare’s Hamlet

By NASRULLAH MAMBROL on July 25, 2020 • ( 2 )

With Shakespeare the dramatic resolution conveys us, beyond the man-made sphere of poetic justice, toward the ever-receding horizons of cosmic irony. This is peculiarly the case with Hamlet , for the same reasons that it excites such intensive empathy from actors and readers, critics and writers alike. There may be other Shakespearean characters who are just as memorable, and other plots which are no less impressive; but nowhere else has the outlook of the individual in a dilemma been so profoundly realized; and a dilemma, by definition, is an all but unresolvable choice between evils. Rather than with calculation or casuistry, it should be met with virtue or readiness; sooner or later it will have to be grasped by one or the other of its horns. These, in their broadest terms, have been—for Hamlet, as we interpret him—the problem of what to believe and the problem of how to act.

—Harry Levin, The Question of Hamlet

Hamlet is almost certainly the world’s most famous play, featuring drama’s and literature’s most fascinating and complex character. The many-sided Hamlet—son, lover, intellectual, prince, warrior, and avenger—is the consummate test for each generation’s leading actors, and to be an era’s defining Hamlet is perhaps the greatest accolade one can earn in the theater. The play is no less a proving ground for the critic and scholar, as successive generations have refashioned Hamlet in their own image, while finding in it new resonances and entry points to plumb its depths, perplexities, and possibilities. No other play has been analyzed so extensively, nor has any play had a comparable impact on our culture. The brooding young man in black, skull in hand, has moved out of the theater and into our collective consciousness and cultural myths, joining only a handful of comparable literary archetypes—Oedipus, Faust, and Don Quixote—who embody core aspects of human nature and experience. “It is we ,” the romantic critic William Hazlitt observed, “who are Hamlet.”

Hamlet also commands a crucial, central place in William Shakespeare’s dramatic career. First performed around 1600, the play stands near the midpoint of the playwright’s two-decade career as a culmination and new departure. As the first of his great tragedies, Hamlet signals a decisive shift from the comedies and history plays that launched Shakespeare’s career to the tragedies of his maturity. Although unquestionably linked both to the plays that came before and followed, Hamlet is also markedly exceptional. At nearly 4,000 lines, almost twice the length of Macbeth , Hamlet is Shakespeare’s longest and, arguably, his most ambitious play with an enormous range of characters—from royals to gravediggers—and incidents, including court, bedroom, and graveyard scenes and a play within a play. Hamlet also bristles with a seemingly inexhaustible array of ideas and themes, as well as a radically new strategy for presenting them, most notably, in transforming soliloquies from expositional and motivational asides to the audience into the verbalization of consciousness itself. As Shakespearean scholar Stephen Greenblatt has asserted, “In its moral complexity, psychological depth, and philosophical power, Hamlet seems to mark an epochal shift not only in Shakespeare’s own career but in Western drama; it is as if the play were giving birth to a whole new kind of literary subjectivity.” Hamlet, more than any other play that preceded it, turns its action inward to dramatize an isolated, conflicted psyche struggling to cope with a world that has lost all certainty and consolation. Struggling to reconcile two contradictory identities—the heroic man of action and duty and the Christian man of conscience—Prince Hamlet becomes the modern archetype of the self-divided, alienated individual, desperately searching for self-understanding and meaning. Hamlet must contend with crushing doubt without the support of traditional beliefs that dictate and justify his actions. In describing the arrival of the fragmentation and chaos of the modern world, Victorian poet and critic Matthew Arnold declared that “the calm, cheerfulness, the disinterested objectivity have disappeared, the dialogue of the mind with itself has commenced.” Hamlet anticipates that dialogue by more than two centuries.

Like all of Shakespeare’s plays, Hamlet makes strikingly original uses of borrowed material. The Scandinavian folk tale of Amleth, a prince called upon to avenge his father’s murder by his uncle, was first given literary form by the Danish writer Saxo the Grammarian in his late 12th century Danish History and later adapted in French in François de Belleforest’s Histoires tragiques (1570). This early version of the Hamlet story provided Shakespeare with the basic characters and relationships but without the ghost or the revenger’s uncertainty. In the story of Amleth there is neither doubt about the usurper’s guilt nor any moral qualms in the fulfillment of the avenger’s mission. In preChristian Denmark blood vengeance was a sanctioned filial obligation, not a potentially damnable moral or religious violation, and Amleth successfully accomplishes his duty by setting fire to the royal hall, killing his uncle, and proclaiming himself king of Denmark. Shakespeare’s more immediate source may have been a nowlost English play (c. 1589) that scholars call the Ur – Hamlet. All that has survived concerning this play are a printed reference to a ghost who cried “Hamlet, revenge!” and criticism of the play’s stale bombast. Scholars have attributed the Ur-Hamle t to playwright Thomas Kyd, whose greatest success was The Spanish Tragedy (1592), one of the earliest extant English tragedies. The Spanish Tragedy popularized the genre of the revenge tragedy, derived from Aeschylus’s Oresteia and the Latin plays of Seneca, to which Hamlet belongs. Kyd’s play also features elements that Shakespeare echoes in Hamlet, including a secret crime, an impatient ghost demanding revenge, a protagonist tormented by uncertainty who feigns madness, a woman who actually goes mad, a play within a play, and a final bloodbath that includes the death of the avenger himself. An even more immediate possible source for Hamlet is John Marston’s Antonio’s Revenge (1599), another story of vengeance on a usurper by a sensitive protagonist.

Whether comparing Hamlet to its earliest source or the handling of the revenge plot by Kyd, Marston, or other Elizabethan or Jacobean playwrights, what stands out is the originality and complexity of Shakespeare’s treatment, in his making radically new and profound uses of established stage conventions. Hamlet converts its sensational material—a vengeful ghost, a murder mystery, madness, a heartbroken maiden, a fistfight at her burial, and a climactic duel that results in four deaths—into a daring exploration of mortality, morality, perception, and core existential truths. Shakespeare put mystery, intrigue, and sensation to the service of a complex, profound epistemological drama. The critic Maynard Mack in an influential essay, “The World of Hamlet ,” has usefully identified the play’s “interrogative mode.” From the play’s opening words—“Who’s there?”—to “What is this quintessence of dust?” through drama’s most famous soliloquy—“To be, or not to be, that is the question.”— Hamlet “reverberates with questions, anguished, meditative, alarmed.” The problematic nature of reality and the gap between truth and appearance stand behind the play’s conflicts, complicating Hamlet’s search for answers and his fulfillment of his role as avenger.

Hamlet opens with startling evidence that “something is rotten in the state of Denmark.” The ghost of Hamlet’s father, King Hamlet, has been seen in Elsinore, now ruled by his brother, Claudius, who has quickly married his widowed queen, Gertrude. When first seen, Hamlet is aloof and skeptical of Claudius’s justifications for his actions on behalf of restoring order in the state. Hamlet is morbidly and suicidally disillusioned by the realization of mortality and the baseness of human nature prompted by the sudden death of his father and his mother’s hasty, and in Hamlet’s view, incestuous remarriage to her brother-in-law:

O that this too too solid flesh would melt, Thaw, and resolve itself into a dew! Or that the Everlasting had not fix’d His canon ’gainst self-slaughter! O God! God! How weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable Seem to me all the uses of this world! Fie on’t! ah, fie! ’Tis an unweeded garden That grows to seed; things rank and gross in nature Possess it merely. That it should come to this!

A recent student at the University of Wittenberg, whose alumni included Martin Luther and the fictional Doctor Faustus, Hamlet is an intellectual of the Protestant Reformation, who, like Luther and Faustus, tests orthodoxy while struggling to formulate a core philosophy. Brought to encounter the apparent ghost of his father, Hamlet alone hears the ghost’s words that he was murdered by Claudius and is compelled out of his suicidal despair by his pledge of revenge. However, despite the riveting presence of the ghost, Hamlet is tormented by doubts. Is the ghost truly his father’s spirit or a devilish apparition tempting Hamlet to his damnation? Is Claudius truly his father’s murderer? By taking revenge does Hamlet do right or wrong? Despite swearing vengeance, Hamlet delays for two months before taking any action, feigning madness better to learn for himself the truth about Claudius’s guilt. Hamlet’s strange behavior causes Claudius’s counter-investigation to assess Hamlet’s mental state. School friends—Rosencrantz and Guildenstern—are summoned to learn what they can; Polonius, convinced that Hamlet’s is a madness of love for his daughter Ophelia, stages an encounter between the lovers that can be observed by Claudius. The court world at Elsinore, is, therefore, ruled by trickery, deception, role playing, and disguise, and the so-called problem of Hamlet, of his delay in acting, is directly related to his uncertainty in knowing the truth. Moreover, the suspicion of his father’s murder and his mother’s sexual betrayal shatter Hamlet’s conception of the world and his responsibility in it. Pushed back to the suicidal despair of the play’s opening, Hamlet is paralyzed by indecision and ambiguity in which even death is problematic, as he explains in the famous “To be or not to be” soliloquy in the third act:

For who would bear the whips and scorns of time, Th’ oppressor’s wrong, the proud man’s contumely, The pangs of despis’d love, the law’s delay, The insolence of office, and the spurns That patient merit of th’ unworthy takes, When he himself might his quietus make With a bare bodkin? Who would these fardels bear, To grunt and sweat under a weary life, But that the dread of something after death— The undiscover’d country, from whose bourn No traveller returns—puzzles the will, And makes us rather bear those ills we have Than fly to others that we know not of? Thus conscience does make cowards of us all, And thus the native hue of resolution Is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought, And enterprises of great pith and moment With this regard their currents turn awry And lose the name of action.

The arrival of a traveling theatrical group provides Hamlet with the empirical means to resolve his doubts about the authenticity of the ghost and Claudius’s guilt. By having the troupe perform the Mousetrap play that duplicates Claudius’s crime, Hamlet hopes “to catch the conscience of the King” by observing Claudius’s reaction. The king’s breakdown during the performance seems to confirm the ghost’s accusation, but again Hamlet delays taking action when he accidentally comes upon the guilt-ridden Claudius alone at his prayers. Rationalizing that killing the apparently penitent Claudius will send him to heaven and not to hell, Hamlet decides to await an opportunity “That has no relish of salvation in’t.” He goes instead to his mother’s room where Polonius is hidden in another attempt to learn Hamlet’s mind and intentions. This scene between mother and son, one of the most powerful and intense in all of Shakespeare, has supported the Freudian interpretation of Hamlet’s dilemma in which he is stricken not by moral qualms but by Oedipal guilt. Gertrude’s cries of protest over her son’s accusations cause Polonius to stir, and Hamlet finally, instinctively strikes the figure he assumes is Claudius. In killing the wrong man Hamlet sets in motion the play’s catastrophes, including the madness and suicide of Ophelia, overwhelmed by the realization that her lover has killed her father, and the fatal encounter with Laertes who is now similarly driven to avenge a murdered father. Convinced of her son’s madness, Gertrude informs Claudius of Polonius’s murder, prompting Claudius to alter his order for Hamlet’s exile to England to his execution there.

