Was Hamlet Insane Essays (1490 words) - Characters In Hamlet

Was Hamlet Insane Hamlet a hardy man, courageous, and worthy of eternal commendation, who arming himself with a crafty, dissembling, and strange show of being distract out of his mind, under that pretense deceived the wise, and crafty, thereby not only preserving his life from the reasons and wicked practices of the tyrant, but by an new and unexpected kind of punishment revenged his fathers death many years after the act committed . I am here to explain certain theories of Hamlets sanity. Some say he was sane and only pretending, and some say he was insane over certain that happened in his life. ?I am but mad north-north-west: when the wind is southerly I know a hawk from a hand saw? (II.ii.376-7). This is a classic example of the ?wild and whirling worlds? (I.v.134) with which Hamlet hopes to persuade people to believe that he is mad. These words, however, prove that beneath his ?antic disposition,? Hamlet is very sane. indeed. Beneath a strange choice of imagery involving points of the compass, the weather, and hunting birds, he is announcing that he is calculatedly choosing the times when you appear mad. Hamlet's madness was faked I think for a purpose. He warned his friends he intended to fake madness, but Gertrude as well as Claudius saw through it, and even the slightly dull-witted Polonius was suspicious. His public face is one of insanity but, in his private moments of soliloquy, through his confidences to Horatio, and in his careful plans of action, we see that his madness is assumed. After Hamlet has discovered the truth about his father, he goes through a very traumatic period, which is interpreted as madness by readers and characters. With the death of his father and the hasty, incestuous remarriage of his mother to his uncle, Hamlet is thrown into a suicidal frame of mind in which ?the uses of this world? seem to him ;weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable.? Many ironies and misunderstands of the play cannot be understood without a proper awareness of this gap between Hamlet's knowledge and the most others' ignorance of the murder. For, according to their own lights, Polonius and the rest behave as normally as they should be, obeying and flattering a king whom they acknowledge as their great ruler. Hamlet, for his part, is so obsessed with the secret murder that he overreacts to those around him, rejecting overtures of friendship and becoming embittered, callous, brutal, and even violent. His antisocial behavior gives the others good reason to fear him as a menace to the state. Nevertheless, we share with Hamlet a knowledge of the truth, and know that he is right whereas the others are at best unhappily deceived by their own blind complicity in evil. No man was in his right state of contemplates suicide and would take his life due to human frailty. Either his love for Ophelia was never strong as he said, which in doubt, or he has really gone insane by assuming every situation is going to happen and he sacrifices her love for revenge. Throughout the play, there are also supporting factors to argue Hamlet's sanity, as these details compromise his madness, and that if Horatio notices any strange behavior from Hamlet, it is because he is putting on an act. [Act I, scene V, lines 166-180]. He knows that he is not the same as he used to be and fears he is going insane, so by telling his closes friend that he is just an act, he covers his tracks. ?It is no, nor it cannot come to good...but break my heart, for must hold my tongue.? All he can do in this frustrated state is to lash out with bitter satire at the evils he sees and then relapse into suicidal melancholy. Hamlet has mood swings as his mood changes badly throughout the play. Hamlet appears to be insane, after Polonius's death, in act IV scene II. In conclusion, Hamlet was a genius. In his mind were thoughts and plans in which he always knew each persons next step before they did it. Due to his procrastination and thoughts of revenge he became so overwhelmed with every situation