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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

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 .

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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.

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William Shakespeare: Hamlet’s Actions and Inactions Essay (Critical Writing)

“Hamlet” is a play for all times. Its protagonist is a contradictory and mysterious person. If he is guided by blind revenge or righteous feel of justice, why he hesitates and lingers to punish culprits if he is prudent or light-minded – these adages may be united under two maxims:” Look before you leap” and “He who hesitates is lost”. This paper is an attempt to analyze Hamlet’s actions and inactions to prove the authenticity of the application of these maxims to the protagonist.

Although the scene of the play is laid in the Danish Kingdom, the problems involve the whole of mankind to think over this play. In the first act, we get acquainted with Hamlet and it gives us some intellectual challenge. The protagonist is a noble hero, he has a philosophical set of minds, he judges everything from the height of moral virtues, but he has found himself in a complicated and even tragic predicament after having known about his mother and uncles betray. The old world is destructed, and the Ghost asks Hamlet to take responsibility and revenge for his father’s death and restore universal justice. Hamlet obeys the Ghost and is careless of consequences. Here we see the first “leap” of Hamlet because he takes too much upon himself. But this proves the Prince to be an ideal person of the Renaissance.

Hamlet disguises himself as a madman. He should convince everybody that he has gone insane. Being a jester gives an opportunity to tell everything he thinks about. The Prince gives praise to Human beings, calls him perfect, but here we hear the disappointment in life values. All Universal lacks any sense. Hamlet became animated when remembering an old play about the murder of Priam by Pyrrhus. This scene has a very emotional moment when the Prince remembers Priam’s wife Hecuba. For Hamlet it is very important: Hecuba is a faithful wife and Queen Gertrude – not. Anguish comes to the surface again, but reproaches about inaction mingle with this anguish. Why does he linger? Why not avenge his father’s death? He is angry with himself and calls himself pejorative names: “what a rogue and peasant slave am I” (Hamlet, Act II). This is an example of his hesitations.

The famous soliloquy “To be or not to be” is the culmination of Hamlet’s doubts. “To suffer The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune” (Hamlet, Act III) directly refers to the situation Hamlet is in: to fight against evil or avoid struggle. Desires controvert virtues. Hesitation is grounded on fear. The Prince is afraid to suffer a defeat. His views on life are destructed, and his goddess Justice is blind. Does he have enough powers to resist the temptation of inactivity and sleep peacefully? Once again, the Prince is prevented from action by his hesitancy. Hamlet does not moralize. He is lost in the world, lost in his hesitations. He cannot draw a demarcation line between reality and his feigned insanity. Hamlet chooses “to be”, but “to be” means to die. He claims that death is inevitable, but hesitates because it is unknown as well. The soliloquy expresses Hamlet’s torment of mind. He is determined to kill the King, but he is unsure if it will bring good or harm.

Now nothing can stop Hamlet and there is a right moment. Hamlet finds Claudius praying, but he cannot kill him. The prayer defends the King and Hamlet does not want him to die sinless. It leads to Heaven, but Claudius does not deserve it. And here Hamlet should think before he leaps. The Prince just excuses his hesitation by waiting for some other appropriate fatal occasion. He wants his revenge to be perfect and edifying. If not – he refuses it completely. He has no time to consider the circumstances and kills Polonius, once more “leaping” before thinking.

Laertes wants to compete in fencing with Hamlet and kill him during this duel. Laertes’ sword will be poisoned and the Prince will die from the wound. Hamlet is tortured by forebodings of evil. Horatio suggests declining the duel. But Hamlet’s response astonishes by its wisdom. Come what may, what must be will be, there exists some Divine power that rules the world – such thoughts occur in Hamlet’s mind for the first time.

