Is Hamlet mad or merely acting?

Question

also answer why or how u know this.

Answer 1

he wasn't mad; he hated the situation about the betrayal of his mother to his father and he acted as if he was mad, just because of this problem. (unfortunately, it's been a long time since i read it.)

Answer 2

There is actually a phrase that Hamlet speaks shortly after seeing his father's ghost that actually concludes this. Hamlet says to Horatio, and the 2 guards that no matter how strangely he acts, they are not to say anything of the knowledge they found from the ghost of Hamlet's father. I'm not certain of the specific scene, pretty sure it's act I. But it is immediately following the exit of King Hamlet's ghost.

To go further with this, I don't think that Hamlet was ever crazy so much as just overcome with grief from his father's death. Then when he learned that his father was murdered, the grief was multiplied and he became overly focused on revenge. I don't believe crazy was ever a factor, just that he pretty much had blinders on to everything that was going along with what he was doing and how he was pushing everybody away and never really realized it until it was too late.

Answer 3

Wow....this is a question that has been kicked around for more than two hundred years. I think each actor that plays the role has to decide for him (or her) self how far the madness goes. Add to that all the scholars who study the play and all the psychologists/psychiatrists who study the play and you have a question without an answer. I have played in three productions of Hamlet over the years (never as the prince himself) and I have seen three different interpretations. I have also seen a dozen different actors (including Gielgud and Burton) play Hamlet.....again, each one is different.

Answer 4

Both.

Acting:

HAMLET
I perchance hereafter shall think meet
To put an antic disposition on

POLONIUS
Though this be madness, yet there is method in 't.

Guildenstern
Nor do we find him forward to be sounded,
But, with a crafty madness, keeps aloof,
When we would bring him on to some confession
Of his true state.


Truly Mad:

HORATIO
What if it .... deprive your sovereignty of reason
And draw you into madness?

GHOST
I could a tale unfold whose lightest word
Would harrow up thy soul

HAMLET
Yea, from the table of my memory
I'll wipe away all trivial fond records,
All saws of books, all forms, all pressures past,
That youth and observation copied there;
And thy commandment all alone shall live
Within the book and volume of my brain,

HAMLET
So, oft it chances in particular men,
That for some vicious MOLE of nature in them,
.....
Oft breaking down the pales and forts of reason,

HAMLET
Well said, old MOLE! canst work i' the earth so fast?
A worthy pioner!

[A "pioner" was a military engineer who dug under the wall of a fort or castle to plant a "mole", which was an explosive charge to break down the wall.]

HAMLET
though I am not splenitive and rash,
Yet have I something in me dangerous,
Which let thy wiseness fear:

[Hamlet was possessed by his father's ghost. In those days, insanity and demonic possession were often considered to be the same thing.]

HAMLET
And you must needs have heard, how I am punish'd
With sore distraction. What I have done,
That might your nature, honour and exception
Roughly awake, I here proclaim was madness.
Was't Hamlet wrong'd Laertes? Never Hamlet:
If Hamlet from himself be ta'en away,
And when he's not himself does wrong Laertes,
Then Hamlet does it not, Hamlet denies it.
Who does it, then? His madness: if't be so,
Hamlet is of the faction that is wrong'd;
His madness is poor Hamlet's enemy.

CLAUDIUS
And can you, by no drift of circumstance,
Get from him why he puts on this confusion,
Grating so harshly all his days of quiet
With turbulent and dangerous lunacy?

POLONIUS
I have found
The very cause of Hamlet's lunacy.

[Polonius was wrong about the cause, but he was right to call it "lunacy." Hamlet's father compared himself to "Hyperion," the sun god. Laertes compared Hamlet to the moon (do not "umask your beauty to the moon." The moon shone with "borrowed sheen" from the sun. The cause of Hamlet's lunacy (moon-ness) was that he was reflecting his father's warmongering, landgrabbing, murderous, vengeful values, letting his father's commandment live all alone in the book and volume of his brain.]

Note: Duckyduckduck's answer is basically correct. She seems to be looking at the underlying psychology and reaching essentially the same conclusion that I arrived at by analyzing the word-play.

