In this scene, Shakespeare makes the audience question whether Hamlet is really mad because Hamlet’s behaviour can be interpreted in so many different ways, and it is hard to tell whether Hamlet is just putting it on. This unpredictability would keep the audience in suspense and thinking about what would happen next and they would want to keep watching to find out whether Hamlet was really mad.
At the beginning of Act 2 scene 2, Claudius tells Gertrude that Polonius knows the real reason for Hamlet’s madness, but Gertrude says ‘I doubt it no other but the main: his fathers death and our o’erhasty marriage.’ Polonius comes in and shows the King and Queen a letter which Hamlet wrote to Ophelia, to try and prove to Gertrude what he thinks has made Hamlet mad. The letter describes Ophelia as ‘beautified’ which is being nasty to her because it is calling her artificially beautiful, but then later on it says ‘never doubt I love’. This gives Polonius the impression that the reason for Hamlet’s madness is because he is madly in love. This letter to Ophelia could just be another way of distracting everyone away from Hamlet’s real reason, so he can carry on plotting his revenge. I think that Shakespeare is using this letter to try and confuse the audience, and make them think more about whether Hamlet really is starting to go mad. If Hamlet was madly in love with Ophelia, then he wouldn’t call her ‘beautified’, but if he didn’t like her he wouldn’t say he loved her, so this letter could show that Hamlet is so mixed up about everything which has happened to him that he really is beginning to go insane.
Once the King and Queen have gone, Polonius talks to Hamlet, who is very rude to him. An excuse for being rude to people could also be another reason why Hamlet chose to pretend to be mad. Hamlet calls Polonius a ‘fishmonger’ and sarcastically answers his questions, for example when Polonius asks Hamlet what he is reading, Hamlet answers literally ‘words, words, words’. This would make the audience wonder even more whether Hamlet was mad, because Hamlet doesn’t have much of a reason to want to annoy Polonius or be rude to him and it is not Polonius on whom Hamlet wants to get revenge.
At the end of this scene, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern have been asked to spy on Hamlet and keep him company to find out what is wrong with him. Hamlet says ‘I know the King and Queen have sent for you,’ so at this point I do not think that Hamlet is mad because he is aware of what is going on. He tells Rozencrantz and Guildenstern that ’I have of late– but wherefore I know not lost all my mirth, foregone all custom of exercises,’ so he is very depressed, has gone off his everyday activities and has lost interest in women. It is probably true that Hamlet is depressed after everything that has happened to him, but he would not want to tell Rozencrantz and Guildenstern the whole truth because he knew that they would report back to the King and Queen. Hamlet also says to them ‘I am but mad north-north-west. When the wind is southerly, I know a hawk from a handsaw’. By this he means that he is mad depending on the situation and people around him. Hamlet reacts differently to different people depending on what he wants them to think. For example in this scene he has a better attitude towards Rozencrantz and Guildenstern than a few moments before when he was rude to Polonius, so his mood changes very quickly, and this would keep the audience interested to find out what Hamlet’s real state of mind was.
In Act 3 Scene 1, Hamlet speaks his ‘to be or not to be’ soliloquy. He is very depressed and is considering suicide. When Hamlet asks himself ‘ to be or not to be,’ he is really asking whether he should live or kill himself. He says ‘To die, to sleep ; to sleep perchance to dream. Ay, there’s the rub.’ Hamlet realises that there is so much mystery surrounding death that he does not know whether all the bad things happening to him in his life are better or worse than what might await him, so he is not sure whether to take the risk or not. He is even more put off about the idea of suicide now that he has seen his father’s ghost and has found out that hell exists, so this stops him from killing himself. Hamlet is a deep thinker, and he realises that because he is wasting so much time procrastinating, it is stopping him getting on with his task and killing Claudius. This is shown when he says ‘the native hue of resolution is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought’ and ‘With this regard, their currents turn away and lose the name of action.’ He is probably beginning to become frustrated with himself and has doubts about whether he is capable of killing Claudius. Part of the reason he is having doubts is that he believes ‘conscience does make cowards of us all,’ he wants to get revenge for his father’s murder but realises that if he gets revenge it will make him almost as bad as Claudius himself.