Hamlet is uncertain whether he can believe the Ghost. He scruples to trust everybody: Ophelia, Horatio, Gertrude. He is even unsure of himself. When a troupe of actors comes, he gets inspired with his new intention. To re-act, the murder of his father means to punish the culprits. Hamlet mocks the evils of life, thus trying to delete them from reality. He is just satisfied when everybody sees that it is his uncle who has killed Hamlet’s father. His suspicions are confirmed, but he never tries to return for evil. And it happens but by an accident. Hamlet makes no attempt to punish the King. So Hamlet “leaps” into the struggle, but with much hesitation. On one hand, he is a loser, because he died, on the other – a winner, because culprits endured the punishment. He reflects upon his infirmity but does not try to put his intentions into practice. He is obsessed with thinking, not acting. This is his essence and escapes from reality. Only death can bring deliverance and oblivion from uncertainty.

Hamlet is not remarkable for willpower or determination, foresight and deep consideration. But we enjoy refined thoughts and genuine sentiments of his. The Prince lacks deliberateness in actions; he rushes to the whirl of life on the spur of the occasion. If Hamlet were a man of action, he might have killed Claudius at once together with the Queen. And everybody would think him to be a cruel murderer. If he were more prudent, he could have avoided his death and become a King himself. But could he be a good King for his people? A hesitating and indiscreet king can ruin his kingdom. He could save Ophelia, innocent victim of his indifference, Laertes, noble and loving brother. But Hamlet breaks the equilibrium of imaginative and authentic worlds, and reality turns out to be crueler than his fictional insanity. Skepticism, accompanying Hamlet, makes him vulnerable, as only strong beliefs can bring to actions. What if Hamlet has not believed the Ghost at all? Maybe it is conscience that came to him, and if he had not listened to it, his life would be full of scruples of remorse facing his father’s memory. Hamlet, the flesh and blood of his mother, wanted to sentence her to death, and if he had not been stopped by the Ghost, a fatal mistake could have been made.

It is controversial if Hamlet is a hero or a pure madman with judicious observations; his motives are mixed and vague. But we can find Hamlet in ourselves. Like him, we hesitate before an important decision and overestimate our powers. It is in human nature and when Hamlet speaks, he speaks on behalf of all people.

Works Cited

Shakespeare William. Hamlet. NY: Dover Publications, 2004.

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A study of madness in Hamlet.

A study of madness in Hamlet

I think that one of the most poignant themes of Hamlet  is the presentation and importance of madness. We first see a glimpse of madness with Hamlet who pretends to be mad, using it as a cunning mask while he battles with his own mind and conscience over the idea of revenge. There is also the character of Ophelia who turns mad with grief when she hears of her father’s death.

Although while Hamlet is holding up this pretence of madness he slowly becomes drawn into a depression, which is so deep at some points it is unclear whether he is insane or deeply depressed, I would not call this depression madness in any way because the term madness is something more obvious. It is a very blunt expression, which automatically draws one to think so something very stereotypical; similar to how Hamlet deliberately acts. Also there is no actual evidence of Hamlet being insane. However insanity is considered to be the loss of control of ones mind and acting against society. This is almost irrelevant as the society where Hamlet exists is one that he constantly is fighting to go against the normal behaviour because of those in power and control.

Hamlet assumes madness as a device while in pursuit of revenge; an aspect of the play I choose to question is whether Hamlet truly ever is mad. In Act 1 Scene 2 during a gathering of the court after the wedding of his mother and uncle we see Hamlet dressed in dark, sombre clothes, which are unsuitable for the celebratory occasion. These clothes indicate the state of mind Hamlet is in and his perception of his mother and Claudius; they could also foreshadow his future behaviour and mood.

Hamlet’s antic disposition could be regarded as a sub conscious way of avoiding the revenge of his father’s death by using it as displacement behaviour. Shakespeare could have intended for his character, Hamlet to appear to be engulfing himself in convincing everyone that he is in fact mentally unstable rather than having to take action and decide what he should do. Although at first Hamlet feels the idea of the antic disposition is a good one, it becomes apparent that even Hamlet doubts his genuine sanity.  This quote shows Hamlet commenting on his own actions, which he regrets. I think that through what he is saying he is even doubting his own sanity and almost suggesting a second personality.

“…. His madness. If’t be so,

        Hamlet is of the faction that is wronged,

        His madness is poor Hamlet’s enemy”

It seems unclear to the audience at times, if Hamlet is speaking in the act of insanity or when what he is displaying to the audience is his real self, particularly in Act 3 Scene 4 when Hamlet argues with his mother. He is wanting to show his mother a mirror which can reveal her true self so she can she how others see her. His mother does not understand this and feels it to be a threat on her life so must be in a worried state to feel threatened by her own son.