Answer 5

Well, he wasn' exactly stable at the beginning of the play, and I'm sure seeing his father's ghost didn't help too much.
"Oh, by the way, son, I was murdered by my own brother and I'd like you to avenge my death. Have a nice night!"
Not helpful to a highly stressed-out teenager.
But I think he put on an act for a long time. I think the act slowly began to take over his mind, and right around the confrontation in his mother's bedroom he went a little haywire. Murder of the King wasn't a good idea in the first place, but murdering someone who MIGHT be the King, but turns out to be Polonius... not good. And I'm sure realizing he'd just killed the father of the woman he loved worked out great for him. By the time of his return to Denmark, he was barely sane. Remember his absolute rampage upon seeing Fortinbras' army. Not what you'd expect from the cool-minded man.
Ophelia's death seems to send him over the edge. Seeing her funeral and having Laertes scream at him. Afterwards, he has a distinct, calm calculation to his actions which may denote scheming madness. This keeps up until the final minutes of his life, in which he speaks much as he did in act one, thus returning to purity and sanity.

To sum up, I think he was sane, then insane, then sane again.

:)

Answer 6

particular, I trust TG. different productions (and different actors) make different selections approximately that. In some productions, he's pretending, and in others, he's insane. yet i think of an excellent type of the time they desire to make it a mixture, because of the fact is the suited. It makes the objective audience ask your self that very question for themselves?

Answer 7

Dear John,

I do not think the play gives us any warrant to think that Hamlet was insane. He was under great emotional duress from his mother's actions following his father's death; and from being denied the election to the Kingship of Denmark, which he had spent his life preparing for and expecting to be his on his father's death. That the actions of his mother and his uncle led him to be suspicious is undeniable (Oh, my prophetic soul), and certainly affected his thinking (specifically seen, I believe, in the forced alienation of his affection for Ophelia by foolish Polonius).

Something we tend to forget and which Kenneth Branagh put so vididly into his film "Hamlet" was the force and pressure of politics from both within and without Denmark.
Claudius had no ambition but his own power. Gertrude was a weak and sensuous woman who might have affection, but would never have moral will. Thus Denmark was weakened from within (and Hamlet remarks on this).
From without we have young Norway circling and approaching with his army, while the Danish court spends it's time in dissipating revelry.

Hamlet shows himself to be ambitious, extraordinarily intelligent, intellectual, self-aware, and highly intuitional.

He is coming into an unnatural situation and one fraught with peril for himself. He has to be aware that his uncle wants him close to home to keep an eye on him and possibly eliminate him if the chance presents itself (and later, in sending him to England, he almost accomplishes this).

There is a sense in which Hamlet does as King David did at Ziklag (I think), where he pretended madness to save his his life, for it was not proper to kill a madman. Hamlet uses 'madness' to give himself some room to think, to observe, to try to sort out a way out of the impossible situation he finds himself.

His nerves betray him at times (as when he jumps into Ophelia's grave and earlier at the play), but a highly strung nervousness is not the same as madness.

He is aware of the personal and political stakes for himself, and also, I believe the political stakes for Denmark.

If there is any real madness, it is the madness which forces him to play out the mad game he is given to play,
the madness common to all men and nations when they
expend their energy in foolish and sinful desires.

In a sense, he and Laertes are both caught in the same web, a web which has been played out in real history more than once.

There is a sense in which Hamlet was too large for life--
he was bred to be a king--and without a kingdom in which to exercise his formidable powers we are given a view of his inner life--the tragedy that he could never carry out the destiny.

There are some who say Hamlet was modeled in part on the Earl of Essex, who tried to overthrow Elizabeth I, when she would not give him the power he desired--he was a brilliant man, a melancholic by nature, and yet a man of action, as was Hamlet.

Hamlet was erratic, but he had sound objective reasons for that erraticism outside himself. That we are allowed to see the inner turmoil his own temperament works on him does not, I believe, constitute real madness.

But I don't think that merely acting gets it quite right either, because he was acting for his very life, acting on a personal and political stage which led him into an act of passion (the murder of Polonius) which was not acting at all. I think he struggled to keep his balance as on a highwire--for he was built for the highwire--but that even within his acting he revealed himself.

Hey Ho,

Shakespeare lovers,

Maggie

Answer 8

i had to discuss this question on my essay
and i got 97/100 from it :)
he is not mad but it takes pages to explain all this