Essay plan based on the past paper brief of ‘“Hamlet is a play about madness” Using your knowledge of the play as a whole, show how far you agree with this view…’. Includes initial points, varying interpretations and wider views to create an element of debate. Grade A.
“Hamlet is a play about madness” Using your knowledge of the play
as a whole, show how far you agree with this view…
Initial Points:
- The play opens with a question being posed to the audience over the authenticity of
Barnardo and Marcellus’ claims, with the voice of reason, Horatio, stating “tis but
our fantasy”. After Horatio is subject to the ghost’s apparition, defying logic, the
question of madness is still very much relevant with characters separated into those
who are privy to the ghost and those who aren’t
- Hamlet’s antic disposition depicts the idea that truth can be found when the
formalities of human experience are broken down – for example, Hamlet’s wordplay
shows this in the very beginning “I am too much in the sun.”
- He is questioning his sanity after the appearance of the ghost, whilst questioning it’s
morals, scared it may “be a devil who will betray his soul,”
- He may also be mad with revenge, and within that mad as a result of his impotence
towards the vengeance upon his Uncle
- He states his depression in his first soliloquy to the audience, contemplating suicide
as he wishes his skin would “resolve itself to a dew”, suggesting that throughout the
play we will see a redemptive story as he starts at an all-time low
- Literary critic Paul A. Jorgensen (1963 source) discusses in his essay "Hamlet's
Therapy” that one of Hamlet’s main concerns within the play is the “regaining of the
sanity which he had formerly displayed as an ideal prince”, ironically a very Claudian
idea
- Madness can also be viewed as an inevitability within the play – from the self-doubt
of Marcellus and Barnardo needing a “scholar” to Claudius’ claim that Hamlet shows
“a mind impatient” and eventually to the antic disposition of Hamlet and the
‘infection’ of Ophelia with a true madness
- The antic disposition may also have acted as a denial of Hamlet’s initial condition,
with him feeling it necessary to increase his madness to appear as harmless
- Ophelia’s madness, though claimed to have been sexual frustration, is fuelled by the
death of her father to Hamlet, a conflicting idea much like the seemingly avuncular
Claudius before we and Hamlet find out about the murder
- The audience are constantly aligned with Hamlet and the deception he finds himself
in with the court as we discover about the murder with him, whilst also gaining the
ability to see the duplicity of Claudius’ character as he conspires against Hamlet
- Madness is, however, an undeniably secondary theme that allows for the dissection
of Hamlet’s psyche and his ineptitude for a typical revenge
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