Hamlet         “Come, come, and sit you down; you shall not budge; You go not till I set you up a glass Where you may see the inmost part of you.”

Queen Gertrude “What wilt thou do? thou wilt not murder me? Help, help, ho!”

Even at the point where true insanity seems most likely, in Act 3, Scene 4 his actions are still directed to his main purpose, the revenge of his father.

“Thou wretched rash, intruding fool, farewell.”

This is a preview of the whole essay

He kills Polonius thinking him to be Claudius, without regret and then offers his mother advice which he genuinely believes to have value and through which he can explain his opinion of her and Claudius’ relationship and marriage. Hamlet is speaking openly and honestly for once. This shows a huge change of character from his first soliloquy when he says that he will have to hold his tongue.

“It is not, nor cannot come to good:

But break, my heart, for I must hold my tongue”        Act 1 Scene 2.

This profound change in Hamlet can also be seen in his comparison of himself to Hercules which shows Hamlet must be feeling very low and have a low self-esteem to want to compare himself to a hero. He is upset about his lack of skill and talent as shown in Hercules, which is very worrying; it shows Hamlet to be very depressed which I think is almost merging into insanity due to the profound change in character that is evident. In Act 1 Scene 2,

“My father’s brother, but no more like my father

         Than I to Hercules”.

Hamlet uses this comparison to show that he is unlike Hercules to the extreme. Hercules is a god, a mythological being who was known for strength and courage. He is saying he is not Hercules, meaning he is not strong and confrontational. But in Act 5 Scenes 1,

         “Let Hercules himself so what he may,

        The cat will mew and the dog will have his day.”

Here Hamlet is saying that not even Hercules could stop him from doing what is needed. Hamlet shows the comparison that a cat will mew and a dog will have its day, this is nature – what will happen and no one can change it. So therefore he is meaning no one, not even Hercules can prevent him from doing what should be done. This change from a man, who indicates his weakness compared to Hercules to a man who claims that even Hercules could not stop him, shows the growth in Hamlet from indecisive weakling to active tragic hero.

This change in personality and character shows the change in his state of mind. It is as though Hamlet has developed a second personality, the side of him that is able to take action.  This shows a loss of control and a huge difference from our first impression of Hamlet, but does not mean that he is mad. It could just show the decrease of Hamlet’s care for the world. In today’s society I do not think that Hamlet’s actions would be classed as an act of insanity but merely violent, ruthless behaviour. When Hamlet most acts insane he knows what he is doing and uses clever puns and wit so I am compelled to think that it is at these times he is saner than at other points. Some one who knows what they are doing cannot be insane because they still regain some self control if only a weak grasp.

It is not a question of whether Hamlet truly is mad, because this we are not able to prove either way without personally questioning Shakespeare, it is more deciphering the act of madness from the deep depression and mental state which could be the cause of his actions later in the play and whether this grief descends into insanity at any point.

Hamlet assumed a state of madness in order to complete the task given to him by his father, this mask was able to conceal Hamlet’s true clever plan and distracted Claudius from knowing the truth, which is that Hamlet knows about him murdering his father.

 He tells us at the start of the play in his first soliloquy that he is in such a low state that he would consider killing himself had not god “fixed His canon ‘gainst self-slaughter”.

This deep depression could be caused by his father’s recent death and his mother’s rapid remarriage. We do not know of Hamlets character before the start of the play so it is assumed his state of mind is caused by these occurrences.

Too many of his “wild and whirling words”  carry direct meaning for us to believe he’s mad for any great length of time. In his ‘mad’ exchanges with his enemies, Claudius, Polonius and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, there is far too much method in his madness. Hamlet’s act of madness has a purpose: to confuse or frighten Claudius, to prevent Polonius, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern from finding out the truth. He also uses his state of mind to indulge in some malicious humour, as is the famous style of Shakespeare. Polonius, the butt of many sly attacks never suspects him to be anything but mad. It is him who first informs Hamlet’s mother and uncle that Hamlet has been acting odd.