Hamlet knows that he has gone too far now with his antic disposition to go back on it and he knows he has to take action soon, so he is probably worried about whether he will get found out or if anything will go wrong. In this speech Shakespeare shows that Hamlet’s behaviour does not portray signs of madness because he seems in control and knows what he is doing. This speech is a soliloquy, so it is much more likely that he is telling the truth when he is on his own, because there wouldn’t be much point in lying to himself and there is no one else there for him to be lying to. Towards the end of his speech, Hamlet sees Ophelia and this distracts him.
When Hamlet speaks to Ophelia he seems almost out of control and as if he does not know what he is doing so he upsets her even more. Hamlet could have been taking his anger and frustration out on Ophelia because he knew that she was much weaker and more sensitive than him, so by upsetting her it made him feel better and gave him more power over her. Hamlet is very rude to Ophelia and tells her ‘I loved you not’ and ‘get thee to a nunnery’. In those days ‘nunnery’ had very different meanings, so this could be interpreted in more than one way. If he had meant a home for nuns, he might have told her to go so that no other man could get his hands on her. In those days the word ‘nunnery’ also meant a place for prostitutes so it could have been an insult to upset her, and I think that this is more likely than the other meaning because everything else he says to her is insulting. He also insults her by saying ‘God hath given you one face, and you make yourselves another ‘. He is saying that she makes herself artificially beautiful and this is like earlier on in the letter when he called her ‘beautified’. This scene might make the audience think that Hamlet is insane, because his behaviour does show signs of madness. Hamlet is very out of control, but he could be out of control with anger and frustration, and not actually insane.
Another scene where Hamlet’s behaviour is very erratic is in Act 3 Scene 4, where Hamlet goes and speaks to his mother in her ‘closet’ while Polonius is hiding behind a hanging to spy on him. Hamlet upsets his mother a lot in this scene which is going against his father’s wishes because he specifically asked him not to hurt Gertrude. In this scene, Hamlet’s mother asks him if he has forgotten her and he replies ‘you are the Queen, your husband’s brother’s wife, and, would it were not so, you are my mother,’ so it is as if he is disowning her because he hates Claudius so much.
Gertrude is very scared about how he is acting and thinks that for some reason he is going to murder her, so she calls ‘help, help, ho!’ Polonius answers from behind the wall hanging. Hamlet probably thinks that Polonius is the King who has been spying on him, so he goes and stabs the hidden figure behind the hanging, killing Polonius. This shocks Hamlet because he did not mean to kill Polonius and he has ruined his plan to get revenge even more. He has hurt his mother and Ophelia, and killed Polonius, while Claudius still lives. Gertrude says ‘Alas he’s mad,’ she thinks that Hamlet’s behaviour does show real signs of madness.
The ghost then re-appears to Hamlet and says ‘Do not forget ; this visitation is but to whet thy almost blunted purpose’; he is reminding Hamlet to get revenge, because Hamlet has taken so long over it. Gertrude cannot see the ghost at all, so at this point I think that Shakespeare is trying to confuse the audience even more. He is making them question whether Hamlet could be mad and imagining seeing the ghost altogether, or whether the ghost might have chosen not to appear to Gertrude because it did not want her to find out what Hamlet was going to do. Hamlet tries to tell his mother he is not really mad, he says ‘It is not madness that I have uttered.’ He also says ‘That's not your trespass but my madness speaks.’ By this I think that he is saying that it is Gertrude’s crime of marrying Claudius that has caused the ghost to appear to him, it is not an hallucination caused by his apparent madness.
Much pressure has been put on Hamlet throughout the play, especially from his father’s ghost, and he has had to cope with a lot on his own. First of all his father has died which must have been very upsetting for him, and then his mother quickly married Claudius, his uncle. Hamlet was very annoyed and disappointed with his mother and felt betrayed by her for being so disrespectful to his father and getting over his death so quickly. This is shown in his first soliloquy when he says of his mother; ‘a beast that wants discourse of reason would have mourn’d longer.’ Hamlet must have felt very alone and isolated because he was still mourning his father’s death and no one else understood how he was feeling. His mother tells him to stop being pathetic and get over his father, and says to him ‘cast thy nighted colour off,’ and ‘do not for ever with thy veiled lids seek for thy noble father in the dust.’ Hamlet is shown in this mood of being very depressed and melancholy at the beginning of the play, when he is considering suicide.
