Published around 1600, William Shakespeare’s “Hamlet” has enjoyed incessant success with changing generations of viewers due to the complexity of its characters and its universal themes which continue to fascinate the audience. One of the most important themes in the work is madness and this subject has been intensely studied by critics. Hamlet’s madness or “antic disposition” appears to represent a flaw in Hamlet’s character, meant to hide his weak character and instable personality. In the play, this disposition causes great unrest among other characters, as people fear Hamlet’s madness, or his simulation of madness, depending on their intentions and their feelings for the prince. However, by the end of the play, Hamlet avenges the death of his father. He succeeds in finding out the truth and distracting his enemy, Claudius instead, so as to punish him more easily for this deed. His madness is therefore a successful strategy although it requires a great price, leading to Hamlet’s own death. . In the play “Hamlet” by William Shakespeare, the protagonist Hamlet feigns madness throughout the story in an effort to avenge his father’s death.
Hamlet feigns madness throughout the play. This is a strategy that the prince employs after his father’s death, as a method of finding out the truth about the murder of the king. Even though he had been disgusted with the corruption and lack of sincerity of the members of the court, he only begins to suspect murder when the ghost of his father appears before him and demands Hamlet to revenge his death. The ghost demands that Hamlet revenge his “foul and most unnatural murder” (Shakespeare 1.5). He also reveals the identity of the murderer in the person of his own brother, as he states that, “the serpent that did sting thy father's life/Now wears his crown” (Shakespeare 1.5). The ghost’s description of the murder is very detailed in order to challenge Hamlet to take action (Kallendorf 77). In this respect, the ghost takes advantage of his authority over the young prince, and of his ability to manipulate Hamlet (Kalendorf 77). Therefore, the ghost is responsible for Hamlet’s decision of taking revenge on Claudius, his own uncle.
Hamlet decides to put on the mask of a madman in order to be able to perform random actions without causing suspicion, because people would think they are the actions of an insane individual. He therefore asks his friends that they do not disclose his plan, “Here, as before, never, so help you mercy,/How strange or odd soe'er I bear myself,/As I perchance hereafter shall think meet/To put an antic disposition on” (Shakespeare 1.5). As a result of the encounter with the ghost, Hamlet begins to become more and more apparently irrational, so that his family and friends begin to question his state of mind. Ophelia believes that he may be mad because of his love for her, and her rejection of him, at the orders of her father (Shakespeare 2. 1). However, Claudius does not trust this ‘antic disposition’ and suspects the prince of trickery. Even though the prince himself revealed the strategy, and Claudius does not believe his madness to be true, critics have nevertheless argued that Hamlet’s madness may be more than mere play. Critics have based their claim on Hamlet’s first soliloquy, because in it, Hamlet begins with self-pity but the advances towards more ambiguous attitudes, which can either be perceived as anger, despair or madness (Cohen 108). For this reason, Cohen argues that
“ his speech is the first textual evidence for readings which see Hamlet’s madness as something more than the deliberate antic disposition he puts on after his talk with the ghost. Here the stress will be on Hamlet’s contemplation of suicide, his extension of his mother’s perceived grossness to the whole world” (Cohen 108).
Therefore, Hamlet may play the role of a madman, but this may only hide the fact that he is on his way to losing his mind for real, in this world where everyone else wears one. Given the fact that he has witnessed the supernatural appearance of a ghost of whose intentions he is not even sure, it is not surprising that Hamlet may truly be spiraling down towards actual madness.
Despite his state of mind, Hamlet manages to revenge his father, but with a great price. Trying to regain his self-control and stability, Hamlet wants to make sure that the ghost is telling the truth. In this respect, he has a group of actors put on a play that will frame Claudius and allow Hamlet to study his reactions. His strategy is to have these players “play something like the murder of my father/Before mine uncle: I'll observe his looks; /I'll tent him to the quick: if he but blench,/I know my course” ( Shakespeare 2.2). However, by seeing the reaction of King Claudius after the play, Hamlet becomes convinced that he is guilty (Shakespeare 3.2), and that the ghost told him the truth. This causes him to fully adopt the identity of the revenger (Proser 339), after losing his identity as a son, nephew and even inheritor to the throne at the beginning of the play. However, this identity does not fit his personality or his education, which causes a conflict in his mind. This conflict is solved by his feigned madness, which acts not only as a revenge plan, but also, as a defense strategy:
“The "madness," thus, is both an instrumentality and a defense: a put-on "act" with a grain of truth in it. Hamlet's antic disposition detaches him sufficiently from the center of his own pain to tum his fear into a cutting edge by which he can slice through the layers of falsity the court so easily accepts as the truth” (Proser 340).
Hamlet’s madness allows him to put a mask similarly to the masks worn by the rest of the characters in the play, who are most often, false and corrupt. This mask is the sole defense of a prince who is one of the few honest figures of the play and who has little skill to separate what is false from what is not. As compared to him, Claudius, a master of falsity, has little trouble seeing through Hamlet’s mask.
Therefore, Claudius devises a three-fold plan to kill Hamlet. First, Hamlet tells Horatio about stealing a letter which revealed Claudius’ plot to have Hamlet executed by the King of England, upon his request. However, Hamlet recounts Horatio how he replaces this letter with another one, requested to have Rosencrantz and Guildenstern executed (Shakespeare 5.1). In the next scene, Claudius arranges for a match between Laertes, Ophelia’s sister, and Hamlet. Hamlet asks forgiveness from Laertes for his father’s death, by claiming that “madness is poor Hamlet’s enemy” (Shakespeare 5.2). During this match, he offers Hamlet a poisoned drink as refreshment, in an attempt to have him killed. However, Queen Gertrude drinks the refreshment instead, and she dies. Finally, the king convinces Laertes to poison the tip of his sword, which in the end causes Hamlet’s death. However, before dying from the same poisoned sword, Laertes reveals the evil plan to Hamlet: “The treacherous instrument is in thy hand,/ Unbated and envenom'd: the foul practise/ Hath turn'd itself on me lo, here I lie,/ Never to rise again: thy mother's poison'd:/ I can no more: the king, the king's to blame” (Shakespeare 5.2). Hamlet is doomed but he does not die before taking Claudius’s own death, thus managing to accomplish his revenge. Hamlet’s tragic ending may have been avoided if he had trusted Laertes enough to tell him the truth about Claudius, thus stopping him from being fooled by the murderous king.
Works Cited
Cohen, Michael. “Hamlet: Madness and the Eye of the Reader”. Dionysus in Literature: Essays on Literary Madness. Ed. Branimir Rieger. Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green State University Popular Press. 1994. 101-113. Print.
Kallendorf, Hilaire. “Intertextual Madness in Hamlet : The Ghost’s Fragmented Performativity”. Renaissance and Reformation 22.4 (1998): 69-87.
Proser, Mathew. “Madness, Revenge, and the Metaphor of the Theater in Shakespeare’s Hamlet and Pirandello’s Henry IV”. Modern Drama 24.3(1981): 338-352.
Shakespeare, William. The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark. Web. http://shakespeare.mit.edu/hamlet/full.html