Hamlet’s mental shift from reluctant to willing avenger takes place offstage during his voyage to England in which he accidentally discovers the execution order and then after a pirate attack on his ship makes his way back to Denmark. He returns to confront the inescapable human condition of mortality in the graveyard scene of act 5 in which he realizes that even Alexander the Great must return to earth that might be used to “stop a beer-barrel” and Julius Caesar’s clay to “stop a hole to keep the wind away.” This sobering realization that levels all earthly distinctions of nobility and acclaim is compounded by the shock of Ophelia’s funeral procession. Hamlet sustains his balance and purpose by confessing to Horatio his acceptance of a providential will revealed to him in the series of accidents on his voyage to England: “There’s a divinity that shapes our ends, / Roughhew them how we will.” Finally accepting his inability to control his life, Hamlet resigns himself to accept whatever comes. Agreeing to a duel with Laertes that Claudius has devised to eliminate his nephew, Hamlet asserts that “There’s a special providence in the fall of a sparrow. If it be now, ’tis not to come. If it be not to come, it will be now. If it be not now, yet it will come. The readiness is all.”

In the carnage of the play’s final scene, Hamlet ironically manages to achieve his revenge while still preserving his nobility and moral stature. It is the murderer Claudius who is directly or indirectly responsible for all the deaths. Armed with a poisonedtip sword, Laertes strikes Hamlet who in turn manages to slay Laertes with the lethal weapon. Meanwhile, Gertrude drinks from the poisoned cup Claudius intended to insure Hamlet’s death, and, after the remorseful Laertes blames Claudius for the plot, Hamlet, hesitating no longer, fatally stabs the king. Dying in the arms of Horatio, Hamlet orders his friend to “report me and my cause aright / To the unsatisfied” and transfers the reign of Denmark to the last royal left standing, the Norwegian prince Fortinbras. King Hamlet’s death has been avenged but at a cost of eight lives: Polonius, Ophelia, Rosencranz, Guildenstern, Laertes, Gertrude, Claudius, and Prince Hamlet. Order is reestablished but only by Denmark’s sworn enemy. Shakespeare’s point seems unmistakable: Honor and duty that command revenge consume the guilty and the innocent alike. Heroism must face the reality of the graveyard.

Fortinbras closes the play by ordering that Hamlet be carried off “like a soldier” to be given a military funeral underscoring the point that Hamlet has fallen as a warrior on a battlefield of both the duplicitous court at Elsinore and his own mind. The greatness of Hamlet rests in the extraordinary perplexities Shakespeare has discovered both in his title character and in the events of the play. Few other dramas have posed so many or such knotty problems of human existence. Is there a special providence in the fall of a sparrow? What is this quintessence of dust? To be or not to be?

Hamlet Oxford Lecture by Emma Smith

Analysis of William Shakespeare’s Plays

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How is the Theme of Madness Present in Hamlet?

Back to: Hamlet by William Shakespeare

In Hamlet, Shakespeare takes us to the limit of portraying human minds at work. Through the theme of madness, one can notice how much thoughts can go behind a single action. The Tragedy of Hamlet is a play essentially about making up a human mind and that’s how it touches upon the idea of madness.

In the play, we have Hamlet who is either mad or pretends to be mad, there’s Ophelia who truly gives in to madness, loses her mind and we have Laertes who under the duress loses his reason. When Hamlet confronts the ghost for the first time, it is Horatio who warns that it “ might deprive your sovereignty of reason And draw you into madness? ”.

In Hamlet, one sees the madness for love which is one true madness. Polonius says to Ophelia, “ mad for thy love? ”, “ the very ecstasy(madness) of love ” after she reveals it to him. Shakespeare shows us madness and the sources of madness too.

Hamlet is introduced in the play in a deep mournful state. He is devastated by the fact that his mother didn’t even mourn his father’s death and got seduced by Claudius, his uncle. It is Polonius who labels Hamlet as mad repeatedly. He says to Gertrude that “ your noble son is mad. Mad call I it, for, to define true madness, what is’t but to be nothing else but mad? ”.

Guildenstern understands that through “ a crafty madness Hamlet keeps himself aloof .” Throughout the play the question of madness is evoked by various characters, offering us a comprehensive view of it from a different perspective.

Claudius notes Hamlet’s greatness and at the same time utters that “ madness in great ones must not go unwatched. ” In the end, Hamlet’s mother is also unable to understand him and cries out, “ alas, he’s mad! ” So, the play meditates on the error of judging madness on the surface.

The forces which Hamlet was confronting were much larger and powerful than him as an individual so madness becomes his tool to navigate through all those.

Justifying it to the king, he says, “ I here proclaim was madness. ” The wrongs aren’t done by him, “ Hamlet denies it. ” “ who does it then? His madness. ” At the same time, in Ophelia one may notice the true effects of madness.

She gets “ divided from herself and her fair judgement, without which we are pictures or mere beasts. ” This can be the very reason to assign some madness to Laertes under the shock of revenge. The play meditates upon the varying states of human minds and how under certain duress, they may cross into the realm of madness where reason doesn’t work.

• Essay on Madness in Shakespeare's Hamlet

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Introduction.

Apart from revenge, madness is another big theme throughout Shakespeare's Hamlet. Several characters in the play portray the theme of madness in the play. Mostly, madness is seen in Ophelia and Hamlet in the play, which is driven by the death of their fathers. However, their madness is portrayed in different ways, even though it is driven from the same origins. For instance, the first point where madness is seen in the play is when Hamlet is left to seek revenge for the murders of his father. In the end, all the madness of each character ultimately ends in tragedy. The paper will analyze and discuss the role and the impact of the madness in the play and also if the Hamlet is the on culpable for the death of Polonius.

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What is Madness?

Madness is being mentally ill by showing extremely foolish behaviour and state of chaotic activity. In the Hamlet play, madness has a big role and many impacts on it. The first role is that madness is the main theme other than revenge throughout the play, and even it is the cause of the plot as it is. For example, Hamlet's madness makes him display many characteristics in the play. When the play is starting, Hamlet is visited by the ghost of his father and by that, it can be said he is already mad. According to the play, the ghost tells him that he was killed by Claudius, making him seek revenge. At that point, he displays his character of erratic behaviour, pretending he has become mad with a desire to avenge his father's death. However, he also worries that the ghost might be a devil which will betray his soul at the end. That makes Hamlet even more confused as what to do, making him being even closer to madness.

Further, Hamlet had a chance to kill Claudius at the initial of play, but he decided not to because he thought if he killed him praying his soul would go to heaven. That made him wait until another time to prevent his soul from going to heaven. That made him be even closer to madness since the longer he waited, the more he became melancholy. For example, his famous monologue ‘to be, or not to be’ in Act 3, in scene one shows more of his melancholic states. At this state, Hamlet can be said to be having a crisis within himself whether or not to take his own life. By taking up his life, it would be a better off in calming the existential crisis. Thus, his melancholy and madness has driven him to the point of wanting to commit suicide.

Suffering from Melancholy

Hamlet madness had impacted him to be suffering from melancholy which comes from the actual mental illness most likely depression. The madness has even caused him to display negative and pessimistic thoughts. The state of madness has resulted in him into a state of depression when he is unable to cope with his perceived responsibility to his father's death. At the end of the play, Hamlet madness causes not only his death but also the death of many other characters, including his mother, who drinks the poison that was meant for him. Hence, his pretence of being mad for the vengeance of his father's death ended up, causing even more destruction to his own family.

However, in the play, Hamlet madness fairs Ophelia's madness through death and love in the heart of the play. In the play, Ophelia is portrayed as a person who is weak and even unable to stand by herself or even have a sense of individuality. For example, in the play, Ophelia says to her father that she does not know what she should think, meaning she does not have an identity of herself. That indicates mental illness which is madness. In the play, Ophelia's fathers are her identity, and this loss of identity makes her becomes even more mad. However, Ophelia's madness is driven by the loss of a male influence which has been in her life. According to Shakespeare, Laertes is the sister to Ophelia, Polonius is his pawn, and she is Hamlet's Lover. Thus, when these influences are removed from her life, she losses her identity and even become mad. However, when her father is dead, she losses she even losses a major part of her life. She is also rejected by Hamlet and the expectation of Laertes to be chaste drives her into a state of madness influenced by sexual frustration. The impact of madness in the life of Ophelia's she is not able to recognize herself as an independent without the three dominant male figures in her life (Brown).

There is also the issue of madness which contributes to the Ophelia madness. In the play, she is seen being much aware of England's medieval catholic past. Hence, when she losses the three men in her life, she starts to grief, making allusions to the medieval catholic forms of pity. Thus, the religious ideas on the role of women may have contributed to Ophelia’s dependence on the three men in her life. Angry with the grief on the death of her father, Ophelia ends up drowning herself into the river. At the end of the play, Ophelia commits suicide since she had nothing to live for without the people she loved in her life and even bestowed the sense of identity upon herself.

However, Hamlet is culpable for the death of Polonius in the play. In the play, during the confrontation with his mother, he stabs a man behind a curtain who turns to be the father of Ophelia the king's courtier, Polonius. That is when Ophelia, who is Hamlet's lover, goes mad and commit suicide. Although everyone at the final act of the play is killed, Polonius is revived to face the trial for killing Polonius. In the court, Washington, who is the attorney to Hamlet defend him, saying he did not fake the insanity, but he is just a sick boy who needs help (Wilber). He goes further to defend him, saying that the prosecutor wants to make a crime out of illness. They go head to give medical evidence from Harvard psychiatrist Dr Guttheil who is a witness in the case. He goes ahead to say that a mentally stable person would not drag the dead body saying ‘he will lug the guts into the neighbor room’ (Wilber). Unfortunately, the jury of volunteers from the audience agreed to the crime Hamlet was accused of. Not only was Hamlet responsible for driving Ophelia to her death, but jurors also he was guilty of killing Polonius. They said they did not believe that Hamlet was mentally ill. However, the plot of the play shows he had the mental ability to plan how and when to avenge his father’s death. Although in real life Hamlet case of being criminally responsible would not end at that point, there was no time for that issue. His lawyer had defended him, saying that the killing can be justified.

Playing Madness

In playing madness, Hamlet, become mad (Wilber). At the beginning of the play, Hamlet is perceived as an intelligent and even very knowledgeable man. Still, his mental health declines along with the story and even becomes the character of madness. However, everyone can agree that if someone killed themselves because of the careless action of another person, it is enough to drive them insane. For example, in the play, Hamlet is the last person to hear about Ophelia's death, and that made him throw himself into the gravesite where she was buried. Although along with the play, it becomes harder even to follow Hamlet's ideas because they are jumbled. However, the readers, along with the play question if Hamlet's madness was from the start of the play of it comes along the way. That is because when he sees his father's ghost at the beginning, it might be he was mad already.

