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Examples Of Madness In Hamlet

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Hamlet and His, Not so Real, Madness
A few symptoms of madness are extreme high or low moods, confused thinking, extreme fear, and change in eating or sleeping patterns. In the play Hamlet, Hamlet does not have these symptoms for most of the play. A few things that show Hamlet is not truly mad are his depression, his need to get revenge, and him acting crazy to get these things.
Hamlet struggles with depression all throughout this play. In the beginning of Hamlet he is struggling to deal with the death of his father. Hamlet also has to deal with the fact of his mother getting remarried to quickly. “He is in mental agony and agitation as his father is dead and his mother has hastily married his uncle Claudius” (Pearce 95). He expresses some of this mental …show more content…

All throughout this play Hamlet uses his acting skills to make everyone else believe that he is insane. “There are numerous long speeches that Hamlet makes throughout the play to other characters, yet here he is to a large extent acting a role, aware of himself as an actor; it is only in his soliloquies, where he is alone on stage, that he is able to give full expression to his private thoughts” (Pearce and Duffy 21). When Hamlet is alone he never shows the signs of madness, however, when other people are around this is not the case. If Hamlet were actually mad he would not be able to be normal one minute and crazy the next. Hamlet even explains why he appears to be mad and is sane the next. “I am but mad north-north-west. When the wind is/southerly, I know a hawk from a handsaw’’ (Shakespeare II.ii.351-352). In this quote Hamlet is telling people that he is only pretending to be crazy. Hamlet is trying to tell the people around him that he is only crazy in certain situations, but they do not understand this. Eventually Hamlet’s acting this way does cause the people closest to him to believe he has lost his

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