is hamlet crazy essay

Is Shakespeare’s Hamlet Really Crazy? Essay

There is hardly a better-known tragedy by William Shakespeare than “Hamlet”. His character was not a banal avenger or “psycho”; everything is much more complicated. The poem suggests a wide variety of interpretations, but mainly there are two points of view. According to the first one, Hamlet pretends to be mad, so that he is not taken seriously and is not considered as dangerous, under the guise of a madman, he can say anything. It gives him the opportunity to observe others, to collect evidence that Claudius really killed his father. According to another point of view, he is actually insane.

Unbearable grief from the death of a loved one can affect a person in different ways, driving him or her into complete despair or igniting a fire in the soul. It often depends on external influences, the environment, the outer world, as well as on the inner world of a person, his or her character, beliefs. However, personal choice still plays a crucial role, so from my point of view, Hamlet’s insanity is fictional.

Hamlet put on fake insanity and simulated that his mind is greatly damaged, in order not to incur the suspicions of his uncle. Hamlet says, “Here, as before, never, so help you mercy, How strange or odd some’er I bear myself” (Shakespeare 69). When Hamlet explains to Horatio what qualities he values in him, the Prince abruptly stops speaking when he sees the king and all the court attendants approaching, and says, “They are coming to the play. I must be idle. Get you a place.” In the second act, there is a line “I am but mad north-north-west. When the wind is southerly, I know a hawk from a handsaw. (Shakespeare 107). From these words, it is clear that Hamlet’s madness is a mask that he puts on himself.

Prince is not mad as he shows it to others – it’s all just a game. By playing his part, he delayed the desired ending for as long, waiting for the right moment. All this time, his soul is eager for action, Hamlet blames himself for the delay but does not want to rush. In his famous monologue, he asks the question “To be or not to be—that is the question: Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, Or to take arms against a sea of troubles And, by opposing, end them.” (Shakespeare 127). His speech is often directed not to someone, but to himself. The culmination of this internal struggle is a conversation with Gertrude and the murder of Polonius. Hamlet can’t wait any longer, he takes out all his anger and grief on his mother and, wanting to do his duty without delay, impales Polonius. He expected to see Claudius in his place, but he was mistaken.

But still, does Hamlet go crazy or not? Not that he was mad with grief, like Ophelia, or with a desire for revenge, like Laertes. In this Hamlet was rational: Prince did not believe the Ghost, he developed a plan, conducted a real investigative experiment, did not kill Claudius while praying. He also repeatedly admits that his insanity is feigned. Thus, Hamlet was not actually mad, but the game that he played did not pass without a trace for his consciousness. Hamlet’s former integrity of views on life and reality, as it then seemed to him, was broken.

Shakespeare, William. Hamlet . Edited by Barbara A. Mowat, and Paul Werstine, The Folger Shakespeare Library, 2012.

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IvyPanda . 2022. "Is Shakespeare's Hamlet Really Crazy?" September 6, 2022. https://ivypanda.com/essays/is-shakespeares-hamlet-really-crazy/.

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Bibliography

IvyPanda . "Is Shakespeare's Hamlet Really Crazy?" September 6, 2022. https://ivypanda.com/essays/is-shakespeares-hamlet-really-crazy/.

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William Shakespeare’s Hamlet: Is He Insane?

Introduction, works cited.

The issue of insanity has often been uncomfortable, for the average human being as well as for the writer. It often provides a fascinating subject for drama, as has been demonstrated brilliantly by William Shakespeare as insanity plays a key role in Shakespeare’s tragedy Hamlet. In this play, the young prince of Denmark is informed by the ghost of his father that his Uncle Claudius, now married to Hamlet’s mother, murdered his father with poison. Hamlet creates a plan in which he’ll act insane in order to discover the truth, but he might already be insane since he truly believes he is seeing and talking with ghosts. While Hamlet at first seems to be truly insane, Shakespeare demonstrates through language and action that there is a definite method behind Hamlet’s madness and therefore he is only pretending to be insane.

When the play opens, Hamlet appears to be an intelligent young man who is maybe a little spoiled. He is aware of his duties as a prince and a son and he had once a bright future ahead of him as his father was king of Denmark. At the same time, though, he is quickly associated with the idea of insanity. His first spoken words in the play, “a little more than kin, and less than kind!” (I, ii), are spoken in an aside to himself, indicating the disdain in which he holds his uncle and mother, but could also be interpreted as the first signs of insanity as he is seen to be talking to himself. Responding to his uncle, his next words, “Not so, my lord. I am too much in the sun” (I, ii), demonstrate his ability to turn a phrase and perhaps is another sign of insanity. In addition, Hamlet demonstrates an almost suicidal depression following his father’s death and his mother’s betrayal, only kept from killing himself by his religious upbringing: “O that this too too sullied flesh would melt, / Thaw, and resolve itself into a dew, / Or that the Everlasting had not fixed / His canon ‘gainst self-slaughter” (I, ii).