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PRINCE HAMLET   →

“I shall win at the odds.”

KING CLAUDIUS   →

“He is justly served … a poison tempered by himself”

QUEEN GERTRUDE   →

“What devil was’t … That thus hath cozened you at hoodman-blind?”

OPHELIA   →

“Of ladies most deject and wretched … I cannot choose but weep.”

HAMLET AND THE GHOST   →

“Remember me … Rest, rest, perturbed spirit!”

HAMLET AND CLAUDIUS   →

“Thou incestuous, murderous, damned Dane.”

HAMLET AND GERTRUDE   →

“Go not to mine uncle’s bed.”

HAMLET AND OPHELIA   →

“The canker galls the infants of the spring.”

HAMLET AND HORATIO   →

“Those friends thou hast …”

CLAUDIUS AND GERTRUDE   →

“My uncle-father and aunt-mother.”

THE MAIN THEMES OF HAMLET    →

“Purposes mistook / Fallen on th’inventor’s heads.”

THEME OF REVENGE   →

“Show yourself in deed your father’s son.”

THEME OF APPEARANCE VERSUS REALITY   →

“Who’s there? … Stand and unfold yourself.”

THEME OF MADNESS   →

“Howsoever thou pursuest this act, / Taint not thy mind.”

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  Characters

• #1: Prince Hamlet
• #2: King Claudius
• #3: Queen Gertrude
• #4: Ophelia

  Relationships

• #5: Hamlet and the Ghost
• #6: Hamlet and Claudius
• #7: Hamlet and Gertrude
• #8: Hamlet and Ophelia
• #9: Hamlet and Horatio
• #10: Claudius and Gertrude

  Themes

• #11: Main Themes
• #12: Revenge
• #13: Appearance Versus Reality
• #14: Madness

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The Theme of Madness in Hamlet

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Is Hamlet ever really insane? If not, why is he pretending to be? And is the prince's “antic disposition” (1.3) the cause of Ophelia’s “I cannot choose but weep” (4.5) traumatic breakdown?

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Essay introduction /  thesis statement, “the canker galls the infants of the spring”.

“My wit’s diseased” , Prince Hamlet tells Guildenstern in 3.2. But is the prince really insane? If so, is it because of some psychological defect in his personality? Or has Hamlet lost his reason as a result of being “benetted round with villainies” (5.2)?

And if Hamlet is not as “Mad as the sea and wind, when both contend / Which is the mightier” (4.1), why is the prince pretending to be? As for Ophelia , no one can doubt her poignant descent into very real trauma.

Hamlet is a tragic portrayal of the older generation destroying the younger—first, by driving them into maddening circumstances ( “he shall not choose but fall” , 4.7; “I cannot choose but weep” , 4.5), and, then, into the grave. It may even be argued that Hamlet and Ophelia are the two sanest characters in the play.

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#Hamlet: a play in which the old destroy the young: first, by driving them into maddening circumstances, and then into the grave.

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SOME KEY ESSAY TOPICS

• Hamlet and Ophelia respond in opposite ways to their dilemmas. But there is nothing in either’s behavior that differs significantly from how a mentally well, ‘normal’ person would react had they been subjected to similar stresses.
• Hamlet’s put on “antic disposition” (1.5) provides him with an outlet to vent his rage and enables the prince to cling to his sanity amidst the “sea of troubles” (3.1) that engulf him.
• In contrast, the submissive and isolated Ophelia carries the pain of her continual silencing and humiliation inside her until her sanity collapses under its weight.

Key Supporting Quotes

Hamlet’s performance, “an antic disposition”.

With his trusted colleague Horatio and the guard Marcellus ( “your fingers on your lips, I pray” ), Hamlet shares his plan to put on an “antic disposition” (1.5) — but never reveals his motive.

Is the prince hoping to disguise a real mental fragility ( “my weakness and my melancholy” , 2.2) that might disqualify him from ever succeeding to the throne? We have Gertrude’s words that her son is prone to manic episodes ( “a while the fit will work on him” , 5.1).

Or is Hamlet setting in place a defense of temporary insanity should he assassinate King Claudius and face a trial before Denmark’s nobles? This is the excuse he later offers to Laertes for Polonius’ murder: “Was’t Hamlet wronged Laertes? Never Hamlet … Who does it, then? His madness” (5.2).

"How came he mad?" - #Hamlet asks about himself of the clownish grave-digger. "On account of losing his wits" is the unhelpful reply he receives.

• Hamlet’s motive for his put-on “antic disposition” (1.5) cannot be to protect his life from Claudius, for the king has no reason to suspect the prince knows the truth about his father’s death.
• If anything, what the king calls Hamlet’s “turbulent and dangerous lunacy” (2.1) makes Claudius more rather than less suspicious of his nephew.
• Hamlet comes to be regarded not as an entirely sane man who could call on Horatio and Marcellus to prove he was only occasionally pretending to be otherwise; but as a complete lunatic ( “he that is mad” , 5.1) who was banished from Denmark in the hope he might “recover his wits” (5.1).

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Hamlet’s psychology

“a kind of joy”.

The prince is never less like his ‘melancholy Dane’ caricature than when with the Players. Their arrival to Elsinore is his happiest moment in the play ( “there did seem in him a kind of joy / To hear of it” , 3.1). Indeed, the prince fancies he would find success as a playwright and actor: “Would not this … get me a fellowship in a cry of players?”

Was Hamlet’s loss in childhood of the court jester and his surrogate parent Yorick a traumatic moment when the aged-seven only child was “from himself be ta’en away” (5.2)? And did he afterward find a refuge from painful reality in the make-believe world of theater? For there “the adventurous knight / shall use his foil and target; the lover shall not / sigh gratis” and “the humourous man shall end his part / in peace” (2.2).

Was #Hamlet's loss in childhood of his surrogate parent Yorick a traumatic moment when the aged-seven only child was "from himself be ta'en away"?

• Hamlet’s speech to his two old school friends in 2.2 ( “I have of late … lost all my mirth” ) is often cited as evidence that the prince depressed. But Hamlet speaks these words only after discovering Rosencrantz and Guildenstern were “sent for” to spy on him.
• The prince’s claim to have “forgone all / custom of exercises” is contradicted by his later remark to Horatio in 5.2: “since (Laertes) went into France, / I have been in continual (fencing) practise.”
• To suggest Hamlet is impaired by aboulomania (a paralyzing inability to make decisions) is to believe a ‘cured’ prince or other mentally sane person would, immediately without delay, murder his country’s elected leader on the word of a ghost.

Hamlet’s Oedipal complex?

“go not to mine uncle’s bed”.

“With most wicked speed to incestuous sheets” (1.2)—does Hamlet’s reaction to Queen Gertrude’s speedy remarriage reveal a perverse obsession with his mother’s sexuality? Or is it evidence of an entirely practical concern by the prince for his future safety?

The birth of a rival heir to Hamlet’s “uncle-father and aunt-mother” (2.2) would make permanent the prince’s exclusion from Denmark’s throne. A wish to protect his already-thwarted inheritance is sufficient reason for Hamlet to urge Queen Gertrude: “go not to mine uncle’s bed” (3.4).

Moreover, there is no ‘bedroom scene‘ in Hamlet . Why would the queen have a second “royal bed of Denmark” (1.5) in her closet? And Hamlet’s only directions to Gertrude in the 3.4 text of “Sit you down” and “You shall not budge” contain little hint of erotic interaction.

Is #Hamlet incestuously obsessed with his mother's sexuality? Or simply worried that Gertrude might provide King Claudius with a rival heir to Denmark's throne?

• Hamlet’s fantasy about his parents’ marriage is less perverse than poignant. It is not to imagine himself as an incestuous interloper between father and mother; quite the contrary.
• His quest is to rescue his mother’s soul ( “Confess yourself to heaven” , 3.4) and condemn his uncle’s ( “as damned and black / As hell, whereto it goes” , 3.3).
• This suggests a son’s longing to reunite in the afterlife the fractured-by-Claudius parental relationship he cherishes in his memory ( “so loving to my mother … Why, she would hang on him” , 1.2).
• Even Sigmund Freud would admit that nothing could be less incestuous or ‘oedipal’ than a son wishing he could restore his father to his mother’s side.

Ophelia’s trauma

“divided from herself”.

After Hamlet’s “doublet all unbraced” visit to her closet, Ophelia worries that Polonius’ interpretation of Hamlet’s behavior ( “Mad for thy love?” ) may be correct: “My lord, … truly, I do fear it” (2.1). Following her father’s murder and Hamlet’s exile, the uncertain and distressed Ophelia of the first three acts collapses into the traumatized Ophelia of act four.

Ophelia’s madness is also for her a form of liberation. In her trauma, she has not so much lost her powers of reason but is using them for the first time. But, for so long unaccustomed to communicating her true feelings, she must borrow from the symbolic language of flowers and popular ballads to express her clear understanding of her bleak situation in a world of corruption and betrayal.

#Ophelia is left with "self-slaughter" as her only escape when her sanity is crushed by #Hamlet the play's maddening world of deception and betrayal.

• Hamlet is in part sustained through his trials by his sense of self-worth; as he reminds Rosencrantz, he is “the son of a king” (4.2). Also, he has the friendship of Horatio and the loyalty of the palace guards.
• In contrast, Ophelia is entirely alone. Her brother is absent in Paris and father murdered by her former lover. Even Gertrude, the play’s only other female character, will later refuse to offer her comfort in her distress: “I will not speak with her … What would she have?” (4.5).
• Through the ballad of a naive girl who is seduced by the promise of marriage only to be abandoned because she is no longer a virgin, Ophelia conveys the maddening contradictions of her situation and impossibility of anything but failure: “I cannot choose but weep” (4.7).

Essay conclusion / Summary

“cudgel thy brains no more”.

The tormented grappling of Hamlet and Ophelia with their dilemmas is mirrored in Guildenstern’s report of disputes between theater companies: “O, there has been much throwing about of brains” (2.2).

On seeing nothing in her future but disappointment, Ophelia makes the one decision about her life that is within her power: she ends it . Her “self-slaughter” (1.2) in the “weeping brook” (4.7) echoes Hamlet’s earlier wish that his “flesh would resolve itself into a dew” (1.2).

At his end, Hamlet follows the advice given to his assistant by the grave-digger: “cudgel thy brains no more about it” (5.1). The prince now accepts that the “divinity that shapes our ends” (5.2) will provide the circumstances for him to complete the task he has been fated to perform: “To quit (Claudius) with this arm” (5.2).