Polonius “I will be brief: your noble son is mad.

Mad I call it, for to define true madness,

What is ‘t but to be nothing else but mad?” Act 2 Scene 2

The more intelligent and cunning Claudius on the other hand, suspects throughout the play that Hamlet’s madness is feigned. This could be because he can see through what Hamlet says, as there are definite reasons for what he does and says. He also tests Hamlet. He spies on him and sends in Hamlet’s close friends from university as spies to investigate whether he is really mad. This in turn infuriates Hamlet more because Claudius is now turning his old friends against him. This could this be enough for Hamlet to be pushed over the edge into a more sinister mood, which would therefore be an explanation for his later actions.

Assessing Hamlets madness becomes even more complicated when he apologizes to Laertes, sincerely, for the wrongs he has suffered. Hamlet blames not himself but his madness, which makes it seem as if he is admitting that he fell foul of his own pretending and did actually do mad things: including killing Polonius and driving Ophelia to suicide. Or else he could just be blaming himself for his mask of madness; the pretence going too far and achieving his revenge consumed him and was as though the mask took over his body, soul.

“Was ’t Hamlet wronged Laertes? Never Hamlet.

        If Hamlet from himself be ta’en away,

        And when he’s not himself does wrong Laertes,

Then Hamlet does it not, Hamlet denies it.

        Who does it then? His madness. If’t be so,

        His madness is poor Hamlet’s enemy.”

He is grieving and could be entering into depression again now he had realised that his actions have caused the death of the women he ‘loved’: although we are never sure of his true feelings.

Hamlet goes through extreme fluctuations of mood throughout the play, he goes through intense depression and melancholy and then sudden excitement. The depths of despair and sudden bursts of hatred he reveals through his soliloquies shows his troubled mind.

Hamlet’s pretence of madness has a big effect on other characters of the play. He particularly has an effect on Ophelia, which in turn convinces Polonius of his ‘madness’.

Ophelia’s madness is very stereotypical and is never questioned. She sings and laughs and appears to have no sense of what events have happened. Such as the death of her father which is the presumed cause of this madness.

In comparison to Hamlet’s ‘madness’ Ophelia’s mental state still shows her passive nature, but looks positively pathetic and tragic when compared to Hamlet’s behaviour. Hamlet’s feigned madness and depression results in combative attacks and sly battles of wits. Ophelia descends into a harmless humour. She is mad with grief and leaves herself almost instantly to nonsense, but her madness is entirely genuine. Her words have no connection with other characters. Though there are themes running through the remarks, snatches of songs and rhymes she says in her appearances, that merely suggest the causes of her madness. She does not slip in and out of madness, as does Hamlet.

In Act 3 Scene 2 Hamlet and Ophelia confront each other, while being watched by Polonius and Claudius. Ophelia returns the love letters sent to her by Hamlet. Hamlet abandons verse for prose and presents a savage attitude. His speech is disjointed and he uses puns. He uses the word nunnery, which means convent as well as the Shakespearean slang for brothel; we are not told which meaning is intended but it is not clear whether Hamlet knows either. But this does not resemble madness, although he appears to have a change of character the themes are consistent and he is speaking his mind, although he should not be doing so to a woman as he should act as a gentleman. The king and Ophelia’s father watch this and this convinces the king that Hamlet is not insane. Claudius is clever as is Hamlet and can see through the mask at the game Hamlet is playing, although it worries the king, as he does not yet know why Hamlet is doing this.

The madness of Hamlet and Ophelia shows a lot about the society. It could be the society’s corrupt behaviour that causes the pretend madness of Hamlet and true insanity of Ophelia; the corrupt power of the court has infected other people, such as Hamlet so his actions could be blamed on the behaviour of Claudius and Polonius, which in turn killed Polonius. The feelings of the younger generation, Hamlet, Ophelia, Laertes have been ignored and quietened for so long that the depression and grief builds up to the point of loss of control.

