Hamlet

HAMLET

Hamlet is one of the most honored plays written by Shakespeare, with its recurring question “Is Hamlet's madness feigned or real?, William Shakespeare, leaves the audience to decide whether Hamlet is truly mad or not. Hamlet, the main character, must seek revenge for the murder of his father. He decides to portray an act of insanity, as part of his plan to murder Claudius. Throughout Shakespeare's story, Hamlet's madness is explored through his real madness, feigned actions, and the reactions of others towards his madness.

He says he's going to feign it, but we have to remember that Hamlet's already suffering from what the Elizabethans would call "melancholy" and Elizabethan ideas about "madness" are  different than our modern notions of mental illness. In other words, melancholy was, to them, a form of madness.  We use "antic" as a synonym of "madcap," but Shakespeare uses "antic" not to mean "madcap," exactly, but something closer to "mad"—bizarre, irrational, threatening.

Knowing that being mad in Shakespeare's time was different, we know that his madness could have been born out of love; on the revelation made by the Ghost, he felt that he must put aside all thoughts of it; and it also seemed to him necessary to convince Ophelia, as well as others, that he was insane, and so to destroy her hopes of any happy issue to their love, or his father’s death, it must have been really hard to see his mom not grieving for him and marrying the murderer of his father.

At times, it seems that the prince has stopped playing mad and has in fact become antic.

For example, when he kills Polonius instead of Claudius, Hamlet murders without sight of what he is doing, which displays his loss of reason for putting an antic disposition on. In some other instances his madness looks feigned. For example, Hamlet uses his feigned madness to insult Polonius indirectly by using the subject of his book towards the explicit description of Polonius, which in normal circumstances, that would not be accepted. Clearly, Hamlet's shows that he has not lost his reason and is not mad. Another example of Hamlet's feigned madness is when Hamlet's starts talking to the ghost while his mom is there but his mom can’t see it , so she thinks he’s crazy because she sees him talking to nobody

Throughout the play, Hamlet shows that he understands real from fake, right from wrong and his enemies from his friends. Even in his madness, he’s clever in his speech and has full understanding of what if going on.

Hamlet tells Horatio that he is going "To put an antic disposition on." Hamlet tells Rosencrantz and Guildenstern that he is mad only on occasion, "I am but mad north-north-west." Later, in Hamlet tells his mother that he "essentially am not in madness / But mad in craft."

When Hamlet is around Horatio, Bernardo, Francisco, The Players and the Gravediggers, he behaves rationally. When he is in the presence of certain characters, Polonius, Claudius, Gertrude, Ophelia, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, he behaves irrationally.

Ophelia ,daughter of Polonius, becomes crazy for two reasons, first, when his dad died and second, when Hamlet tells her that he doesn’t love her, if we compare Ophelia's mental and physical state to Hamlet’s state, we can see what really being mad is. Hamlet says to his mother and other characters that he’s not actually mad, he is conscient about the act of madness, but Ophelia doesn’t tell anybody that she is mad and her physical look changes drastically in comparison with Hamlet.

Ophelia's madness seems real because it is spontaneous and witnessed by others while Hamlet's is planned and questioned by others throughout the play.

The idea of fake madness involves the deception of those around him. The idea of real madness involves the destruction of oneself. Hamlet’s feigned madness seems so perfect that it seems that he himself fell into real madness but it was never real.