#Hamlet and #Ophelia separately arrive at the fifth and final stage of grief: acceptance. She surrenders to the "weeping brook"; he, to King Claudius' "exploit" of the rigged fencing duel.

• When Claudius’ remarks about Hamlet that “th’exterior nor the inward man / Resembles that it was” (2.2), we arae reminded that Elsinore is a place where there may be two possible answers to the question posed in the play’s opening line: “Who’s there?”
• As with any totalitarian regime, Claudius’ kingdom is an incubator of what psychologists call dissociative identity disorder (DID): a condition that leaves sufferers with split personalities.
• In the rigged fencing duel, Laertes answers the call issued to the Ghost in the very first scene: “stand, and unfold yourself.”
• Laertes shows his true, honorable character by heeding the advice offered to him earler: “This above all: to thine ownself be true, / And it must follow, as the night the day, / Thou canst not then be false to any man” (1.3).

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The most helpful book ever for students and teachers of Shakespeare’s Hamlet .

42 x 1,500-word model essays

Chapter-by-chapter guide to Hamlet Model Essays

IN THIS BOOK ARE THREE 1,500-WORD SAMPLE ESSAYS ON EACH ONE OF THE FOLLOWING 14 CHARACTERS, RELATIONSHIPS, AND THEMES. THAT’S 42 SAMPLE ESSAYS IN TOTAL.

#1: The Character of Hamlet

Born a prince, parented by a jester, haunted by a ghost, destined to be killed for killing a king, and remembered as the title character of a play he did not want to be in. If at the cost of his life, Hamlet does in the end “win at the odds. ”

READ FREE SAMPLE ESSAY   >

#2: The Character of Claudius

His “ambition ” for Denmark’s crown leads him to commit one murder only to find that he must plot a second to cover up the first. When this plan fails, his next scheme leads to the death of the woman he loves followed by his own.

#3: The Character of Gertrude

“Have you eyes? ”, Prince Hamlet demands of his mother. Gertrude‘s “o’erhasty marriage ” dooms her life and the lives of everyone around her when her wished-for, happy-ever-after fairytale ends in a bloodbath.

#4: The Character of Ophelia

As she struggles to respond to the self-serving purposes of others, Ophelia’s sanity collapses in Elsinore’s “unweeded garden ” of falsity and betrayal. Her “self-slaughter” is her revenge for her silencing and humiliation.

#5: Relationship of Hamlet and the Ghost

By surrendering Denmark to his rival’s son, Hamlet grants to the angry Ghost of his “dear father murdered ” the forgiveness his suffering soul needed more than the revenge he demanded.

Hamlet grants the Ghost the atonement his suffering soul needed more than the revenge he demanded: he surrenders Denmark to the son of the man murdered by his father on the day of the prince’s birth.

#6: Relationship of Hamlet and Claudius

Uncle and nephew are two men at war with each other—and themselves. Claudius is haunted by the murder he has committed ( “O heavy burden!” ); Hamlet by the one he hasn’t yet ( “Am I a coward?” ).

#7: Relationship of Hamlet and Gertrude

A haunted-by-the-past Hamlet seeks the truth about his father’s death ( “Do you see nothing there?” ). A live-in-the-present Gertrude seeks to protect her second husband and crown ( “No, nothing but ourselves” ).

#8: Relationship of Hamlet and Ophelia

Their relationship begins in uncertainty, descends into mutual deceit and rejection, and ends with their double surrender to death: Ophelia, to the water; Hamlet, to Claudius’ rigged fencing duel.

#9: Relationship of Hamlet and Horatio

“Those friends thou hast … Grapple them unto thy soul with hoops of steel.” Horatio is Hamlet’s trusted confidant in life and vows to remain the keeper of his memory after the prince’s death.

#10: Relationship of Claudius and Gertrude

A marriage of mutual self-interest: Claudius wanted to become king; Gertrude wanted to remain queen. In the end, both die by the same poison her second husband used to murder her first.

#11: Main Themes of Hamlet

A king murdered, an inheritance stolen, a family divided: Elsinore’s older generation destroys its younger when two brothers—one living, one undead—battle in a “cursed spite” over a crown and a queen.

#12: The Theme of Revenge

Hamlet and Laertes journey from revenge, through obsession and anger, to forgiveness. And the revenge sought by the Ghost on King Claudius becomes the revenge of Old King Fortinbras on Old King Hamlet.

#13: Deception and Appearance versus Reality

“Who’s there?” The characters struggle to distinguish between truth and falsehood in a play-long triple pun on the verb ‘to act’: to take action, to behave deceitfully, and to perform in theater.

#14: The Theme of Madness

“Your noble son is mad” , Polonius tells Denmark’s king and queen. But is Hamlet ever really insane? If not, why is he pretending to be? And is the prince’s “antic disposition” the cause of Ophelia’s traumatic breakdown?