Throughout the play, Hamlet displays lapses in reality, wishing he were dead or participating in wild antics designed to convince others of his instability while allowing him greater freedom, revealing not that he is insane, but that he is greatly conflicted. “One part of him says that he must take revenge, another part finds it horrible; he attempts to reconcile these conflicting feelings by saying that he fears the Ghost may be a devil” (Westlund, 1978: 252). With Ophelia, he is able to get away with many sexual remarks that would not have been allowed otherwise although he makes it clear he wants nothing to do with her and he confuses others with wordplay. This is seen in his responses to Polonius: “Do you see that yonder cloud that’s almost in shape of a camel? … Methinks it is like a weasel … or like a whale” (III, ii). Each change in animal is not voiced until after Polonius has provided him with agreement, such as one might for a child or mentally fragile person.

Despite his insane ravings and actions, however, there is a certain method to Hamlet’s madness that indicates a sane mind furiously at work. This is first and mostly evident in the language he uses and his skill with the language of others. “The soliloquy, the last scene, the first scene, the play – each and together – make an impossible coherence of truths that are both undeniably incomparable and undeniably coexistent” (Booth, 1969: 171). His ability to quickly catch a double or triple meaning in a phrase or a word is the first indication of a very active mind. The biggest clue that Hamlet is sane, though, is his ability to turn his sanity on and off depending upon who might be listening. When Horatio tells him of the ghost, Hamlet asks detailed, sane questions about the ghosts appearance – “Armed, say you? … From top to toe? … looked he frowningly? … Pale or red? … And fixed his eyes upon you? … Stayed it long? … His beard was grizzled, no?”

(I, ii). Hamlet’s quick appraisal of his father’s message based upon this description indicates he is very observant, very intelligent and is able to work his way through to a reasonable conclusion and appropriate course of action quickly, all traits that indicate he is sane. The vital clue in this early section that perhaps Hamlet is not as crazy as he pretends is contained in his requirement that both Horatio and Marcellus swear on his sword never to tell anyone about the ghost and “here as before, never, so help you mercy, / How strange or odd some’er I bear myself / (As I perchance hereafter shall think meet / to put an antic disposition on)” (I,v) to stop believing that he knows what he is doing. Throughout the rest of the play, even in his antic ramblings, Hamlet proves himself remarkably astute in his observations, just as he appears in the beginning.

The final proof lies in his ability to keep up the insane act in front of the people he knows it is imperative to fool and in his consistent course of action in proving his uncle’s treachery. Every motion he makes from the time he sees his father’s ghost, is geared toward publicly proving the ghost’s revelation and in bringing about the revenge his father demanded. Before Rosencrantz and Guildenstern he remains the fool until he comes across the player and hatches his plan to stage “The Murder of Gonzago” as a means of forcing the guilty spirit out of his uncle. His brilliant handling of the assassins proves that while he is busy working to bring about his uncle’s downfall, he is not so single-minded as to neglect to pay attention to other warning signs. “He places inordinate importance on doing and knowing perfectly; throughout most of his experience he also places the responsibility for that knowing and that doing solely on himself” (Hassel, 1994: 610). Although his treatment of Ophelia is often seen as harsh, Hamlet recognizes that her kind words and sweet spirit also threaten the single-minded hunt he’s embarked upon. His rejection of her causes her to go truly insane in a stunning counterpart to Hamlet’s feigned performance.

Through language, actions and comparisons, Shakespeare is able to demonstrate both Hamlet’s madness as well as his sanity, leaving it ultimately up to his reader, or audience, to make the final determination. This final question boils down to whether it is accepted that Hamlet was sane at the beginning of the play. Within the timeframe of the story itself, with the acceptance of Hamlet as a completely sane and rationale although upset young man, there is little doubt that Hamlet is as sound of mind as most of the rest of the characters. His use of language, his consistent ability to stay true to his course and his final success in denouncing the king demonstrate that he had a purpose, a will and a logical course of action. This is compared against the actions of Ophelia, who is not capable of participating in a simple conversation, has no purpose and no final triumph following the onset of her madness.

Booth, Stephen. “On the Value of Hamlet.” Selected Papers from the English Institute. Norman Rabkin (Ed.). New York: 1969.

