“Insanity has been defined as a prolonged departure from the individual's normal reactions of living, and acting, and has also been called the result of a failure of adjustment of the individual to his environment”.Madness or Insanity plays a big role in the lives of most of the characters throughout Shakespeare's Hamlet. Hamlet’s pretend madness, Ophelia’s madness of death and love and Laertes’ madness of revenge.
To start off,Hamlet's madness is questionable to the very beginning of the play if it's for real or not.Hamlet isn't insane, but uses the madness as a revenge tool, for his father's death.He thinks carefully about everything he does.In act two Hamlet appears to be mad when he is reading and talking with Polonius, Rosencrantz, Guildenstern, and the players.But he tells Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, that he is just pretending to be mad when he says “I am but mad north-north-west. When the wind is southerly, I know a hawk from a handsaw (Shakespeare.II.2.377-378)”.Despite the fact that he tells them that he has been deceiving Claudius and his mother, but a good deal of what he is says make him sound like a madman so Rosencrantz and
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She is also the victim of a melancholic love. She bears honest feeling for Hamlet, but his brutal rejection of her affection is too much to bear. Her purity and sensitivity also leads her to madness as said in On Ophelia's Madness“ Whatever the exact nature of Ophelia's malady of love, whether it is pure erotomania or passio hysterica brought on by lovesickness, the symptoms which she exhibits are so clearly portrayed and most of them so easily recognized that the Elizabethan audience, we have reason to suppose, would at least see Ophelia as a girl suffering physically and mentally the pangs of rejected”. She is always depending on men a and when she is rejected by the one she loves, Ophelia falls into madness too hide a purity and