--> directory by Alexander W. Crawford. There is much evidence in the play that Hamlet deliberately feigned fits of madness in order to confuse and disconcert the king and his attendants. His avowed intention to act "strange or odd" and to "put an antic disposition on" (I. v. 170, 172) is not the only indication. The latter phrase, which is of doubtful interpretation, should be taken in its context and in connection with his other remarks that bear on the same question. To his old friend, Guildenstem, he intimates that "his uncle-father and aunt-mother are deceived," and that he is only "mad north-north-west." (II. ii. 360.) But the intimation seems to mean nothing to the dull ears of his old school-fellow. His only comment is given later when he advises that Hamlet's is "a crafty madness." (III. i. 8.) When completing with Horatio the arrangements for the play, and just before the entrance of the court party, Hamlet says, "I must be idle." (III. ii. 85.) This evidently is a declaration of his intention to be "foolish," as Schmidt has explained the word. Then to his mother in the Closet Scene, he distinctly refers to the belief held by some about the court that he is mad, and assures her that he is intentionally acting the part of madness in order to attain his object: This pretense of madness Shakespeare borrowed from the earlier versions of the story. The fact that he has made it appear like real madness to many critics today only goes to show the wideness of his knowledge and the greatness of his dramatic skill. In the play the only persons who regard Hamlet as really mad are the king and his henchmen, and even these are troubled with many doubts. Polonius is the first to declare him mad, and he thinks it is because Ophelia has repelled his love. He therefore reports to the king that "Your noble son is mad" (II. ii. 92), and records the various stages leading to his so-called madness (II. ii. 145-150). No sooner, however, has he reached this conviction than Hamlet's clever toying with the old gentleman leads him to admit that "Though this be madness, yet there is method in't." (II. ii.203-4.) Though it suits the king's purpose to accept this pronouncement of Polonius, he is never quite convinced of its truth. His instructions to his henchmen, "Get from him why he puts on this confusion" (II. i. 2), imply that he understands it as pretence and not real lunacy. He soon admits that Hamlet's actions and words do not indicate madness but melancholy: But it serves his wicked purpose to declare him a madman, and to make this the excuse for getting rid of him by sending him to England. In this as in everything the king is insincere, and seeks not the truth but his own personal ends. Ophelia's view that Hamlet has gone mad for love of her is of no value on the point. She is herself, rather than Hamlet, "Like sweet bells jangled out of tune, and harsh." (III. i. 158.) The poor distracted girl is no judge of lunacy, and knows little of real sanity. She cannot enter into the depth of his mind, and cannot understand that it is her own conduct that is strange and incoherent. There need he no doubt, then, that Hamlet's madness was really feigned. He saw much to be gained by it, and to this end he did many things that the persons of the drama must construe as madness. His avowed intention was to throw them off the track. To understand the madness as real is to make of the play a mad-house tragedy that could have no meaning for the very sane Englishmen for whom Shakespeare wrote. There is dramatic value in such madness as Lear's, for the play traces the causes of his madness, and the influences that restore him. Lear's madness had its roots in his moral and spiritual defects, and the cure was his moral regeneration. But no such dramatic value can be assigned to Hamlet's madness. Shakespeare never makes of his dramas mere exhibitions of human experience, wise or otherwise, but they are all studies in the spiritual life of man. His dramas are always elaborate attempts to get a meaning out of life, not attempts to show either its mystery, or its inconsequence, or its madness. If Hamlet were thought of as truly mad, then his entrances and his exits could convey no meaning to sane persons, except the lesson to avoid insanity. But it needs no drama to teach that. ___ Cf. (I. v. 54), where "antic face" means a mask, and also (III. ii. 162) and (IV, vii. 18). Cf. , by Alexander Schmidt, 3rd edition, Berlin, 1902. Crawford, Alexander W. . Boston R.G. Badger, 1916. . 20 Aug. 2009. ______________ : The Complete Play with Explanatory Notes Plot Summary with Key Passages : Problem Play and Revenge Tragedy (with commentary) Study Quiz (with detailed answers) : Q & A "On this question there are four different hypotheses: (1) That Hamlet was throughout perfectly sane, but feigned insanity; (2) that Hamlet was after his interview with the Ghost more or less insane; (3) that in Hamlet insanity was latent, but was only fully developed after the Court-play; (4) that Hamlet was neither insane, nor feigned to be so." K. Deighton. Join Now to View Premium Content GradeSaver provides access to 2365 study guide PDFs and quizzes, 11012 literature essays, 2781 sample college application essays, 926 lesson plans, and ad-free surfing in this premium content, “Members Only” section of the site! Membership includes a 10% discount on all editing orders. Madness in Hamlet and Macbeth Kelly Crossley Hamlet and Macbeth are two of William Shakespeare's most famous plays. Each share not only fame, however, but format: Both feature main characters with tragic flaws that become their demise. In the cases of Hamlet and Macbeth, this flaw is madness. Whether their insanity is feigned or unfeigned, it plays a key role in their downfall. These characters have the ability to be something great, but they let their madness corrupt them and bring them into the chaos that only has a fatal end. In Hamlet, Prince Hamlet seemed to be in a state of madness ever since the demise of his father, King Hamlet. Though at first, no one knows the cause of King Hamlet's death, but Prince Hamlet soon finds out through a conversation with his dead father's ghost. In it, the ghost reveals to him that he was poisoned by Hamlet's uncle, Claudius. As Claudius pursued Queen Gertrude and married her soon after King Hamlet's death, the chain of events is all Hamlet needs to hear to be convinced. He promises to take vengeance upon his stepfather, swearing "to put an antic disposition on" (2.1. 173) so that his revenge can be accomplished. His "wild and whirling words" (1.5. 137) evoke empathy from the readers because one... GradeSaver provides access to 2312 study guide PDFs and quizzes, 10989 literature essays, 2751 sample college application essays, 911 lesson plans, and ad-free surfing in this premium content, “Members Only” section of the site! Membership includes a 10% discount on all editing orders. Already a member? Log in Home — Essay Samples — Literature — Hamlet Madness — Hamlet’s Insanity: Appearance vs Reality in Shakespeare’s Play How Hamlet is Faking Insanity: Appearance Vs Reality in Shakespeare's Play Categories: Hamlet Hamlet Madness About this sample Words: 2735 | Pages: 5.5 | 14 min read Published: Jun 29, 2018 Words: 2735 | Pages: 5.5 | 14 min read Wilson, J. R., & Fradella, H. F. (2020). The Hamlet Syndrome. Law, Culture and the Humanities, 16(1), 82-102. (https://doi.org/10.1177/1743872115626076) Bali, S. (2014). Mechanics of Madness in Hamlet, Macbeth and King Lear. IUP Journal of English Studies, 9(4), 81. (https://www.proquest.com/openview/3166ac95431b3e203252cbf0256587b7/1?pq-origsite=gscholar&cbl=2030005) Azad, B., & Abbasi, P. (2018). Hamlet’s Catch-22: A Psychoanalytic Reading of Hamlet and Catch-22. Critical Survey, 30(3), 97-115. https://doi.org/10.3167/cs.2018.300308) Dong-Mei, W. E. N. An Analysis of Hamlet’s Insanity: A Relevance Theory Perspective. (10.12783/dtssehs/icaem2017/19116) KOÇAK, H. (2019). A Close Focus into the Inner World and Mind of William Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Eurasian Journal of English Language and Literature, 1(2), 70-74. (https://dergipark.org.tr/en/pub/jell/issue/51236/656029) Cite this Essay Let us write you an essay from scratch 450+ experts on 30 subjects ready to help Custom essay delivered in as few as 3 hours Get high-quality help Verified writer Expert in: Literature + 120 experts online By clicking “Check Writers’ Offers”, you agree to our terms of service and privacy policy . We’ll occasionally send you promo and account related email No need to pay just yet! Related Essays 4 pages / 1712 words 3.5 pages / 1677 words 4 pages / 1813 words 4 pages / 1790 words Remember! This is just a sample. You can get your custom paper by one of our expert writers. 121 writers online Still can’t find what you need? Browse our vast selection of original essay samples, each expertly formatted and styled Related Essays on Hamlet Madness In Shakespeare’s text, Hamlet, madness is represented as the inability to act. For instance, Hamlet is unable to act as Claudius takes his rights to the throne though Hamlet is the rightful heir. It seems that any time hamlet [...] The play, The Tragedy of Hamlet The Prince of Denmark, follows the story of Hamlet shortly after his beloved father’s murder. Hamlet learns that Claudius, his stepfather and uncle, poisoned his brother and the ghost of his [...] Madness can be defined as a severely disordered state of the mind usually caused by a mental disorder. Madness can arise in people who endure traumatic experiences and stress and cannot find a way to control their behaviour. In [...] William Shakespeare's "Hamlet" is a timeless tragedy that explores the complex theme of madness. At first glance, madness in the play may appear as mere eccentric behavior, but upon closer examination of the characters, it [...] In William Shakespeare's timeless tragedy, 'Hamlet' the titular character embarks on a treacherous path of feigned madness. Hamlet's decision to adopt an appearance of lunacy throughout the play has captivated audiences and [...] In Tennessee Williams’ play, A Streetcar Named Desire, the nature of theatricality, “magic,” and “realism,” all stem from the tragic character, Blanche DuBois. Blanche is both a theatricalizing and self-theatricalizing woman. [...] Related Topics By clicking “Send”, you agree to our Terms of service and Privacy statement . We will occasionally send you account related emails. Where do you want us to send this sample? By clicking “Continue”, you agree to our terms of service and privacy policy. Be careful. This essay is not unique This essay was donated by a student and is likely to have been used and submitted before Download this Sample Free samples may contain mistakes and not unique parts Sorry, we could not paraphrase this essay. Our professional writers can rewrite it and get you a unique paper. Please check your inbox. We can write you a custom essay that will follow your exact instructions and meet the deadlines. Let's fix your grades together! Get Your Personalized Essay in 3 Hours or Less! We use cookies to personalyze your web-site experience. By continuing we’ll assume you board with our cookie policy . Instructions Followed To The Letter Deadlines Met At Every Stage Unique And Plagiarism Free Hamlet Madness Essay Hamlet’s madness is a key element to the play Hamlet. Hamlet, the protagonist of Hamlet, becomes depressed and horrified after discovering that his uncle Claudius has murdered his father and married Hamlet’s mother. Hamlet seeks revenge on Claudius for this transgression but feels like he has lost all agency because he can’t be sure if people are lying or telling him the truth. His refusal to make any decisions based on anything other than absolute certainty destroys everything around him until Hamlet finally goes mad himself and dies as a result of complications brought about by pneumonia. Hamlet’s Madness While it seems likely that Hamlet becomes insane mostly due to grief, guilt and regret (all exacerbated by being ignored by his father, betrayed by his mother and uncle, forced to stay in the same house as the murderer of Hamlet’s father, etc), Hamlet does show symptoms consistent with mental illness in early scenes. For example, Hamlet sees Claudius praying and has “A lunatic could not be so proud / A madman would not hear it” (II. ii. 298-99) because Hamlet knows that Claudius killed Hamlet’s father but Claudius is praying for forgiveness from a man that he murdered. Another symptom of Hamlet’s madness is Hamlet’s overreaction to Polonious death when he stabs through a curtain at him once he realizes that it isn’t actually the king who had been eavesdropping on Hamlet and Ophelia. Hamlet also claims to be “A dull and muddy-mettled rascal” (I. ii. 132), a lack of will to do anything after learning that his father is dead and Hamlets inability to accept what is happening around him as reality (thinking that Claudius was praying) all suggest Hamlet’s madness throughout the play. Hamlet does not go mad immediately after discovering Claudius’ crime however; Hamlet has clearly been contemplating this for most of the play, especially since he is already thinking about such things before meeting his father’s ghost at the beginning of the play. Hamlet thinks about death and revenge almost constantly throughout the entirety of Hamlet, so it seems unlikely that he would flip out the minute he hears that his father was killed. Hamlet simply can’t make decisions for himself, and Hamlet spends most of the play looking for the reason why Claudius would murder Hamlet’s father if it wasn’t for Hamlet’s death; because Hamlet has still not made a decision on what to do after he has discovered the truth about his uncle Claudius, Hamlet does not move forward and instead must take time to “catch [his] breath” (I. v. 43). Hamlet often seems very confused in early scenes of Hamlet, which is understandable considering that Hamlet’s father dies at the beginning of the play, right in front of him. Hamlet’s inability to cope with this compounded by everything else going on around Hamlet results in Hamlet’s