The society sees Hamlet’s madness as dangerous; it is a way of him expressing himself and this is often confused with rebellion. Hamlet presents an aggressive and dangerous distortion of the world and his mask consumes him where by the end of the play all of the normal society has left Hamlet and it is as though he is in his own society.

It is a huge contrast to the insanity of Ophelia who simply spoke about her feelings and had no control over her mind. Although this is also going against the society because women were not meant to speak out. It was not correct for a woman to talk openly and behave how Ophelia was.

The society of Elsinore is very controlling and do not see insanity as an illness but as a threat. The king sees Hamlet’s madness as “ turbulent and dangerous” . He suspects that his madness may be a pretence and considers it to be more a depression but views Hamlet as a problem because of what he may say or do, with no control over his mind. So sends him away to England as an effort to control him and have him killed, but we can see through Hamlet’s escape Shakespeare uses this to prove at this time he is not mad, he is simply clever. Hamlet has managed to prove his sanity by escaping this fate left for him by his uncle, this shows the state of mind of the prince has improved or was never mad to start with.

Samantha Ball20/04/07

Document Details

• Word Count 2513
• Page Count 4
• Level AS and A Level
• Subject English

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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.

After the ecstasy of love, it is the grief which turns him towards madness which he can’t notice by himself i.e. when the gravedigger tells him that Hamlet was sent to England because he was mad, he cries out, “ how came he mad? ”.

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? ”.

He grants him mad and asks to “ find out the cause of this…defect .” But at the same time, one also learns that Hamlet is a supremely conscious character. It is again Polonius who notices that “ though this be madness, yet there is method in’t .”

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.

Hamlet answers on the true nature of his madness when he says that “I essentially am not in madness, but mad in craft.” It clarifies the thematic concerns on madness in the play. Madness can also be a pretention.

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.

It is hard to notice whether it is caused by the murder of his father by her own lover or the loss of Hamlet’s love for her or maybe both. Her symptoms are visibly that of losing one’s mind.

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.

How does Ophelia Commit Suicide

This essay about the tragic demise of Ophelia in Shakespeare’s “Hamlet.” It explores her descent into madness and eventual suicide, analyzing the factors that contribute to her tragic end. Ophelia’s struggles with conflicting expectations, familial pressures, and the betrayal of her lover, Hamlet, are examined, shedding light on the societal constraints and patriarchal pressures faced by women in Shakespearean England. Through an exploration of Ophelia’s character and the symbolism of flowers in the play, the essay delves into the complexities of human nature and the destructive power of unchecked ambition and misogyny.

How it works

Shakespeare’s portrayal of Ophelia in “Hamlet” is one of the most enigmatic and tragic characters in literature. Her descent into madness and eventual suicide has intrigued audiences and scholars alike for centuries. While the exact circumstances surrounding her death are open to interpretation, examining Ophelia’s actions and state of mind provides insight into her tragic end.

Ophelia’s suicide is not explicitly depicted in the play but is rather reported by Queen Gertrude in Act IV, Scene VII. Gertrude describes Ophelia’s death by drowning, suggesting that she fell into the brook while gathering flowers, weighed down by the heavy burden of her madness and grief.

This ambiguous account leaves room for speculation regarding the nature of Ophelia’s intentions and the events leading up to her demise.

One interpretation suggests that Ophelia’s suicide is a culmination of the overwhelming pressures and conflicts she faces throughout the play. As a young woman caught between the conflicting expectations of her father, brother, and lover, Ophelia experiences a profound sense of powerlessness and despair. Her father Polonius manipulates her into spying on Hamlet, her beloved, while her brother Laertes warns her against pursuing a relationship with him. Meanwhile, Hamlet’s erratic behavior and rejection further destabilize her fragile mental state.

Ophelia’s madness, characterized by her fragmented speech and erratic behavior, serves as a coping mechanism for the emotional turmoil she experiences. Unable to reconcile the conflicting demands placed upon her, she retreats into a state of delusion and confusion. Her famous songs and floral imagery reflect her inner turmoil, as she grapples with the loss of her father, the betrayal of her lover, and the disintegration of her own identity.