Hassel, R. Chris Jr. “Hamlet’s ‘Too, Too Solid Flesh.’” Sixteenth Century Journal. Vol. 25, N. 3, (994), pp. 609-622.

Shakespeare, William. “Hamlet.” The Complete Pelican Shakespeare. New York: Viking, 1969, pp. 930-976.

Westlund, Joseph. “Ambivalence in the Player’s Speech in Hamlet.” Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900. Vol. 18, N. 2, (1978), pp. 245-256.

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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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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

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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)

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Was Hamlet Really Crazy?

People can interpret William Shakespeare ’s Hamlet , the Prince of Denmark, as being sane, insane or a bit of both. This is because points of contention such as murdering others, considering suicide and seeing ghosts all have rationalizations toward different conclusions. Cultural mandates and assumptions also change the definition of what sane even is, and the character’s mental state cannot be determined with certainty if the definition of lucidity is not static. As Shakespeare no longer can assert what he truly intended, the best modern actors and directors can do is work under their own analysis.

The majority of cultures believe life is valuable and that murder therefore is wrong, crossing a line into a degree of insanity. The Prince of Denmark is insane by this measure, as he kills more than one person over the course of the play. At the same time, people in most communities also value seeking justice, and in some instances, taking a life is considered justifiable. In the United States, for example, multiple states allow the death penalty for certain types of crime. An analyst can view the character as sane if he accepts that, through taking the life of immoral or sinful people, the character is merely trying to avenge his father’s death.

Consideration of Suicide

In perhaps the most well-known speech in all of English literature , Hamlet ponders whether or not to kill himself, asking whether it is better “to be, or not to be.” Most cultures consider the ending of one’s own life an act of insanity, similar to taking the life of someone else. That he contemplates suicide therefore could be a mark that his mental stability is unraveling. Given that much of what he holds dear has been lost or proven false, however, and given that he wants relief from his extreme hurt and grief, wanting a way out could be interpreted as sanely following the Freudian pleasure principle.

Seeing a Ghost

Hamlet sees the ghost of his dead father as he is out taking a stroll late at night. His assertion of this vision might have been a point for the case toward insanity, but three of his friends also see the ghost. This proves that the spirit is not simply the product of his troubled mind. Later in the play, however, the ghost appears to him again, and this time, no one else sees it. This could mean that he now is seeing things, or it could be that the ghost has his own motives for not appearing to the others present.

Fighting Off Friends

When the ghost of Hamlet’s father first appears, the ghost bids his son to follow him. Hamlet’s friends fear for his safety and try to stop him from leaving. He fends them off at sword point. Some literary experts question whether this course of action is evidence of insanity, as most people would flee from a ghost and recognize when friends were merely trying to help. On the other hand, going with the ghost is rational considering that the Prince of Denmark desperately misses his father and wants to know once and for all whether his father was murdered.

Inconsistency and Ophelia

Hamlet’s actions and words are extremely inconsistent. He tells his love interest, Ophelia, that he no longer loves her, for example, but then later jumps into her grave as he prepares for a fight, professing his passion. Modern psychologists often assert that inconsistent actions and speech are signs of emotional and mental distress, but it isn’t clear whether the inconsistency comes from going crazy or from the overwhelming stresses of his circumstances. Some people assert that, were he sane and truly in love, he wouldn’t have tried to push Ophelia away and been mean to her, but others point out that the actions of his mother have destroyed his trust of women and that his actions toward Ophelia are misdirected.

Direct Assertion

Hamlet says very clearly that he is not mad, but that he is merely acting insane. Experts sometimes take this at face value and point out that playing mad serves his intent to avenge his father. Those who take the other side of the argument claim that people who are really insane don’t necessarily recognize their lack of lucidity.

Sane and Insane

Those who have studied Hamlet sometimes claim that he was both mad and not mad. A problem when trying to debate his mental state is that people typically assume that sanity is a consistent thing. This is not always true, as people can move in and out of periods of lucidity, such as during severe illness. It might be he had moments of clarity, such as when he plotted to catch his father’s murderer, but that he could not sustain that clarity and therefore did not always do sane things.

Another interpretation is that he begins the play sane but becomes mad by the end. The idea here is that, by acting crazy, he slowly lost his ability to discern good rationalization and proper behavior. A problem with this interpretation is that his troubles continue to increase over time. An increase in strange behavior might be a response to this increase in stress, not evidence of worsened craziness.

