Shakespeare’s revenge tragedy is founded upon the complex nature of revenge in that it ultimately causes the madness and demise of the tragic antihero, Hamlet, who transforms from a state of staged madness to genuine insanity. Hamlet wears his heart on his sleeve as a genuine and honest scholar from the University of Wittenberg. However, Shakespeare introduces the ghost in the earlier scenes of the play, as his demonic symbol is a catalyst for Hamlet’s uncertainty and madness. The ghost imperatively orders Prince Hamlet to ‘revenge (my) most foul and unnatural murder’, a turning point in the tragedy where Hamlet is exposed to the corrupt Claudian court and called to embrace medieval ideologies he inherently opposes. In a bid to ascertain if Claudius was responsible for his father’s immoral death, Hamlet vows to duplicitously put on an ‘antic disposition’, subversive to the genuineness in the preceding scenes. …show more content…
The ghost’s destructively ambiguous role as a messenger who orders Prince Hamlet to avenge his father’s death torments Hamlet mentally, as connoted in the ironically despairing characterisation of ‘weakness’ and ‘melancholy’ in ‘out of my weakness and my melancholy as he is very potent with such spirits abuses me to damn me’, where Hamlet’s uncertainty of the ghost’s authenticity depicts his insanity. The antithesis between Hamlet’s ‘heat’, symbolic of his madness, juxtaposed with Gertrude’s ‘cold patience’, a metonym for tranquillity, exemplifies Hamlet’s madness as the only person who sees the ghost. Gertrude affirms this loss of madness in ‘o what a noble mind is here overthrown’. The metaphoric ‘noble mind’ is Hamlet’s sanity and Renaissance intellect, which has been usurped by madness and