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Explore Shakespeare’s dramatic presentation of madness in Hamlet
Within Hamlet, the playwright Shakespeare implements madness as a major plot
device to expose the characters’ flaws, specifically Hamlet and Ophelia. By inflicting
these characters with madness, Shakespeare attempts to highlight the fatal
consequences of allowing one’s insecurities to overpower them sets them upon an
inevitable trajectory towards madness and eventual death. Madness held a curious
fascination for Shakespeare and as seen through his various plays such as Macbeth
and King Lear, Shakespeare teaches madness as a destructive threat to identity. To
many Elizabethans, madness was something to be laughed at and the mentally
disturbed were often kept in their place by being whipped. Hamlet and Ophelia ,
however, as members of nobility, were safe from such treatment. Therefore,
Shakespeare shows, through the death of these characters, that class and status
exempts nobody from the effects of madness.
Hamlet is characterised by Shakespeare as having a hamartia of inaction. His
insecurity over his lack of inaction when instructed by the ghost to ‘revenge his foul
and most unnatural murder’ results in his initial feigned, ‘antic disposition’ then into
genuine madness and death. For Hamlet, memory in both its natural and artificial
form appears to shape one of the major themes in the play, madness. As author,
Michael Andrews remarks, ‘purpose is slave to memory for Hamlet’. This is because the
play shows us a character who remembers with extraordinary intensity, ao much so
that the past is literally given visible form, presented by the ghost’s appearance who is
believed to be his late father. The ghost is a plot device used by Shakespeare to
commence not only Hamlet’s conflict between action or inaction but also to give rise
to philosophical questions that permeate not only Hamlet’s mind but the minds of the
audiences also. The ghosts’ description of the ‘tormenting flames’ of purgatory is likely
what triggers his existential crisis soon seen in act 5 scene 1 where he really ponders
on the meaninglessness of life. It is Hamlet’s encounter with the ghost which inspires
his ‘antic disposition’ and therefore supporting Goddard’s critical view that ‘the ghost
is the spirit of war and a symbol for the devil.’ Goddard’s analysis of the ghost echoes
Protestant beliefs about ghosts. To them, ghosts were merely demons in disguise from
hell not purgatory, as Catholics would have believed. Protestant audiences would likely
blame the tragic mental and physical death that Hamlet experiences on the demonic
encounters with the ghost. On the other hand, Wilson states that ‘we are never
perfectly certain as to just who or what the ghost is’, thus this ambiguity of the
realness of this Ghost resounds with the sweeping religious reforms from Catholicism
to Protestantism that England had undergone at the time of Shakespeare’s writings.
Therefore, the conflicting religious beliefs in England mirrored the conflicting beliefs
about whether the ghost was a demonic hallucination or a real apparition. Hamlet is
now forced to identify with the revenger role that has been imposed upon him by the
ghost. However, in the process of taking up this role, he undergoes the death of his
identity and this is shown to the audience through Hamlet’s nihilistic statements
indicating depression (a sign of madness in the Elizabethan era). He reflects upon ‘how
weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable seem to {him} all the uses of this world’, while also
wishing his ‘sullied flesh would melt and resolve it’. Here Hamlet is experiencing suicidal
ideations however, the catholic teaching states that one cannot take their own life as it
is a sin, this would have been very important to a Shakespearian audience as
protestants as well as catholics view suicide as a sin hence, Hamlet’s suicidal
idealisations is possibly Shakespeare’s attempt of integrating the conflicting
denominations of the Reformation era. Within Act 3 scene 1, Hamlet pairs ‘sleep’ with
‘dreams’ in soliloquy, the assonance between sleep and dreams, considering the fact
he isn’t talking about regular sleep but the ‘sleep of death’ confirms his longing to just
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