The symbolism of Ophelia’s flowers is particularly significant in understanding her suicide. Throughout the play, flowers serve as symbols of love, innocence, and death. Ophelia’s distribution of flowers to the other characters reflects her attempts to communicate her emotions and desires, albeit in a fragmented and disjointed manner. In her final moments, surrounded by the flowers she once cherished, Ophelia’s suicide becomes a tragic manifestation of her inner turmoil and despair.

Ultimately, Ophelia’s suicide remains a poignant and unresolved mystery in “Hamlet.” While the circumstances surrounding her death are open to interpretation, her tragic end serves as a reflection of the societal constraints and patriarchal pressures faced by women in Shakespearean England. By exploring Ophelia’s character and the events leading up to her demise, audiences gain insight into the complexities of human nature and the destructive power of unchecked ambition and misogyny.

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This vivid novel of mental illness captures the power of living on

‘what kingdom,’ by fine grabol, is set at a residential facility meant to transition residents out into the world.

The mad have long haunted the borderlands of our fiction. Consider the attic-bound wife in “Jane Eyre,” the deluded ranters of Dostoevsky and Gogol, or all of Kleist’s lunatics, driven crazy by their dogged adherence to absurd principles. These figures can be comic or tragic, jesters or men who have fooled themselves into believing they’re the kings. All destabilize the reality of a narrative, injecting a dangerous dose of irrationality into circumstances otherwise defined by decorum and rigorous self-interest.

As madness became mental illness, the unwell and their institutions have taken on a more central role in their own stories. Memoirs and autobiographical novels such as “The Eden Express” and “The Bell Jar” foregrounded mental breakdowns, from delusions and hallucinations to hospitalization and treatment. These institutions then became subjects in themselves, their straitjackets and barred windows standing in for social repression at large. Books like “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest ” present illness and treatment through a metaphorical lens, as symptoms of something else, and not as subjects in and of themselves.

These precisely are the concerns of “What Kingdom,” the Danish poet Fine Grabol’s prizewinning debut novel. Grabol’s unnamed narrator lives on the fifth floor of a psychiatric housing facility, in the temporary accommodations for young people (the book’s Danish title translates to “Youth Unit ” ) transitioning back into society following periods of hospitalization. With her schizotypal personality disorder and bipolar disorder diagnoses, the narrator has already experienced her share of institutionalization, and has come to “the residential facility” to learn skills and routines that might allow her to live on her own again. “Those of us with no place to live and no place to die end up in this trial home,” she writes in Martin Aitken’s vivid translation, “this impermanent halfway house.”

Grabol’s narrator cannot sleep, hallucinates that the building is breathing, and experiences memory loss in the aftermath of electroconvulsive therapy and her pharmaceutical regimen. She longs to devour neon tubes, then vomits up her food. Violent episodes are followed by recessed ones, as hyper-attunement to minute details — the fingerprints left on a computer screen, the thud of a fellow resident’s unique gait — gives way to numbness. “I sometimes wake up,” she observes, “and realize that what’s going to happen has no name.”

This results in “a self-narrative with gaps,” told in an episodic present tense that directly plugs you into each moment — from floor meetings and outings to the grocery store to insomniac periods and manic episodes — even as it elides her self-harming and occasional suicide attempts. A single period can separate the preparation of a razor blade from the staff bandaging her arms. These gaps reveal the novel’s fundamental instability. However close we feel to Grabol’s narrator, there is much more she won’t or can’t convey to us.

Her floor of the residential facility is meant to transition residents out into the world, teaching them routines that will place guardrails around their instability. They shop and cook for one another, sing karaoke, go on outings, play in a band. After periods of confinement, they need to learn to be comfortable in their own rooms, with their own things, managing, for the most part, their own time.

It is an environment of deliberate limits, providing its residents the safety of their “incomplete individuality.” The staff are not authoritarians, but custodians, aides who “see the two poles ill and well as an acknowledgment of the individual’s pain.” They want to keep their charges out of the hospital, and to ease their way back into society. We are a long ways from the sadism of Nurse Ratched. Yet this security and support come with real trade-offs: The narrator’s room might be hers to design and keep up, but the staff will always have an extra key. Her home there will always be provisional, temporary, subject to changes in the law and her own situation.