As the play progresses, Hamlet’s mind becomes more and more disturbed, but this is not necessarily due to madness. He begins to doubt that he is even capable of killing Claudius, and even has doubts as to whether the ghost was real, or could have been the devil in disguise. This is shown in Act two Scene two when he says ‘The spirit that I have seen may be a devil.' He is probably making excuses for himself because he is scared of taking action. Hamlet is thoughtful to the point of obsession, he decides he must prove his uncle’s guilt before he acts. To prove Claudius’s guilt, Hamlet even gets the players to put on a play with a similar theme to what happened to his father, so when Claudius stands up during it and calls for lights, Hamlet knows the ghost was telling the truth so he has to do something about it. The problem with putting on the play was that now Claudius would suspect that Hamlet might know the truth, and this makes his task harder for him, although it did prove Claudius’s guilt.
The people in the play who Hamlet reacts most badly to are the women, Ophelia and Gertrude. His words often indicate his disgust with and distrust of women in general and he thinks they are very devious. Early on in the play, he even says ‘frailty thy name is woman’ when talking to his mother. He cannot forgive his mother for the way in which she forgot about his father so quickly and married Claudius, and hates her for it, although he still loves her as his mother. This means that despite his father’s instructions, Hamlet cannot force himself to be nice to his mother and ends up hurting her because he treats her so badly. He probably also sees the women in his life as easy targets to take his anger out on because they are weaker than him.
In conclusion I do not think that Hamlet actually goes mad during the play, but I think he feels out of control with anger and frustration in some scenes, which causes him to behave very rashly and impulsively. When he does act, it is with surprising swiftness and little or no premeditation, as when he stabs Polonius through a curtain without even checking to see who he was. Hamlet’s behaviour is very erratic, his mood changes extremely quickly between scenes. I think that Hamlet is a very paranoid or nervous character, rather that actually being insane. He seems to step very easily into the role of a madman, upsetting the other characters with his wild speech and pointed innuendos. He also seems to find it very easy to step out of this role when he wants to, so if he was mad I do not think he would be able to control his behaviour like this and could keep so calm in some scenes. I think that Shakespeare is trying to show the audience that Hamlet is using an ‘antic disposition’ to distance himself from the other characters in the play, which helps him cope with the pressures placed on him and gives him some space to think over everything that has happened.
Shakespeare has tried to show the audience that Hamlet is a very enigmatic and intelligent character. There is always more to him than the other characters in the play can figure out. This helps to confuse the audience because it is impossible for them to know everything there is to know about Hamlet or to understand him. Hamlet actually tells other characters in the play that there is more to him than meets the eye– notably his mother, and Rozencrantz and Guildenstern. When he speaks, it sounds as though there is something important he is not saying, and this helps make him such a fascinating character for the audience to watch.
If Hamlet’s madness is compared to Ophelia’s it becomes obvious that he is not truly mad. Ophelia is Shakespeare’s idea of true madness and Hamlet’s behaviour is very different to hers. Ophelia’s thoughts are shown to be very muddled and make no sense, while Hamlet has completely normal thought processes. Hamlet understands his situation and what he must do.
The strongest evidence that Hamlet is really sane is in his soliloquies, because when he is talking to himself and the audience, there is no other character there for him to be lying to, or putting on an ‘antic disposition’ in front of . Hamlet is shown to be very philosophical and contemplative when he makes these speeches and seems very in control, so I think this proves that he was not really mad. At the end of the play, Hamlet actually seems more sane than he has in the rest of the play, and this is also a sign that Hamlet was not really mad, because if he was, it would be most likely that he would get more and more insane as the play goes on, and be the worst at the end. This could be because by the end of the play, Hamlet was not scared of death anymore, and had decided that he was finally going to take action, instead of getting more and more frustrated with himself. He also makes sarcastic comments to people to annoy them when he is fencing Laertes.
Shakespeare uses the theme of Hamlet’s madness to build up tension and suspense in the play, and this keeps the audience wondering and guessing what will happen next. The audience are kept entertained because Hamlet’s state of mind changes so dramatically from scene to scene. Shakespeare has placed scenes where Hamlet appears mad and scenes where he appears sane very close together, so that the audience will keep changing their opinion about whether he really is mad. The theme of madness is one which a lot of people find very interesting, because it is not understood, and so the audience do not know how Hamlet is going to react in each different situation. Shakespeare also uses the theme of madness to make the audience question what madness actually is, and what makes a person go mad.
