What is the difference between Hamlet’s madness and Ophelia’s? Is there a marked difference in their behavior and speech? The theme of madness is one of the main themes in the tragedy Hamlet. Hamlet pretends to be mad and Ophelia is driven to actual madness and even suicide. Hamlet starts to act as a madman to avenge the death of his father by his uncle.
Madness is a vital plot element in William Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Both young Hamlet and his love Ophelia appear mad throughout the play’s duration, but only Ophelia has a genuine affliction of insanity. Although stricken with grief by his father’s death and the clamorous events that follow, Hamlet does not become truly mad because he is still able to distinguish right form wrong and maneuver logically in his plan to avenge his murdered father. Shakespeare surreptitiously places revelations of Hamlet’s sanity throughout the play. Though his planned maneuver to murder his uncle Claudius, the contrast between his feigned madness and Ophelia’s true madness, and his ability change behavior around different characters that possess his trust, Hamlet’s true, rational condition emerges from beneath his veil of insanity.
The difference between the two is that O’Brien believes that he himself suffers from mental insanity while it is Hamlet’s mother and his step father that believes its Hamlet who is insane. 2. Hamlet is perceived as mad by his fellow Danes because he plays a ruse to disguise his plot to kill the king while O’Brien believes that he himself is crazy because he does not want to go to a war he does not support and that tons of Americans didn’t support. 3. Near the middle of each story the characters start to change their opinions slightly; Hamlet starts to believe he is actually becoming insane and O’Brien starts to believe that he may have done what’s right.
“I am in blood / Stepp’d in so far, that, should I wade no more, / Returning were as tedious as go o’er.” (3.4.136-138) In this quote, Macbeth is telling himself that because he has stepped into evil so deeply, it will be hard to go back to morallity because he will never be able to rid of this guilt brought onto him. He begins to feel so remorseful, that he starts hallucinating and realizing that he has done such treacherous deeds. Even though he can still see how his actions are terrible, as the play develops, he begins to inch deeper and deeper into his own destruction of innocence. Macbeth had always felt threatened by Macduff because Macduff knew what a traitor he really was. Therefore, he had wanted to plot to end Macduff’s life as to not pose a threat on his reign any longer.
Hamlet assumes these actions from the actor because these are the actions that Hamlet would use to express his feelings. Hamlet then feels that he is not courageous enough to bravely kill Claudius and all he can do is mope. He puts himself at the peak of frustration since he has not accomplished anything yet and begins to doubt his ability to for revenge and calls himself a coward. He says he should have killed Claudius a long time ago. He then comes up with a plan to have the actors put on a play that is similar to the Murder of King Hamlet.
Lear also demonstrates his awareness that he is losing his mind when he thinks about the pain his daughters put him through: “On such a night as this! O Regan, Goneril, Your old kind father, whose frank heart gave all—Oh, that way madness lies. Let me shun that. No more of that” Edgar’s “Madness” is different from King Lear’s. Edgar has to convince others of his insanity in order to avoid being captured and executed.
Felix Cole English 10 H Monica Espinasse Barbed Words Shakespeare’s tragedy Hamlet evokes a world where a nation can be seen as a diseased body and language can be used as a lethal weapon. Madness, defined in the dictionary as, “engaging in actions that are senseless or foolish”, is an issue that multiple characters deal with throughout the play. Many would say that Hamlet’s actions are very irrational, but everything he says and does eventually helps him achieve his desires. Despite how things seem Hamlet is an intelligent character who ultimately is in his right mind. The death of one’s father and a ghostly visitation thereafter are events that would challenge the sanity of anyone.
I will not say that Hamlet is totally not crazy in this play. After the death of Hamlet’s father, there are many occurrences that shaking Hamlet’s mentality. In the play, Hamlet is pretending to be crazy because he want to revenge his uncle, King Claudius. To show that my answer to this question is right, I will explain my reasons why I am really sure that Hamlet is not crazy and I will give the evidences to support my arguments. The first, someone will be called as crazy man if he has mental instability.
To Hamlet, insanity is the manner in which he speaks and acts. However, I am led to believe that the insanity might or might not be real. Did Hamlet become truly insane, or was it just an act. What was Shakespeare’s purpose in making Hamlet crazy? Throughout the play, Hamlet makes a multitude of snide remarks to Polonius.
In the soliloquy, Hamlet is at first upset with himself about finding ways to avoid avenging his Father’s murder, like his spirit in ghost form told him to. This complaining turns into self hatred and then Hamlet is insulting himself outright. The main reason for this is he has agreed to get revenge on Claudius so his father’s spirit can be at peace, but he hasn’t done it yet. The fact that the Player seems to be more able to get into the mindset of revenge than he can further discourages him. This on top of the fact that Hamlet’s dad is dead and his mother married that man he hates most in the world makes for a pretty melancholy fellow.