The Depression of Hamlet
One of the most captivating aspects of William Shakespeare’s Hamlet is the question of what Hamlet’s afflictions are. The play straightforwardly tells us at most that his peers believe him to be mad, though he disagrees, and that he is indecisive which is his tragic flaw. Scholars have debated what the truth is behind Hamlet since its writing, and the range of potential arguments has only grown wider as the world has come to understand more of the diversity of mental disorders. So in this day and age to take current psychology and apply it to what the play defines in Hamlet as a physical person is no easy task, but not impossible. Paired with modern research, the play does gives enough information to match Hamlet with
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This is evidenced by a 2012 study findings that demonstrated this ideology in the common people across the globe, using a French population as a representation (Angermeyer, et al 2). Even without any diagnostics, these participants correctly identified the affliction of different persons as depressive or insane. Thus these descriptions known by common people can be applied to Hamlet to verify his own affliction. The data is analyzed by searching for spikes in percentages, which indicate what characteristics apply to madness (in the report, schizophrenia), and depression. Based on the spikes, one cause that lead nearly twice more to depression than schizophrenia is troubles in family and relationships (Angermeyer, et al 7). This is a match for Hamlet, who is driven so far as to contemplate suicide by the whirlwind of an adulterous mother, a murderous father, and a rejecting girlfriend. Another match is that depressed individuals don’t come off as frightening to others. Hamlet evokes more strongly the feelings of uncomfortability, insecurity, and confusion than he does fear. Some examples of those effects are Act 1 Scene 2, where his actions leave his parents not knowing how to react, and Act 3 Scene 4, where Gertrude doesn’t demonstrate any horrification as the climax of the incident passes and she remains in his presence. But even with this evidence claiming Hamlet to be depressed, a better job …show more content…
Hamlet’s tragic flaw is indecision, which leads him to prolong events further than his control and even his life. If Hamlet is depressed, there must be a crucial connection between his mental state and this characteristic of utmost importance. A British and German study respectively proved issues in both to be related to depression. In the British study, a sample of depressed and healthy participants were assessed on their mental health, which was factored into a proven method for measuring intuition. The depressed patients experienced higher levels of brooding and reflecting (Remmers, et al 1, 6-7). Hamlets exhibits both; just one of many instances of both brooding and reflecting is the ‘To be or not to be’ soliloquy. At the focal point of the research, depressed patients were found to be significantly low in intuition compared to their healthy counterparts. (Remmers, et al 8). Intuition connects to indecisiveness as intuitive judgements serve as guidelines for decisions. A lack of intuition strips and individual of these guidelines and renders them indecisive. As for the German study, it was remarkably similar, using affected control and sample groups and even the same evaluation criteria to factor the level of depression into the results. For the results, a simple rating scale was used to identify if and how much a
“He is far gone, far gone” (2.2.8). The play Hamlet written by William Shakespeare is the story of young Hamlet whose father was killed by his uncle, Claudius, then his uncle took the throne and married Hamlet’s mother, Gertrude, which ultimately caused hamlet to become melancholic or ‘mad’. In the essay ‘Madness and Melancholy in Hamlet’ written by Kate Flint she explores the idea of madness and melancholy in the Elizabethan time in reference to the actions of Hamlet. She states that Hamlet is neither mad nor melancholy but does display symptoms of each. Flint states that to categorize Hamlet as either mad or melancholy the characters would have to be viewed as real people which they cannot be. She shows that Hamlets madness is only an excuse to expose the truth and teach the audience a lesson. The essay takes the position that hamlet’s strange behaviour was neither madness nor melancholy because those are human emotions but that they were a way to break the barrier between player and audience.
After demolishing the theories of other critics, Bradley concluded that the essence of Hamlet’s character is contained in a three-fold analysis of it. First, that rather than being melancholy by temperament, in the usual sense of “profoundly sad,” he is a person of unusual nervous instability, one liable to extreme and profound alterations of mood, a potential manic-depressive type. Romantic, we might say. Second, this Hamlet is also a person of “exquisite moral sensibility, “ hypersensitive to goodness, a m...
