Insanity And Madness In Shakespeare's Hamlet

In Shakespeare’s Hamlet, characters tread the line between sanity and madness. The eponymous character, Hamlet leaves the audience and his family stunned at whether he is merely performing madness or if he has truly lost his wits. This careful balancing act of sanity and madness is perpetuated across the text as characters grapple with what it means to be sane and what it means to be mad. Most notably, Hamlet is not the only character to suffer from a distracted mind. After Polonius’s death, Ophelia has been driven insane from grief from her father’s death. Claudius, the king, laments her change of fate and declares her mind lost: “Poor Ophelia divided from herself and her fair judgment.” It appears to be sound logic: Ophelia sings snatches

Firstly, the state of madness is tentative and difficult to define, as shown through various characters' inability to recognize Hamlet’s madness as acting. So, those characters' trustworthiness in their statements on Ophelia’s statements are shown to be false: if they cannot recognize Hamlet’s madness then who is to say they can recognize Ophelia’s? Continuing on, Ophelia’s ‘madness’ rant contains too much hidden meaning to be simply written off as delusional speeches. She references flowers, something she has done before she went ‘mad’, and also connects Hamlet to her father’s death using those same flower metaphors: a kind of wordplay that cannot be believed to be executed by one whose speech is nonsense. Ophelia thus must be sane to some degree. If Ophelia is pretending to be insane, a major reason she might want to is for her own safety. Ophelia’s father is dead, his murder covered up by the king, and her brother is the leader of an insurrectionist movement that is working to usurp Claudius’s place on the throne. By pretending to be mad, Ophelia deflects suspicion and flies under Claudius’ radar, something she must do as Claudius and others are already aware she is causing a stir and providing dangerous words and theories to those who are against Claudius. Ophelia is not mad and is merely performing madness, much like Hamlet