The Big Problem

A major issue in trying to determine whether Shakespeare wanted the main character of his play to be sane or insane is that sanity by itself is somewhat open to interpretation. Behavior that is acceptable to one culture might not be acceptable to another, for instance. Rationalization also is assumed to be a mark of sanity, but as murderers often demonstrate, even “insane” acts can be carefully plotted and thought out. The best anyone can do, therefore is to interpret his actions and speeches under his own cultural and personal lens.

Tricia has a Literature degree from Sonoma State University and has been a frequent LanguageHumanities contributor for many years. She is especially passionate about reading and writing, although her other interests include medicine, art, film, history, politics, ethics, and religion. Tricia lives in Northern California and is currently working on her first novel.

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Discussion Comments

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• By: Georgios Kollidas As no objective determination of Hamlet's sanity is possible, actors are left to their own discretion in how to play Shakespeare's prince.
• By: Arsgera Hamlet's actions, such as murdering others and considering suicide, must be evaluated when determining his sanity.
• By: Georgios Kollidas Shakespeare has Hamlet say that he is not sane, but only pretending.

Reasons why Hamlet is not Insane

This essay will argue against the notion that Hamlet is insane in Shakespeare’s play. It will present reasons and evidence suggesting that his actions and thoughts are a result of strategic planning and profound emotional distress rather than madness. On PapersOwl, there’s also a selection of free essay templates associated with Hamlet.

How it works

Though it may seem that Hamlet looks insane sometimes but in reality Hamlet is not insane. Hamlet is trying to seek the revenge that his father wants him to get. The insanity the people think they see in Hamlet, is what Hamlet sees himself as quandaring on what to do. Seeking revenge is hard for Hamlet to do, in the since he is going to end up killing his mother’s lover, but on the other hand his father’s killer.

Hamlet is naturally appalled to find himself failing to play the prescribed royal part of righteous, avenging son., Hamlet feels that he can’t pursue his father’s position. Hamlet, finds himself struggling to stick to the script to revenge, but keeps himself sane. Noticing that Hamlet quandaring on what to about getting revenge can show that he’s not insane. His suicidal reluctance to avenge his father, is his restrained desire for his mother’s lover, he would be killing someone like himself if he killed Claudius. For that his mother’s lover is the killer of his father. There would be no reason to ask Hamlet why would he question or consider killing his mother’s lover. He, himself is puzzled by all of what has happened, so he wouldn’t be able to act in a way that would be necessary. The murderer Claudius, leaves Hamlet no option to take things in his own hands to get the revenge his father has asked him to do.

Hamlet is very unpredictable; one never knows whether he will respond seriously or sarcastically, loudly or softly, calmly or enraged. Hamlet does seem to be the kind to be unpredictable. Hamlet’s character itself, you never know how he reacts. This doesn’t mean that he is insane, he doesn’t know how to react in a situation dealing with murder. It’s not insanity when he is trying to protect someone he cares about; that could be in trouble with her new lover. Her new lover may make her seem like he cares for and loves her, but in reality he doesn’t. He cares about his mother and he doesn’t want her getting hurt by Claudius. The only way to do this would be revenge by killing him for his father. Hamlet may seem insane when he can’t get his mother to pay him any attention to tell her what may happen or what happened. People may take this as he is insane treating his mother this way.

Hamlet is plunged into anguish at the thought of his father being replaced in his mother’s affections by someone else.. Hamlet feels that he has been replaced by his mother’s new lover, since he was up next for the throne. Hamlet feels that his father was betrayed by his own brother. Even though Hamlet knew that he couldn’t pursue the same footsteps as his father, he wouldn’t want someone else in his own family to take it instead. Hamlet himself feels betrayed by his own mother, that she wouldn’t believe her on son in a time where she needs to realize that she would end up getting hurt in the end. But Hamlet keeps himself from being insane, even though he is hurt inside and is a little angry. There is nothing he can do about it now but seek revenge on Claudius, as for his father told him to do.The question of the madness of Hamlet, whether it was real or feigned, has the same and greater difficulties in the way of its solutions.

Proof That Hamlet is Not Mad

Hamlet has been questioned by many writers and readers for his or what people think is his madness. He may seem mad at Claudius for killing his father and he may seem mad at his mother for choosing Claudius and not realizing that he is the one who killed King Hamlet. Hamlet’s madness may seem real to some and not to others, he could be taken as being extremely mad but that doesn’t make him insane. Insanity should be taken as he couldn’t take it no more and he just had to kill himself. Even though he considered suicide, doesn’t make him insane. Insane is another level than madness. Hamlet’s madness didn’t get to a point where it got him in trouble even though he ended up killing Polonius, but that was Polonius’s fought.

