Hamlet Theme: Sanity Vs. Insanity

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6.) THEME: SANITY VS. INSANITY
Hamlet and MadnessThe third act of Hamlet opens with a remark by the king, Claudius, who instructs Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, old school-friends of his nephew, to discover why the latter ‘puts on this confusion,/ Grating so harshly all his days of quiet/ With turbulent and dangerous lunacy?’ For over three centuries hundreds of experts have turned their attention to the problem of Hamlet’s madness. Hundreds of articles have been written, and dozens of controversial theories have been put forward and countered. The characters of Shakespeare’s play are themselves desperate to discover the origins of the affliction which mars the prince of Denmark. Whilst Polonius sees Hamlet’s conduct as the result of disappointed love, Ophelia can only see the symptoms of pure madness. For Rosencrantz and Guildenstern it is ambition and frustration which are gnawing away at the young heir to the throne. Finally, for Gertrude, Hamlet’s mother, who in this joins most critics, at the root of it is a warped reaction, including rejection, to the death of his father and her own hasty remarriage. This interpretation does indeed play an essential role in the play. Hamlet himself never ceases speculating not only about the overt or covert motivations of other characters but also about the uses and abuses of power, the faults of passion, action and inaction, the significance of ancestral customs as well as the question of suicide. Most of the characters observing Hamlet’s behaviour can’t agree whether it is fake and calculating or whether the prince really is suffering from a mental illness threatening the ‘noble, sovereign reason’ which separates men from beasts (Claudius). Claudius himself is conscious of the fact that the conduct and words of his nephew are at one and the same time completely irrational and absolutely coherent. Basing his judgement on the theories of ancient medicine, he attributes the ambi...