When she was a teenager, Grabol was institutionalized in a series of psychiatric hospitals, and much of “What Kingdom” appears to be autobiographical. Her descriptions can be both beautiful and queasily intimate, a record of treatment’s effects on both mind and body. In the hospital, the narrator takes “something that would make me disappear.” The staff make her drink activated charcoal, turning her excrement into “thin, oily jets of liquid,” which only adds to her distress.

This period is now in Grabol’s past, and even though the novel is written in an insistent present tense, her narrator conveys the experiences at hand in a variety of registers. She discusses the gendered qualities of diagnosis — “boys are schizotypal, girls are borderline or obsessive-compulsive” — relays how various laws affect their housing, and questions how mental illness is theorized and treated. These digressions can be aphoristic, and sometimes they extend to become minor essays on how we conceive of the ill and the well. “Psychiatry exists on the premise of internally directed treatment forms,” she writes. “Could we not imagine treatments that are instead externally directed, involving the outside world gearing itself towards a wider and more comprehensive emotional spectrum?” Yet her conclusions are unresolved and ambivalent: “I don’t know.”

The result is a novel deeply versed in the experience and terminology of psychiatric treatment, without taking on the tenor of therapy. In “What Kingdom,” a diagnosis is only one part of the explanation, and it certainly is not a cure. Grabol’s narrator cannot escape or resolve her illness, and there is no third-act revelation of buried trauma that might yet be resolved. Instead, the poet tries to place us within her experience, conveying through an accumulation of acute details the alternately mundane and hallucinatory qualities of deep mental illness. From one page to the next, a description of sluggish summer boredom will give way to a dream in which the narrator transforms into a massive esophagus and swallows the entire facility, with only a chapter heading to separate them. And by fracturing the narrative, Grabol effectively scrambles all sense of progress, highlighting the stop-start, backsliding reality of treatment. Hers is not a novel of overcoming or repudiating. “What Kingdom ” is about the living-through and the living-with, about the hard-won routines of survival, and the remarkable persistence of a life from one day to the next.

Robert Rubsam is a writer and critic whose work has been published in the New York Times Magazine, the Atlantic, the Baffler and the Nation.

What Kingdom

By Fine Grabol, translated from Danish by Martin Aitken

Archipelago. 146 pp. $18, paperback

An earlier version of this review misidentified the husband of Bertha Antoinetta Rochester in “Jane Eyre.” It was Edward Rochester, not Heathcliff. This version has been corrected.

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Home — Essay Samples — Literature — Hamlet Madness — The Important Theme of Madness in Hamlet by William Shakespeare

The Important Theme of Madness in Hamlet by William Shakespeare

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Critic’s Notebook

In Belfast and Ballybeg, Forging a Bolder Future

“Agreement,” at Irish Arts Center, and “Philadelphia, Here I Come!,” at Irish Repertory Theater, have a timeless feel, rooted in their eras and resonant in ours.

By Laura Collins-Hughes

In more placid times, it would be downright bizarre to classify Owen McCafferty’s political drama “ Agreement ” as feel-good entertainment.

In these fraught, belligerent times, though, there is comfort, even a twinge of hope, in the play’s retelling of the knotty negotiations that finally made an enduring peace possible in Northern Ireland. Part of the United Kingdom, it was long violently divided between Catholics and the Protestant majority, with republicans wanting the region to join the predominantly Catholic Republic of Ireland and unionists vehemently opposed. After decades of blood-soaked warring — and bitter, sectarian score-keeping about who did what to whom — the Good Friday Agreement pointed a different way forward.

It sounds like the makings of theater for wonks, doesn’t it? Seven politicians holed up together in Belfast in April 1998, battling their way toward consensus as the clock ticks down. Tony Blair, the British prime minister, has a family vacation to get to in Spain, so they need to complete the deal by Thursday. In Charlotte Westenra’s impeccably acted production for Lyric Theater, Belfast, the group blows past that deadline and a delirious dream ballet erupts — all of these exhausted people suddenly dancing.