In the playwright Hamlet by William Shakespeare, Hamlet often shows many signs of depression. It is argued whether he is putting on the act, or if he is actually severely depressed. I believe after the death of his father, Hamlet becomes very emotionally unstable. Three things affect Hamlet, the death of his father, the remarriage of his mother, and Ophelia. Hamlet contemplates death, and becomes prepared to die near the end of the play.
Mental illness can be a virus. It attaches to those with wild thoughts, actions, and comprehensions of a world known and unknown. It hits the soul, pulling at once a kind being into anxiety, pain and loss. In Shakespeare's play Hamlet, his main character, Hamlet, comes down with the illness. It enters him through actions by friends, enemies, and even his own family. The hardest thing to understand is whether Hamlet's insanity is completely real, or an act put on to win revenge. However, no matter what the reality of his psychotic mind is, the real question is what brought this whole thing on. In 1601 when Shakespeares Hamlet was written, Hamlet would be diagnosed with suffering from melancholy, but with today's high technology and knowledge he would of been diagnosed with bipolar I disorder. In Shakespeare’s time there was no concept of depressive illnesses, although melancholy was well known during his time.
Arising from Hamlet's depression comes a paralysis to act. By not acting upon the...
Self-image plays a big role in how people act. Hamlet’s inability to know himself or to understand his own motives leads to the restless battles between right and wrong in his conscience, which is the reason for his unpredictable tragic actions, and behaviors. Hamlets’ confusion is clearly shown in his soliloquies. His confused mind can be broken into five categories. Hamlet suffers from his own moral standards, the desperate need to seek the truth, lack of confidence and trust in his own impulses, self-hatred, and melancholy. Each of these categories contribute to Hamlet’s troubled mind.
In William Shakespeare’s play, Hamlet, various mental illnesses are displayed. The mental illnesses are frequently discussed by various critics. Some believe Hamlet is simply love sick, while others argue he has no disease at all. Poet and Shakespeare contemporary, Ben Jonson says, “If you be sick, your own thoughts make you sick.” Ben connects mind with body to imply that a person’s mental state can relate directly to their physical state. This quote relates directly with Hamlet’s mentality. Hamlet has driven himself to madness and, in his own mind, has made himself sick. Hamlet shows clear signs of clinical depression, and because no one is there to help and support him it only gets worse. A person with depression needs
“To die, to sleep; To sleep, perchance to dream - ay, there's the rub: For in this sleep of death what dreams may come...” (Shakespeare 278) reflects Prince Hamlet in his famous “to be, or not to be” melancholic soliloquy. In Shakespeare’s masterpiece, Hamlet’s declamations are filled with melancholia, which was an extremely common mood among the literal and intellectual characters of the Elizabethan’s times. One of them, Robert Burton, wrote its greatest depiction in his popular Anatomy of Melancholia at the beginning of the 1600’s. Burton’s work is believed to had been significant to Shakespeare in the sense that it pinpointed the common stereotype of the melancholic individual and, furthermore, delivered the measuring stick Shakespeare’s audiences would have used in their analysis of his more “dismal” characters. Shakespeare’s best work and mother of modern psychology uncovered the veil to one of the most melancholic characters in the history of literature after presenting Hamlet as a picture of a tortured, miserable young man who loses his path in the labyrinth of his sorrowful t...
Hamlet, a Shakespearean character, constantly struggles in a battle with his mind. He leads a very trying life that becomes too much for him to handle. Hamlet experiences hardships so horrible and they affect him so greatly that he is unable escape his dispirited mood. In speaking what he feels, Hamlet reveals his many symptoms of depression, a psychological disorder. While others can move on with life, Hamlet remains in the past. People do not understand his behavior and some just assume he is insane. However, Hamlet is not insane. He only pretends to be mad. Because Hamlet never receives treatment for his disorder, it only gets worse and eventually contributes to his death.
