Is he mad or sane? Or just mad in craft, yet punished with sore distractions. Perhaps Hamlet is the victim--as we all at some time feel to be--of the world's sane view of insane perplexities. He is the man at war within himself; a traveler with a passport into strange, twilight regions of the soul. Whether or not Hamlet's suffering, and then insanity, is caused by his relations or by his own melancholy, Hamlet's struggle embodies the essential inwardness of human suffering that all can relate to.
The concrete manifestations of Hamlet's misery are closely related. Not only has his father died, also his uncle is the murderer, his mother marries the uncle and is a likely accessory to the crime, and his true love lies to him. It is reasonable to suppose that Hamlet's state of mind becomes more and more unstable as he is consumed with thoughts of all of the sins against him. Eventually Hamlet loses all sense of life's significance. He states to his deceitful mother and uncle, "But......
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Approximate Word Count: 453
Approximate Pages: 2 (260 words per double-spaced page) |