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Insanity In Hamlet

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Can death make someone lose their sanity? I believe to an extent you can lost your sanity. In the play Hamlet written by William Shakespeare, Hamlet has been through a lot in a short period of time. Hamlet is in the middle of grieving over his father’s death, then his mother Queen Gertrude married her brother-in-law Claudius two months after King Hamlet’s death. Hamlet then sees the ghost of his father, King Hamlet tells his son “so art thou to revenge, when thou shalt hear.” (1.5.7) he wanted his son to seek revenge on his uncle for killing him. From that point Hamlet knew what he had to do for his father. According to James Hirsh he believes that Hamlet’s speech was a feigned soliloquy because of Shakespeare plays he uses “eloquence between …show more content…

I believe that as Hamlet is doing his speech and Ophelia steps out from behind the pillars as they have a moment and Hamlet hears something off in the distance and asked Ophelia “…where’s your father?” (3.1.125.) In this scene of his soliloquy he over dramatize his action, he knew that Claudius and Ophelia father Polonius was eavesdropping, and since they were spying on him Hamlet decided to give them something to listen and watch for, by running around the room yelling while pushing Ophelia around. Hamlet states that he would “put an antic disposition on.” (1.5.172.), letting the audience know that he is going to fake his madness, but leaving the other characters in the dark. Hamlet pretends to have gone mad because he witnessed his father’s ghost and know what actually happened to him. He does not want his mother nor Claudius to know what he knows, so he act like he is going mad. It helps him mask what is going on and keeps Claudius out of his mind. He plans on assassinating the King, he has thought maybe his mother was in on it, since she moved on so quickly. He does not want the chance of his secret of knowledge to be known. He makes sure he changes is body language, the way he talks hoping that nothing slips out, and his facial expressions. There is no better way to distract all of this by acting like he is losing his sanity. According to Hirsh he states that “…attempt to mislead or manipulate

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Then Ophelia finds out that Hamlet killed her father and she goes crazy and she starts singing songs about hamlet and starts claiming that he promised to marry her. “He is dead and gone, lady, He is dead and gone…. Quoth she, ‘Before you tumbled me, youpromised me to wed.” (DOC D.). Hamlet’s actions aren’t justified because maybe if Hamlet didn’t kill Polonius, she wouldn’t have gone insane. Now I am going to talk about when Hamlet was denying with himself about everything… in document B he starts calling himself a vogue, peasant, ass, whore and a coward.

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