madness. Although Hamlet’s father is dead, Hamlet does have other family members around him throughout the play who could have helped Hamlet cope with his loss. While Hamlet’s mother remarries soon after Hamlet’s father’s death, she has an opportunity to discuss this with Hamlet before announcing it at a public event which can be seen as very rude without speaking to Hamlet about it first. Laertes also returns from France prematurely for his sister’s funeral so he could have been there for support if needed. Both of these characters are related to Hamlet and know what Hamlet has gone through recently; Claudius knows that killing someone’s parent would look bad but he probably did not understand how much grief this would cause Hamlet. Hamlet’s mother, on the other hand, should know firsthand how Hamlet would react to losing his father especially since Hamlet was already very upset before he saw Claudius praying. Even after Hamlet learns that his uncle murdered his father, Hamlet is still not completely sure of what to do for almost half the play until Laertes goes crazy with grief which pushes Hamlet into action. This long period where Hamlet has trouble deciding what to do suggests mental illness or at least heavy grief and stress. Rosenthal notes that Hamlet’s madness doesn’t have any effect on him throughout most of the play except during Act V when it becomes clear that “the weight of all these past months descends upon Hamlet” and Hamlet finally understands the consequence of what he has been planning. Hamlet’s death in this scene is described as “gently, even graciously,” which shows that Hamlet is at peace with himself and accepting of his fate. Hamlet’s madness throughout Hamlet usually demonstrates Hamlet’s struggle to cope and understand what’s going on around him but it does not usually affect his actions until the end of Hamlet when Hamlet realizes how much time has passed while he was delayed in avenging his father’s death. After all the other characters are dead, Hamlet dies speaking to Horatio about Fortinbras marching through Denmark after Hamlet’s death which could be a reference to Fortinbras’ against Poland during which Fortinbras takes Hamlet’s words, “the readiness is all” (V. ii. 98) to mean that Hamlet wished his death to be as convenient for Fortinbras as possible. Hamlet uses this quote earlier in the play when he tells Horatio not to reveal Hamlet’s plan to kill Claudius until after it has happened because Hamlet wants everything set up before he reveals himself again. Not everyone views Hamlet’s madness as physical, though. For example, Peter Ure argues that Hamlet’s madness was caused by opium instead of grief and stress, which could provide an alternate explanation for Hamlet’s behavior throughout the play including during Act V where Hamlet finally sees the consequences of what he has done so far. However, Hamlet’s very traditional views on death suggest that Hamlet is not the type of person to seek out drugs for pleasure. Hamlet references heaven and hell multiple times throughout Hamlet which shows Hamlet’s strong belief in afterlife. Hamlet also mentions superstition multiple times regarding ghosts and describes “the dread of something after death” (III. i. 78) as one reason Hamlet’s father’s spirit cannot rest which suggests Hamlet does not want to risk dying because he would not be able to go to heaven if he kills himself. The only time Hamlet questions his beliefs is during his conversation with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern where he is trying to figure out what they know about him but this conversation is less about Hamlet doubting his beliefs and more about Hamlet no longer enjoying acting like the way he usually does. Hamlet’s strong views on death Hamlet also show that Hamlet is not likely to disregard his own life just because it’s getting harder for him to live it. More Essays Hamlet Analysis Essay Hamlet Revenge Essay Revenge vs Justice Hamlet Revenge Is Not Justified Analysis Essay The play Hamlet Hamlet Procrastinates The Murder Analysis Essay What Is Hamlet’s Tragic Flaw? Hamlet’s Loss Of His Father Analysis Essay Revenge And Vengeance In Hamlet By William Shakespeare Essay Theme Of Death In Hamlet Research Paper Leave a Comment Cancel reply Save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time I comment. Utility Menu Jeffrey R. Wilson Essays on hamlet. Written as the author taught Hamlet every semester for a decade, these lightning essays ask big conceptual questions about the play with the urgency of a Shakespeare lover, and answer them with the rigor of a Shakespeare scholar. In doing so, Hamlet becomes a lens for life today, generating insights on everything from xenophobia, American fraternities, and religious fundamentalism to structural misogyny, suicide contagion, and toxic love. Prioritizing close reading over historical context, these explorations are highly textual and highly theoretical, often philosophical, ethical, social, and political. Readers see King Hamlet as a pre-modern villain, King Claudius as a modern villain, and Prince Hamlet as a post-modern villain. Hamlet’s feigned madness becomes a window into failed insanity defenses in legal trials. He knows he’s being watched in “To be or not to be”: the soliloquy is a satire of philosophy. Horatio emerges as Shakespeare’s authorial avatar for meta-theatrical commentary, Fortinbras as the hero of the play. Fate becomes a viable concept for modern life, and honor a source of tragedy. The metaphor of music in the play makes Ophelia Hamlet’s instrument. Shakespeare, like the modern corporation, stands against sexism, yet perpetuates it unknowingly. We hear his thoughts on single parenting, sending children off to college, and the working class, plus his advice on acting and writing, and his claims to be the next Homer or Virgil. In the context of four centuries of Hamlet hate, we hear how the text draws audiences in, how it became so famous, and why it continues to captivate audiences. At a time when the humanities are said to be in crisis, these essays are concrete examples of the mind-altering power of literature and literary studies, unravelling the ongoing implications of the English language’s most significant artistic object of the past millennium. Publications              is a Suicide Text—It’s Time to Teach it Like One   ?   : Divine Providence and Social Determinism           Why is Hamlet the most famous English artwork of the past millennium? Is it a sexist text? Why does Hamlet speak in prose? Why must he die? Does Hamlet depict revenge, or justice? How did the death of Shakespeare’s son, Hamnet, transform into a story about a son dealing with the death of a father? Did Shakespeare know Aristotle’s theory of tragedy? How did our literary icon, Shakespeare, see his literary icons, Homer and Virgil? Why is there so much comedy in Shakespeare’s greatest tragedy? Why is love a force of evil in the play? Did Shakespeare believe there’s a divinity that shapes our ends? How did he define virtue? What did he think about psychology? politics? philosophy? What was Shakespeare’s image of himself as an author? What can he, arguably the greatest writer of all time, teach us about our own writing? What was his theory of literature? Why do people like Hamlet ? How do the Hamlet haters of today compare to those of yesteryears? Is it dangerous for our children to read a play that’s all about suicide?  These are some of the questions asked in this book, a collection of essays on Shakespeare’s Hamlet stemming from my time teaching the play every semester in my Why Shakespeare? course at Harvard University. During this time, I saw a series of bright young minds from wildly diverse backgrounds find their footing in Hamlet, and it taught me a lot about how Shakespeare’s tragedy works, and why it remains with us in the modern world. Beyond ghosts, revenge, and tragedy, Hamlet is a play about being in college, being in love, gender, misogyny, friendship, theater, philosophy, theology, injustice, loss, comedy, depression, death, self-doubt, mental illness, white privilege, overbearing parents, existential angst, international politics, the classics, the afterlife, and the meaning of it all.  These essays grow from the central paradox of the play: it helps us understand the world we live in, yet we don't really understand the text itself very well. For all the attention given to Hamlet , there’s no consensus on the big questions—how it works, why it grips people so fiercely, what it’s about. These essays pose first-order questions about what happens in Hamlet and why, mobilizing answers for reflections on life, making the essays both highly textual and highly theoretical.  Each semester that I taught the play, I would write a new essay about Hamlet . They were meant to be models for students, the sort of essay that undergrads read and write – more rigorous than the puff pieces in the popular press, but riskier than the scholarship in most academic journals. While I later added scholarly outerwear, these pieces all began just like the essays I was assigning to students – as short close readings with a reader and a text and a desire to determine meaning when faced with a puzzling question or problem.  The turn from text to context in recent scholarly books about Hamlet is quizzical since we still don’t have a strong sense of, to quote the title of John Dover Wilson’s 1935 book, What Happens in Hamlet. Is the ghost real? Is Hamlet mad, or just faking? Why does he delay? These are the kinds of questions students love to ask, but they haven’t been – can’t be – answered by reading the play in the context of its sources (recently addressed in Laurie Johnson’s The Tain of Hamlet [2013]), its multiple texts (analyzed by Paul Menzer in The Hamlets [2008] and Zachary Lesser in Hamlet after Q1 [2015]), the Protestant reformation (the focus of Stephen Greenblatt’s Hamlet in Purgatory [2001] and John E. Curran, Jr.’s Hamlet, Protestantism, and the Mourning of Contingency [2006]), Renaissance humanism (see Rhodri Lewis, Hamlet and the Vision of Darkness [2017]), Elizabethan political theory (see Margreta de Grazia, Hamlet without Hamlet [2007]), the play’s reception history (see David Bevington, Murder Most Foul: Hamlet through the Ages [2011]), its appropriation by modern philosophers (covered in Simon Critchley and Jamieson Webster’s The Hamlet Doctrine [2013] and Andrew Cutrofello’s All for Nothing: Hamlet’s Negativity [2014]), or its recent global travels (addressed, for example, in Margaret Latvian’s Hamlet’s Arab Journey [2011] and Dominic Dromgoole’s Hamlet Globe to Globe [2017]).  Considering the context and afterlives of Hamlet is a worthy pursuit. I certainly consulted the above books for my essays, yet the confidence that comes from introducing context obscures the sharp panic we feel when confronting Shakespeare’s text itself. Even as the excellent recent book from Sonya Freeman Loftis, Allison Kellar, and Lisa Ulevich announces Hamlet has entered “an age of textual exhaustion,” there’s an odd tendency to avoid the text of Hamlet —to grasp for something more firm—when writing about it. There is a need to return to the text in a more immediate way to understand how Hamlet operates as a literary work, and how it can help us understand the world in which we live.  That latter goal, yes, clings nostalgically to the notion that literature can help us understand life. Questions about life send us to literature in search of answers. Those of us who love literature learn to ask and answer questions about it as we become professional literary scholars. But often our answers to the questions scholars ask of literature do not connect back up with the questions about life that sent us to literature in the first place—which are often philosophical, ethical, social, and political. Those first-order questions are diluted and avoided in the minutia of much scholarship, left unanswered. Thus, my goal was to pose questions about Hamlet with the urgency of a Shakespeare lover and to answer them with the rigor of a Shakespeare scholar.  