Madness and Insanity in Shakespeare's Hamlet - Is Hamlet Mad?

Is Hamlet Mad?

Perhaps the world's most famous mental patient, Hamlet's sanity has been

argued over by countless learned scholars for hundreds of years. As a mere

student of advanced-level English Literature, I doubt I can add anything new to

the debate in 2000 words, but I can look at the evidence supporting or

dispelling each argument and come to my own conclusion.

Hamlet is obviously experiencing grief and despair right from the beginning of

the novel, with the death of his father and his uncle's seizure of the throne

and rapid weddign of Hamlet's mother, and we can observe his great grief

bordering on irrational suicidal tendencies as early as Act II Sc I, where he

gives his first soliloquy. He cries:

"O that this too too solid flesh would melt,

Thaw, and resolve itself into a dew!

Or that the Everlasting had not fixed

His canon 'gainst self-slaughter!"

Macbeth wants his flesh to dissolve into a dew ("solid" contrasting with "melt"

in the first line), and wishes that God had not forbade suicides from going to

heaven. This is also the first glimpse of another recurring theme in the play,

that of Hamlet's unhealthy obsession with the afterlife. This is one of the

reasons that the ghost of his father has such an effect on him, which is a

trigger for all the subsequent events in the play.

Moving on to the fourth scene, the next interesting speech is on l. 23. It is a

long and complicated speech, but its general gist is that if a person has one

fault, no matter how virtuous they may be in other ways, they are soiled by "the

stamp of one defect". This speech is quite ironic, because it is Hamlet's "one

defect" (his hesitancy and inability to take action), regardless of his other

qualities (such as honour and integrity), will be the main reason why the play

ends so tragically.

Although we are supposed to suspect that "something is rotten in the state of

Denmark", as Horatio puts it, from the start of the play, it is only when Hamlet

talks with the ghost of his father in Act I Sc V that we realise the full extent

of his uncle's treachery. When he first sees the ghost, Horatio and Marcellus

try to restrain him, Horatio saying:

"What if it tempt you toward the flood, my lord,

Or to the dreadful summit of the cliff

That beetles o'er his base into the sea,

And there assume some other horrible form,

Which might deprive your sovereignty of reason,