“Agreement,” at Irish Arts Center in Manhattan, is generally less colorful than that, and its barrage of contentious details can be overwhelming. But really, negotiations are stuck on the same few specifics: power sharing, economic cooperation, the decommissioning of paramilitary weapons and the release of prisoners.

The show’s most teasing joke is having the career pacifist John Hume (Dan Gordon), the gentlest pol in the room, ask the audience whether there’s any need for him to explain an elusive central point yet again. Whereupon he does not clarify.

“You all get it, don’t you?” Hume says, moving briskly along. “And if you haven’t — pay attention!”

In the rushing current of this play, what buoys us isn’t the particularities but rather the personalities. Mo Mowlam (Andrea Irvine), the flagrantly unpretentious British secretary of state for Northern Ireland and the only woman in the mix; Gerry Adams (Chris Corrigan), the leader of Sinn Fein, the political wing of the Irish Republican Army, who turns out to be good for a wisecrack at a urinal; Bertie Ahern (Ronan Leahy), the Irish premier, freshly in mourning for his mother and showing up anyway — this is a charismatic bunch.

With the American special envoy George Mitchell (Richard Croxford), the former Senator, as a kind of interloper-facilitator, they are quite likable, mostly, despite Blair (Martin Hutson) being besotted with his smiley self, and the men’s sexist sidelining of Mowlam. Her lack of vanity is in stark contrast to the obstructive male egotism on display. Radiation treatments have made her hair fall out, but when her wig gets too hot, she takes it off. Puts her stocking feet up on her desk, too.

The most maddeningly intransigent negotiator is the pinstriped David Trimble (Ruairi Conaghan), soon to become first minister of Northern Ireland. He is alienating in his stubbornness, yet he and Hume will share that year’s Nobel Peace Prize.

In honoring the healing accord reached in Belfast, the Nobel Committee said it hoped “that the foundations which have now been laid will not only lead to lasting peace in Northern Ireland, but also serve to inspire peaceful solutions to other religious, ethnic and national conflicts around the world.”

That, of course, is why “Agreement,” with its universal title, is a meditation for this moment: because peacemaking is a human emergency, very much ongoing.

The drama is similarly timeless over at Irish Repertory Theater, where Ciaran O’Reilly has staged a stellar, stinging revival of Brian Friel’s 1964 comedy, “ Philadelphia, Here I Come! ” Part of the company’s seasonlong Friel Project, it is the work of a director who understands the play in his very bones.

O’Reilly directed it in 2005 , acted in it in 1990 , and shares some biography with Gar, its young protagonist, who is preparing to leave his home in fictional, claustrophobically small Ballybeg, County Donegal, for the United States. O’Reilly, Irish Rep’s producing director, was 19 when he quit his Irish hometown.

Set on the eve of Gar’s departure, “Philadelphia” is both very funny and liable to take a sharp little dagger to your heart as it ponders the guts it takes to leave home for another country, and the guts it takes to forge a future where you’ve always been. At its center is an impeccable double act: David McElwee as the timid, external Gar and A.J. Shively as the garrulous, unconstrained Gar inside his head.

At 25, Gar wants nothing more desperately than for his taciturn, widowed father (O’Reilly) to love him in a way he can at least detect, but the gulf between them, even at the same dinner table, might as well be an ocean wide.

The play’s whipsaw emotional balance is complex, delicate, subtle. This superb production delineates it all.

Through May 12 at Irish Arts Center, Manhattan; irishartscenter.org . Running time: 1 hour 40 minutes.

Philadelphia, Here I Come!

Through May 5 at Irish Repertory Theater, Manhattan; irishrep.org . Running time: 2 hours 15 minutes.

Arts and Culture Across Europe

A reimagining of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s “Sunset Boulevard,” starring Nicole Scherzinger as Norma Desmond, the long forgotten silent movie star who descends into madness, was the big winner at this year’s Olivier Awards .

New productions of “Macbeth” and “Hamlet” in Paris follow a French tradition of adapting familiar works . The results are innovative, and sometimes cryptic.

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At a retrospective of John Singer Sargent’s portraits in London, where the American expatriate fled after creating a scandal in Paris, clothes offer both armor and self-expression .