In doing so, these essays challenge the conventional relationship between literature and theory. They pursue a kind of criticism where literature is not merely the recipient of philosophical ideas in the service of exegesis. Instead, the creative risks of literature provide exemplars to be theorized outward to help us understand on-going issues in life today. Beyond an occasion for the demonstration of existing theory, literature is a source for the creation of new theory. Chapter One How Hamlet Works Whether you love or hate Hamlet , you can acknowledge its massive popularity. So how does Hamlet work? How does it create audience enjoyment? Why is it so appealing, and to whom? Of all the available options, why Hamlet ? This chapter entertains three possible explanations for why the play is so popular in the modern world: the literary answer (as the English language’s best artwork about death—one of the very few universal human experiences in a modern world increasingly marked by cultural differences— Hamlet is timeless); the theatrical answer (with its mixture of tragedy and comedy, the role of Hamlet requires the best actor of each age, and the play’s popularity derives from the celebrity of its stars); and the philosophical answer (the play invites, encourages, facilitates, and sustains philosophical introspection and conversation from people who do not usually do such things, who find themselves doing those things with Hamlet , who sometimes feel embarrassed about doing those things, but who ultimately find the experience of having done them rewarding). Chapter Two “It Started Like a Guilty Thing”: The Beginning of Hamlet and the Beginning of Modern Politics King Hamlet is a tyrant and King Claudius a traitor but, because Shakespeare asked us to experience the events in Hamlet from the perspective of the young Prince Hamlet, we are much more inclined to detect and detest King Claudius’s political failings than King Hamlet’s. If so, then Shakespeare’s play Hamlet , so often seen as the birth of modern psychology, might also tell us a little bit about the beginnings of modern politics as well. Chapter Three Horatio as Author: Storytelling and Stoic Tragedy This chapter addresses Horatio’s emotionlessness in light of his role as a narrator, using this discussion to think about Shakespeare’s motives for writing tragedy in the wake of his son’s death. By rationalizing pain and suffering as tragedy, both Horatio and Shakespeare were able to avoid the self-destruction entailed in Hamlet’s emotional response to life’s hardships and injustices. Thus, the stoic Horatio, rather than the passionate Hamlet who repeatedly interrupts ‘The Mousetrap’, is the best authorial avatar for a Shakespeare who strategically wrote himself and his own voice out of his works. This argument then expands into a theory of ‘authorial catharsis’ and the suggestion that we can conceive of Shakespeare as a ‘poet of reason’ in contrast to a ‘poet of emotion’. Chapter Four “To thine own self be true”: What Shakespeare Says about Sending Our Children Off to College What does “To thine own self be true” actually mean? Be yourself? Don’t change who you are? Follow your own convictions? Don’t lie to yourself? This chapter argues that, if we understand meaning as intent, then “To thine own self be true” means, paradoxically, that “the self” does not exist. Or, more accurately, Shakespeare’s Hamlet implies that “the self” exists only as a rhetorical, philosophical, and psychological construct that we use to make sense of our experiences and actions in the world, not as anything real. If this is so, then this passage may offer us a way of thinking about Shakespeare as not just a playwright but also a moral philosopher, one who did his ethics in drama. Chapter Five In Defense of Polonius Your wife dies. You raise two children by yourself. You build a great career to provide for your family. You send your son off to college in another country, though you know he’s not ready. Now the prince wants to marry your daughter—that’s not easy to navigate. Then—get this—while you’re trying to save the queen’s life, the prince murders you. Your death destroys your kids. They die tragically. And what do you get for your efforts? Centuries of Shakespeare scholars dumping on you. If we see Polonius not through the eyes of his enemy, Prince Hamlet—the point of view Shakespeare’s play asks audiences to adopt—but in analogy to the common challenges of twenty-first-century parenting, Polonius is a single father struggling with work-life balance who sadly choses his career over his daughter’s well-being. Chapter Six Sigma Alpha Elsinore: The Culture of Drunkenness in Shakespeare’s Hamlet Claudius likes to party—a bit too much. He frequently binge drinks, is arguably an alcoholic, but not an aberration. Hamlet says Denmark is internationally known for heavy drinking. That’s what Shakespeare would have heard in the sixteenth century. By the seventeenth, English writers feared Denmark had taught their nation its drinking habits. Synthesizing criticism on alcoholism as an individual problem in Shakespeare’s texts and times with scholarship on national drinking habits in the early-modern age, this essay asks what the tragedy of alcoholism looks like when located not on the level of the individual, but on the level of a culture, as Shakespeare depicted in Hamlet. One window into these early-modern cultures of drunkenness is sociological studies of American college fraternities, especially the social-learning theories that explain how one person—one culture—teaches another its habits. For Claudius’s alcoholism is both culturally learned and culturally significant. And, as in fraternities, alcoholism in Hamlet is bound up with wealth, privilege, toxic masculinity, and tragedy. Thus, alcohol imagistically reappears in the vial of “cursed hebona,” Ophelia’s liquid death, and the poisoned cup in the final scene—moments that stand out in recent performances and adaptations with alcoholic Claudiuses and Gertrudes. Chapter Seven Tragic Foundationalism This chapter puts the modern philosopher Alain Badiou’s theory of foundationalism into dialogue with the early-modern playwright William Shakespeare’s play Hamlet . Doing so allows us to identify a new candidate for Hamlet’s traditionally hard-to-define hamartia – i.e., his “tragic mistake” – but it also allows us to consider the possibility of foundationalism as hamartia. Tragic foundationalism is the notion that fidelity to a single and substantive truth at the expense of an openness to evidence, reason, and change is an acute mistake which can lead to miscalculations of fact and virtue that create conflict and can end up in catastrophic destruction and the downfall of otherwise strong and noble people. Chapter Eight “As a stranger give it welcome”: Shakespeare’s Advice for First-Year College Students Encountering a new idea can be like meeting a strange person for the first time. Similarly, we dismiss new ideas before we get to know them. There is an answer to the problem of the human antipathy to strangeness in a somewhat strange place: a single line usually overlooked in William Shakespeare’s play Hamlet . If the ghost is “wondrous strange,” Hamlet says, invoking the ancient ethics of hospitality, “Therefore as a stranger give it welcome.” In this word, strange, and the social conventions attached to it, is both the instinctual, animalistic fear and aggression toward what is new and different (the problem) and a cultivated, humane response in hospitality and curiosity (the solution). Intellectual xenia is the answer to intellectual xenophobia. Chapter Nine Parallels in Hamlet Hamlet is more parallely than other texts. Fortinbras, Hamlet, and Laertes have their fathers murdered, then seek revenge. Brothers King Hamlet and King Claudius mirror brothers Old Norway and Old Fortinbras. Hamlet and Ophelia both lose their fathers, go mad, but there’s a method in their madness, and become suicidal. King Hamlet and Polonius are both domineering fathers. Hamlet and Polonius are both scholars, actors, verbose, pedantic, detectives using indirection, spying upon others, “by indirections find directions out." King Hamlet and King Claudius are both kings who are killed. Claudius using Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to spy on Hamlet mirrors Polonius using Reynaldo to spy on Laertes. Reynaldo and Hamlet both pretend to be something other than what they are in order to spy on and detect foes. Young Fortinbras and Prince Hamlet both have their forward momentum “arrest[ed].” Pyrrhus and Hamlet are son seeking revenge but paused a “neutral to his will.” The main plot of Hamlet reappears in the play-within-the-play. The Act I duel between King Hamlet and Old Fortinbras echoes in the Act V duel between Hamlet and Laertes. Claudius and Hamlet are both king killers. Sheesh—why are there so many dang parallels in Hamlet ? Is there some detectable reason why the story of Hamlet would call for the literary device of parallelism? Chapter Ten Rosencrantz and Guildenstern: Why Hamlet Has Two Childhood Friends, Not Just One Why have two of Hamlet’s childhood friends rather than just one? Do Rosencrantz and Guildenstern have individuated personalities? First of all, by increasing the number of friends who visit Hamlet, Shakespeare creates an atmosphere of being outnumbered, of multiple enemies encroaching upon Hamlet, of Hamlet feeling that the world is against him. Second, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are not interchangeable, as commonly thought. Shakespeare gave each an individuated personality. Guildenstern is friendlier with Hamlet, and their friendship collapses, while Rosencrantz is more distant and devious—a frenemy. Chapter Eleven Shakespeare on the Classics, Shakespeare as a Classic: A Reading of Aeneas’s Tale to Dido Of all the stories Shakespeare might have chosen, why have Hamlet ask the players to recite Aeneas’ tale to Dido of Pyrrhus’s slaughter of Priam? In this story, which comes not from Homer’s Iliad but from Virgil’s Aeneid and had already been adapted for the Elizabethan stage in Christopher Marlowe’s The Tragedy of Dido, Pyrrhus – more commonly known as Neoptolemus, the son of the famous Greek warrior Achilles – savagely slays Priam, the king of the Trojans and the father of Paris, who killed Pyrrhus’s father, Achilles, who killed Paris’s brother, Hector, who killed Achilles’s comrade, Patroclus. Clearly, the theme of revenge at work in this story would have appealed to Shakespeare as he was writing what would become the greatest revenge tragedy of all time. Moreover, Aeneas’s tale to Dido supplied Shakespeare with all of the connections he sought to make at this crucial point in his play and his career – connections between himself and Marlowe, between the start of Hamlet and the end, between Prince Hamlet and King Claudius, between epic poetry and tragic drama, and between the classical literature Shakespeare was still reading hundreds of years later and his own potential as a classic who might (and would) be read hundreds of years into the future. Chapter Twelve How Theater Works, according to Hamlet According to Hamlet, people who are guilty of a crime will, when seeing that crime represented on stage, “proclaim [their] malefactions”—but that simply isn’t how theater works. Guilty people sit though shows that depict their crimes all the time without being prompted to public confession. Why did Shakespeare—a remarkably observant student of theater—write this demonstrably false theory of drama into his protagonist? And why did Shakespeare then write the plot of the play to affirm that obviously inaccurate vision of theater? For Claudius is indeed stirred to confession by the play-within-the-play. Perhaps Hamlet’s theory of people proclaiming malefactions upon seeing their crimes represented onstage is not as outlandish as it first appears. Perhaps four centuries of obsession with Hamlet is the English-speaking world proclaiming its malefactions upon seeing them represented dramatically. Chapter Thirteen “To be, or not to be”: Shakespeare Against Philosophy This chapter hazards a new reading of the most famous passage in Western literature: “To be, or not to be” from William Shakespeare’s Hamlet . With this line, Hamlet poses his personal struggle, a question of life and death, as a metaphysical problem, as a question of existence and nothingness. However, “To be, or not to be” is not what it seems to be. It seems to be a representation of tragic angst, yet a consideration of the context of the speech reveals that “To be, or not to be” is actually a satire of philosophy and Shakespeare’s representation of the theatricality of everyday life. In this chapter, a close reading of the context and meaning of this passage leads into an attempt to formulate a Shakespearean image of philosophy. Chapter Fourteen Contagious Suicide in and Around Hamlet As in society today, suicide is contagious in Hamlet , at least in the example of Ophelia, the only death by suicide in the play, because she only becomes suicidal after hearing Hamlet talk about his own suicidal thoughts in “To be, or not to be.” Just as there are media guidelines for reporting on suicide, there are better and worse ways of handling Hamlet . Careful suicide coverage can change public misperceptions and reduce suicide contagion. Is the same true for careful literary criticism and classroom discussion of suicide texts? How can teachers and literary critics reduce suicide contagion and increase help-seeking behavior? Chapter Fifteen Is Hamlet a Sexist Text? Overt Misogyny vs. Unconscious Bias Students and fans of Shakespeare’s Hamlet persistently ask a question scholars and critics of the play have not yet definitively answered: is it a sexist text? The author of this text has been described as everything from a male chauvinist pig to a trailblazing proto-feminist, but recent work on the science behind discrimination and prejudice offers a new, better vocabulary in the notion of unconscious bias. More pervasive and slippery than explicit bigotry, unconscious bias involves the subtle, often unintentional words and actions which indicate the presence of biases we may not be aware of, ones we may even fight against. The Shakespeare who wrote Hamlet exhibited an unconscious bias against women, I argue, even as he sought to critique the mistreatment of women in a patriarchal society. The evidence for this unconscious bias is not to be found in the misogynistic statements made by the characters in the play. It exists, instead, in the demonstrable preference Shakespeare showed for men over women when deciding where to deploy his literary talents. Thus, Shakespeare's Hamlet is a powerful literary example – one which speaks to, say, the modern corporation – showing that deliberate efforts for egalitarianism do not insulate one from the effects of structural inequalities that both stem from and create unconscious bias. Chapter Sixteen Style and Purpose in Acting and Writing Purpose and style are connected in academic writing. To answer the question of style ( How should we write academic papers? ) we must first answer the question of purpose ( Why do we write academic papers? ). We can answer these questions, I suggest, by turning to an unexpected style guide that’s more than 400 years old: the famous passage on “the purpose of playing” in William Shakespeare’s Hamlet . In both acting and writing, a high style often accompanies an expressive purpose attempting to impress an elite audience yet actually alienating intellectual people, while a low style and mimetic purpose effectively engage an intellectual audience. Chapter Seventeen 13 Ways of Looking at a Ghost Why doesn’t Gertrude see the Ghost of King Hamlet in Act III, even though Horatio, Bernardo, Francisco, Marcellus, and Prince Hamlet all saw it in Act I? It’s a bit embarrassing that Shakespeare scholars don’t have a widely agreed-upon consensus that explains this really basic question that puzzles a lot of people who read or see Hamlet . Chapter Eighteen The Tragedy of Love in Hamlet The word “love” appears 84 times in Shakespeare’s Hamlet . “Father” only appears 73 