Insanity In Hamlet Research Paper

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Insanity William Shakespeare is a well known English poet, and playwright who has written various popular plays and sonnets, one of those being Hamlet which was written between 1599 and 1602. The tragedy of Hamlet takes place in Denmark; it revolves around the revenge Prince Hamlet plans to perform against his very own Uncle Claudius. The play starts off with a brutal murder in which Claudius slays the King of Denmark (Hamlet’s Father) by pouring poison into his ear. Hamlet is grief stricken upon this event happening unlike his mother Gertrude who only morns for a short period of time and then goes off and marries Claudius making him the new King of Denmark. Hamlet is outraged by this sudden marriage between Claudius and Gertrude which is…show more content…
When Hamlet finds out that Gertrude had not only quickly moved on from his father’s death to marry another man he also learned that she had been unfaithful to him. He states “She married. O, most wicked speed, to post, With such dexterity to incestuous sheets! It is not nor it cannot come to good: But break, my heart; for I must hold my tongue” (1.2.6). This shows that Hamlet isn’t just mad about her remarriage he is also disturbed by the fact that his mother is guilty of incest. He constantly is faced with the urge to take revenge over his mother but controls it when the ghost of his father orders him to. Hamlet refers to his mother as “Like Niobe, all tears:-why she, even she- O, God! A beast, that wants discourse of reason, Would have mourned longer” (1.2.6.). This proves that Hamlet has lost any loving emotion that he had towards his mother also stating that an animal or beast would’ve mourned longer than she mourned over his father. In Hamlet’s struggle to avenge his father’s death he attempts to bring his mother back to him by “imploring her to renounce her sexual life with Claudius and return to him and become faithful to his father's memory” (Theodore Lidz). At this point Hamlet is attempting to tell his mother that it was in fact Claudius, her new lover who had killed her old one, the true King of Denmark.…show more content…
Once Hamlet realizes what Claudius has done he kills both Rosencrants and Guildenstern and makes his way back to Denmark. In his absence his lover Ophelia commits suicide by drowning herself in a nearby lake. Once Hamlet realizes that Ophelia is the one the grave was dug for he leaps into her grave along with Laertes, Ophelia’s brother claims that he loves her more and they begin to fight. Hamlet states that “Forty thousand brothers, Could not, with all their quantity of love, Make up my sum” (5.1.256). This quote proves that Hamlet believes he loved Ophelia more than her own brother. Laertes is angered by Hamlet’s sudden love for Ophelia because he hadn’t been expressing his love towards her ever since the death of the King. This altercation leads up to Hamlet’s, Claudius’s, and Gertrude’s death. All these different acts that Hamlet is putting on and is starting to contradict each other “like all real men, and especially men such as he, has a character made up of many elements, ramifying themselves in many directions, some being healthy and some diseased, and intertwined now in harmony” (Strachey). This theory quoted from Edward Strachey states that the way Hamlet is acting gives others the right to judge him in many different and in many different perspectives that the characters see fit. One of those characters being Ophelia

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