Formal essay

It has been argued about the sanity of Hamlet and Ophelia throughout the play of Hamlet. Many believe that Hamlet is truly mad and many others would disagree. Although it may appear as though Hamlet could have been mad in the play, it was all feigned madness. On the subject of Ophelia, her madness stemmed from the death of her father and how Hamlet has become mad. Another argument commonly made in Hamlet is whether or not Hamlet and Ophelia were truly in love, which by analysis the audience can see that it was probably no more than the ordinary crush someone has on another. In this essay, it will be discussed why Hamlet is not mad but in fact feigning his madness; the cause of Ophelia’s madness; and finally the complicated love between Ophelia and Hamlet.

To begin, the character of Hamlet is not mad but he is feigning it as part of his master plan for revenge. He fakes the madness so that those people around him do not question any of actions that may seem unordinary; he did not want people to catch onto his plan for revenge against King Claudius and get caught for planning against the king. Hamlet believed that if he feigned madness then people would just assume that when he did something out of the ordinary, it was just because he was insane. One key scene that really proves this is the scene where Hamlet meets up with Gertrude in the bedroom and he sees Ghost Hamlet, but she cannot. Hamlet says, “It is not madness/That I have uttered. Bring me to the test,” (3.4.132-133). He is trying to tell Gertrude that he truly is not crazy and that she can test him to see. According to philosopher and chemist Tenney Davis, “Throughout the play [Hamlet] is the alert intellectual splitter of hairs ”; by this, Davis is trying to say that Ha...

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...ate of madness, she says how “a noble mind is here o’erthrown” (3.1.149 ) and continues on with other compliments to Hamlet. As one may see, Ophelia may have loved Hamlet at one time or another but ultimately the feeling was lost. She did, however, show that she cared for him and most likely thought of him as a good friend of hers.

In conclusion, the common argument over whether Hamlet was truly insane or not can be solved by reading textual evidence and analyzing the play; the solution is that he had just feigned his madness to draw people’s attention away from him later on in his revenge plan. However, Ophelia’s madness was true; shortly after her father’s death and other complicated life events, Ophelia lost her mind due to extreme stress and ended up drowning herself. This leads to another common argument of whether or not she committed suicide, which she did.