..it may appear that his behavior is abnormal or even bordering on crazy, Hamlet is simply a man dealing with an impossible situation, attempting to please the ghost of his father, and right the wrongs around him.. Hamlet is pressured with everything going on around him, may make him a little crazy at times. Hamlet wants to please his father, which is the ghost, so he is desperately trying to get back at Claudius. Everyone by the end of play ends up getting a little bit out of control, realizing when they’re in a situation that is unsolved, or they don’t know what to think. Hamlet may not be insane, but he gets a little crazy when things start to get out of hand.

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Is Hamlet Crazy

Table of Contents

Introduction

Readers and viewers of Shakespeare’s play “Hamlet” may occasionally believe that Hamlet, the protagonist, appears to be crazy, but in fact he is not. Hamlet is attempting to avenge the death of his father. The madness that people assume they see in Hamlet is what Hamlet observes in himself when he reflects on his actions. It is tough for him to go for revenge because he is supposed to slay a man, but on the other side — the murderer of his father.

The evidence that Hamlet is not crazy

Hamlet is in despair because he cannot fulfill the request of his father’s ghost to avenge his death. Hamlet finds he cannot share his father’s opinion. The prince seeks to follow the sequence to fulfill the plan, but does not lose his common sense. Observing that Hamlet hesitates about revenge, one can realize he is not crazy. His desperate unwillingness to kill someone embodies his pent-up desire for his mother’s lover; Hamlet would be executing someone like himself if he killed Claudius. Therefore, his mother’s lover is his father’s murderer. There is no explanation as to why Hamlet doubts or contemplates massacring his mother’s man. He himself is bewildered by everything that has happened, so he would not be able to do the right things. Claudius, the murderer, gives Hamlet no choice but to take matters into his own control to avenge what his father wanted him to do.

Hamlet is very unforeseeable; you can never guess whether he will speak sincerely or harshly, softly or strongly, quietly or furiously. The fact that he does not comprehend how to respond to events does not indicate that he is crazy. It is not crazy when he tries to stand up for someone who is close to him. The mother’s new husband may give the impression that he is concerned about her and loves her, but in fact he is not. Hamlet actually cherishes his mother and does not want her to be harmed by Claudius. The sole way to establish this is to take revenge by murdering Claudius. Hamlet may appear mad when he cannot persuade his mother to notice him and explain to her what may happen or what has already taken place. People may misinterpret it as madness when he refers to his mother like this.

Hamlet is visibly distressed at the reflection that his father has been substituted in his affection for his mother by someone different. The prince realizes that he was completely supplanted by his mother’s new lover because he was the next in line to the crown. Furthermore, he is aware that his father was betrayed by his own brother. Although Hamlet understood that he could not follow the similar path as his father, he would not wish anyone else from his own family to follow it instead. As a son, he feels abandoned by his own mother when she did not confide in him at a time when she should have recognized that she would ultimately suffer. But Hamlet does not let himself go crazy, although he is in pain inside and slightly enraged. He cannot complete anything about it now, except to take revenge on Claudius, as his father bequeathed him. The issue of Hamlet’s insanity, whether it was accurate or mistaken, experiences the identical and more fundamental problems on the way to its solving.

A number of authors and audiences have called into question Hamlet’s insanity, or what people perceived to be his craziness. He may be considered deranged because Claudius slayed his father, just as Hamlet may be viewed as insane because his mother married Claudius and did not comprehend that he was the one who murdered her previous husband. Hamlet’s craziness may seem natural to some and simulated to others, it may be perceived in any way, but it does not indeed make him crazy. The insanity can be seen as something that he couldn’t stand any longer and he nothing but had to commit suicide. Even if he contemplated killing himself, that doesn’t make him a madman. Insanity is on a more diverse level than craziness. Hamlet’s craziness did not rise to the point that caused problems, although he murdered Polonius, but it was Polonius’ battle.

After all, some may recognize his actions inadequate or even verging on craziness, Hamlet remains an ordinary man who is confronting an extremely complex situation, trying to fulfill the request of his father’s ghost and ultimately establish justice in his life. Hamlet is influenced by everything that is happening around him, from which he can sometimes go a little crazy. Hamlet desperately tries to satisfy his father, who is a ghost, so he frantically seeks revenge on Claudius. By the time the play ends, almost everyone’s a little out of their minds, feeling that they are in a desperate or unsolvable position, or they are unsure of what to believe. Hamlet may not be crazy, but he does become a little deranged when things start to spin out of control.

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