Hamlet is arguably the most famous play written by the highly renowned English playwright, William Shakespeare--a man known in much of the western world as the father of english literature. Part of the reason for this title is for Shakespeare’s ability to take a character, and through a basic plot, transform said character into becoming something that many scholars have debated over for years. Hamlet in this play is this character; a character whose mental instability or sheer lack of perception has lead to countless debate and argument over the actual explanation for the characters behavior. Schizophrenia can be defined as a lasting mental disorder that forms a fundamental impediment in thought and emotion (as well as behaviour). This disorder can then lead to a lack of judgment in perception, and unusual actions and feelings, all in addition to an overall withdrawal from reality and a devolution of personal relationships to delusional perceptions of oneself and his surroundings--in all, schizophrenia is a mental disorder involving the breaking down of the mind and one’s grip on reality (National Library of Medicine). With the above definition, it may at first seem rash to criticize Hamlet and declare that he has Schizophrenia; however, once it is considered the varying degrees in which Schizophrenia can manifest itself, it no longer becomes such a farfetched thought. It must be contended then, that Hamlet is neither insane nor lazy, but merely a man who suffers from Schizophrenic-hallucinations; hallucinations that spiral up the plot into one focused primarily on Hamlet’s search for truth.
“The world is sad, because a puppet was once melancholy” once said Oscar Wilde, the modern playwright in reference to Hamlet. It is understandable why. In Shakespeare’s tragedy, the protagonist, Hamlet is depressed after the death of his father and remarriage of his mother to his uncle, Claudius (the antagonist.) His depression is defined by Louis Menhand in The New Yorker as “the unhappiness of eternal disappointment in life as it is” or the German word, weltschmerz. To a great extent, this type of sadness is what shaped Hamlet’s decisions more than his reasoning though process. In William Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Hamlet’s weltschmerz degrades his ability through feminine allusions and body imagery to the extent that he needed the stability of triangulation to live.
As Hamlet transforms from a motivated intellectual to an obsessed griever, Shakespeare evaluates the fluidity of sanity.The juxtaposition of Hamlet’s desire to act and inability to do so unveils Hamlet’s inner turmoil, for as Hamlet disconnects from family, distrusts his environment, and forms an obsession with perfection, the audience realizes his fatal flaw and watches him tumble into the grasps of insanity. This degeneration forces the audience to consider how equilibrium between thought and action influences the conservation of sanity, not only for Hamlet, but also for all of humanity.
The psychology behind inner conflict and an individual’s decisions has been well explored, but it can be truly demonstrated through the use of William Shakespeare’s dramatic play, Hamlet. An inner conflict evolves as he learns of his father’s death and that it was due to the ambitions of his uncle Claudius. Depression is the first conflict that is shown by Hamlet in which he is mourning, but shortly after we see a contemplation between action and inaction in regards to avenging his father’s death. He eventually reaches an epiphany which allows him to truly understand that absolute control can not be achieved. Until one’s life is hurt by another’s evil ambitions, a true understanding of self is not yet fully developed. It is when they are influenced
In the play Hamlet by William Shakespeare, the main character, Hamlet, is often perceived by the other characters in the play as being mentally unbalanced because he acts in ways that drive them to think he is mad. Hamlet may very well be psychotic; however, there are times when he “feigns insanity” in order to unearth the truth surrounding his father's death. This plan seems to be going well until Hamlet's mental state slowly begins to deteriorate. What began as an act of insanity or antic disposition transitions from an act to a tragic reality. After studying Hamlet's actions, one will notice that as the play progresses, his feigned insanity becomes less and less intentional and devolves into true mental illness.
The psychological aspect of Hamlet which is most prominently displayed is his melancholy. This condition is rooted in the psyche and the emotions, the former causing the latter to go awry. Lily B. Campbell in “Grief That Leads to Tragedy” emphasizes ...