Title The renowned psychologist Robert hare’s psychopath checklist-revised or PCL-R for short, is a list of behavioral traits that psychopath’s share or have in common, and it was to my great surprise that Shakespeare’s character Hamlet displays almost every single trait, excluding a few simply because we do not know much of Hamlet's childhood. Throughout the play, Hamlet is known for feigning madness, and he is so convincing that it comes to the point where even his own mother doubts his sanity. Hamlet isn’t faking madness like he says, instead, he is a full fledged psychopath playing at being sane. In modern day society the word psychopath is predefined, immediately conjuring up images of deranged criminals, murderers or rapists. The literal literal definition of a psychopath is noticeably different, …show more content…
In their article Hungry like the wolf: A word-pattern analysis of the language of psychopaths, authors Jeffrey Hancock, Michael Woodworth and Stephen Porter describe psychopaths in a very different light, instead cataloging them as “...psychopaths lack emotion, hold a selfish, instrumental world view, and prey upon and exploit others, using aggression and manipulative conversational skills as weapons” (Hancock, Woodworth and Porter, 109), which begins to sound very familiar when approaching Hamlet’s personality with a clinical perspective. Some of the more obvious aspects of his personality fit right in the PCL-R checklist, such as item number one on the list, “grandiose self worth” and item five, “cunning/manipulative”. Throughout the play, Hamlet is conniving and calculating, hyper fixated on single objects (i.e killing Claudius, on Ophelia, and making his mother see the error of her ways) and yet is extremely close minded at the same time, his tunnel vision forcing out all other distractions such as Fortinbras storming down to conquer Denmark. He doesn’t consider the consequences of his