times, “play” 60, “think” 55, “mother” 46, “mad” 44, “soul” 40, “God" 39, “death” 38, “life” 34, “nothing” 28, “son” 26, “honor” 21, “spirit” 19, “kill” 18, “revenge” 14, and “action” 12. Love isn’t the first theme that comes to mind when we think of Hamlet , but is surprisingly prominent. But love is tragic in Hamlet . The bloody catastrophe at the end of that play is principally driven not by hatred or a longing for revenge, but by love. Chapter Nineteen Ophelia’s Songs: Moral Agency, Manipulation, and the Metaphor of Music in Hamlet This chapter reads Ophelia’s songs in Act IV of Shakespeare’s Hamlet in the context of the meaning of music established elsewhere in the play. While the songs are usually seen as a marker of Ophelia’s madness (as a result of the death of her father) or freedom (from the constraints of patriarchy), they come – when read in light of the metaphor of music as manipulation – to symbolize her role as a pawn in Hamlet’s efforts to deceive his family. Thus, music was Shakespeare’s platform for connecting Ophelia’s story to one of the central questions in Hamlet : Do we have control over our own actions (like the musician), or are we controlled by others (like the instrument)? Chapter Twenty A Quantitative Study of Prose and Verse in Hamlet Why does Hamlet have so much prose? Did Shakespeare deliberately shift from verse to prose to signal something to his audiences? How would actors have handled the shifts from verse to prose? Would audiences have detected shifts from verse to prose? Is there an overarching principle that governs Shakespeare’s decision to use prose—a coherent principle that says, “If X, then use prose?” Chapter Twenty-One The Fortunes of Fate in Hamlet : Divine Providence and Social Determinism In Hamlet , fate is attacked from both sides: “fortune” presents a world of random happenstance, “will” a theory of efficacious human action. On this backdrop, this essay considers—irrespective of what the characters say and believe—what the structure and imagery Shakespeare wrote into Hamlet say about the possibility that some version of fate is at work in the play. I contend the world of Hamlet is governed by neither fate nor fortune, nor even the Christianized version of fate called “providence.” Yet there is a modern, secular, disenchanted form of fate at work in Hamlet—what is sometimes called “social determinism”—which calls into question the freedom of the individual will. As such, Shakespeare’s Hamlet both commented on the transformation of pagan fate into Christian providence that happened in the centuries leading up to the play, and anticipated the further transformation of fate from a theological to a sociological idea, which occurred in the centuries following Hamlet . Chapter Twenty-Two The Working Class in Hamlet There’s a lot for working-class folks to hate about Hamlet —not just because it’s old, dusty, difficult to understand, crammed down our throats in school, and filled with frills, tights, and those weird lace neck thingies that are just socially awkward to think about. Peak Renaissance weirdness. Claustrophobicly cloistered inside the castle of Elsinore, quaintly angsty over royal family problems, Hamlet feels like the literary epitome of elitism. “Lawless resolutes” is how the Wittenberg scholar Horatio describes the soldiers who join Fortinbras’s army in exchange “for food.” The Prince Hamlet who has never worked a day in his life denigrates Polonius as a “fishmonger”: quite the insult for a royal advisor to be called a working man. And King Claudius complains of the simplicity of "the distracted multitude.” But, in Hamlet , Shakespeare juxtaposed the nobles’ denigrations of the working class as readily available metaphors for all-things-awful with the rather valuable behavior of working-class characters themselves. When allowed to represent themselves, the working class in Hamlet are characterized as makers of things—of material goods and services like ships, graves, and plays, but also of ethical and political virtues like security, education, justice, and democracy. Meanwhile, Elsinore has a bad case of affluenza, the make-believe disease invented by an American lawyer who argued that his client's social privilege was so great that it created an obliviousness to law. While social elites rot society through the twin corrosives of political corruption and scholarly detachment, the working class keeps the machine running. They build the ships, plays, and graves society needs to function, and monitor the nuts-and-bolts of the ideals—like education and justice—that we aspire to uphold. Chapter Twenty-Three The Honor Code at Harvard and in Hamlet Students at Harvard College are asked, when they first join the school and several times during their years there, to affirm their awareness of and commitment to the school’s honor code. But instead of “the foundation of our community” that it is at Harvard, honor is tragic in Hamlet —a source of anxiety, blunder, and catastrophe. As this chapter shows, looking at Hamlet from our place at Harvard can bring us to see what a tangled knot honor can be, and we can start to theorize the difference between heroic and tragic honor. Chapter Twenty-Four The Meaning of Death in Shakespeare’s Hamlet By connecting the ways characters live their lives in Hamlet to the ways they die – on-stage or off, poisoned or stabbed, etc. – Shakespeare symbolized hamartia in catastrophe. In advancing this argument, this chapter develops two supporting ideas. First, the dissemination of tragic necessity: Shakespeare distributed the Aristotelian notion of tragic necessity – a causal relationship between a character’s hamartia (fault or error) and the catastrophe at the end of the play – from the protagonist to the other characters, such that, in Hamlet , those who are guilty must die, and those who die are guilty. Second, the spectacularity of death: there exists in Hamlet a positive correlation between the severity of a character’s hamartia (error or flaw) and the “spectacularity” of his or her death – that is, the extent to which it is presented as a visible and visceral spectacle on-stage. Chapter Twenty-Five Tragic Excess in Hamlet In Hamlet , Shakespeare paralleled the situations of Hamlet, Laertes, and Fortinbras (the father of each is killed, and each then seeks revenge) to promote the virtue of moderation: Hamlet moves too slowly, Laertes too swiftly – and they both die at the end of the play – but Fortinbras represents a golden mean which marries the slowness of Hamlet with the swiftness of Laertes. As argued in this essay, Shakespeare endorsed the virtue of balance by allowing Fortinbras to be one of the very few survivors of the play. In other words, excess is tragic in Hamlet . Bibliography Anand, Manpreet Kaur. An Overview of Hamlet Studies . 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Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018. 270 IMAGES Decision-Making and Madness in Hamlet Free Essay Example Explain And Illustrate Hamlet’s Madness Hamlet Madness ≫ What Lead Hamlet to Madness? Free Essay Sample on Samploon.com 📌 Essay Example on Hamlet: Madness at the Centre of All Problems A* Hamlet Essay on Shakespeare's presentation of the theme of madness COMMENTS Madness In Shakespeares Hamlet: [Essay Example], 679 words In conclusion, the theme of madness in "Hamlet" is a rich and multifaceted exploration of the human psyche, revealing the complexities of emotions, motivations, and societal decay. Through the feigned insanity of Hamlet, the genuine madness of Ophelia, and the broader implications of moral corruption within the court of Denmark, Shakespeare ... Essays on Hamlet Madness The works of Shakespeare are central to any literature course and Hamlet is one of the key plays on which various student assignments focus. One particular theme in Hamlet on which these analysis papers focus is that of madness - the way it is represented in various characters (Hamlet's madness -half faked, half true, Ophelia's madness, psychological the disorders affecting Polonius). The Theme of Madness in Shakespeare's "Hamlet" His suspicions were first clarified when he was invited by Horatio to come to see his father's ghost. In doing so, Hamlet's father reveals that he was indeed murdered by Hamlet's uncle and orders Hamlet to seek revenge (1.5.25, 62). Hamlet, blinded by the rage of the betrayal of his uncle, begins his descent into the assumed madness of ... A Modern Perspective: Hamlet But of course Hamlet's madness is as much disguise as it is revelation; and while the Prince is the most ruthlessly observed character in the play, he is also its most unremitting observer. ... See Mack's classic essay, "The World of Hamlet," Yale Review 41 (1952): 502-23; Mack's approach is significantly extended in Harry Levin's ... Analysis of William Shakespeare's Hamlet Whether comparing Hamlet to its earliest source or the handling of the revenge plot by Kyd, Marston, or other Elizabethan or Jacobean playwrights, what stands out is the originality and complexity of Shakespeare's treatment, in his making radically new and profound uses of established stage conventions.Hamlet converts its sensational material—a vengeful ghost, a murder mystery, madness, a ... Themes Madness Hamlet: Advanced For a new-historicist essay examining madness in Hamlet in relation to Essex's dangerous subversion of Queen Elizabeth's authority in the 1590s, see Karin S. Coddon's 'Suche strange desygns, Madness, Subjectivity and Treason in Hamlet and Elizabethan Culture', reprinted in Susan Zimmerman (ed.), New Casebooks, Shakespeare's Tragedies (1998). Theme of Madness in Hamlet Through the theme of madness, one can notice how much thoughts can go behind a single action. The Tragedy of Hamlet is a play essentially about making up a human mind and that's how it touches upon the idea of madness. In the play, we have Hamlet who is either mad or pretends to be mad, there's Ophelia who truly gives in to madness, loses ... Essay on Madness in Shakespeare's Hamlet In the Hamlet play, madness has a big role and many impacts on it. The first role is that madness is the main theme other than revenge throughout the play, and even it is the cause of the plot as it is. For example, Hamlet's madness makes him display many characteristics in the play. When the play is starting, Hamlet is visited by the ghost of ... Hamlet Essay Outline and Topics. Your free sample essay on the theme of madness in Shakespeare's Hamlet.From Hamlet: Model Essays for Students by Brendan Munnelly.In six parts: Introduction: ("The canker galls the infants of the spring") Hamlet is a play in which the old destroy the young: first, by driving them into maddening circumstances, and then into the grave. Hamlet's Antic Disposition Hamlet's Antic Disposition From Hamlet, an ideal prince, and other essays in Shakesperean interpretation: Hamlet; Merchant of Venice; Othello; King Lear by Alexander W. Crawford. There is much evidence in the play that Hamlet deliberately feigned fits of madness in order to confuse and disconcert the king and his attendants. Hamlet Essay Hamlet and Macbeth are two of William Shakespeare's most famous plays. Each share not only fame, however, but format: Both feature main characters with tragic flaws that become their demise. In the cases of Hamlet and Macbeth, this flaw is madness. Whether their insanity is feigned or unfeigned, it plays a key role in their downfall. Hamlet's Insanity: Appearance vs Reality in Shakespeare's Play: [Essay Using extensive evidence from the text and scholarly criticism, it can be efficiently argued that Hamlet does indeed maintain his sanity throughout the entirety of the play. By discussing how Hamlet is faking his madness, this essay analyzes the major theme of appearance versus reality through Hamlet's character. The Madness of Hamlet and Ophelia: Mental Illness in Shakespeare The longer Hamlet waits to exact his revenge, the further he descends into madness and melancholy. A prime example of Hamlet's melancholic state is his famous "To be, or not to be" soliloquy in Act 3, Scene 1. In this monologue, Hamlet seems to be having an existential crisis as he contemplates the meaning of life and death and whether or not he would be better off taking his own life. Madness in Hamlet by William Shakespeare William Shakespeare's play Hamlet is a play about revenge, but also about "madness," and in some cases, the two intersect and become one. When Hamlet returns to find his father, The King, dead and ... PDF The Theme of Madness in Shakespeare's Hamlet May 25, 2017 The Theme of Madness in Shakespeare's Hamlet. ough revenge i. the most obvious theme in Hamlet, Shakespeare writes extensivelyabout madness. As the play progresses, the thin line. between sanity and madness blurs, leavingreaders to w. nder if Hamlet is insane. Opheli. has a minor role in the play, but the theme ofmadness is ce. Hamlet Madness Essay Essay Hamlet Madness Essay. Hamlet's madness is a key element to the play Hamlet. Hamlet, the protagonist of Hamlet, becomes depressed and horrified after discovering that his uncle Claudius has murdered his father and married Hamlet's mother. Hamlet seeks revenge on Claudius for this transgression but feels like he has lost all agency because he ... Essays on Hamlet Hamlet is more parallely than other texts. Fortinbras, Hamlet, and Laertes have their fathers murdered, then seek revenge. Brothers King Hamlet and King Claudius mirror brothers Old Norway and Old Fortinbras. Hamlet and Ophelia both lose their fathers, go mad, but there's a method in their madness, and become suicidal. Hamlet Sample Answer: Madness This essay argues that Hamlet's madness, whether feigned or real, lasting or temporary, reveals additional layers to the complexity of the character in Shakespeare's tragedy. The question of whether Hamlet's madness is genuine has been widely debated among scholarly critics. Criticism: Hamlet: A Document in Madness SOURCE: "Hamlet: A Document in Madness," in New Essays on Hamlet, edited by Mark Thornton Burnett and John Manning, 1994, pp. 189-203. 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