Hamlets Madness Essay, Research Paper
The ghost becomes Hamlet?s
counselor, guiding him through his everyday maze of depression and
confusion. It is through the ghost of his father that he learns that Claudius, the
new King of Denmark, is solely responsible for his father?s ?foul and most
unnatural murder? (I.v.26). He claims that he is told to seek revenge on his
father?s murder by murdering Claudius. Hamlet sees the ghost at various
times over the course of the play, appearing when he is in need of help.
Hamlet?s condition persists, gradually getting worse, as he becomes
increasingly more aggressive and violent. His behavior towards Ophelia, the
woman he loves, becomes erratic. He has violent outbursts towards his
mother. He kills various members of the castle without explanation. Hamlet is
clearly out of control, and is in need of a psychological evaluation. The most
major of mental illnesses is schizophrenia, a psychotic illness, where the
patient is out of touch with reality. In this disease, thoughts may be deranged
or delusions without basis may arise. The individual tends to withdraw from
their already little social contact. They become unresponsive and lose interest
in normal activities. Emotionally, they can be irritable, angry, aggressive, and
even violent at times. At other times, they can have an obsession with death,
or voices can be heard or visions seen. The reasons for this change often
appear unexplainable to relatives and friends. Some try to explain this new
behavior as due to stresses, past or present, especially from interpersonal
difficulties and mishaps. It is generally a devastating illness, troublesome to the
patient and painful to the relatives and sometimes offensive to society.
(Chong, 1) William Shakespeare?s literary opus Hamlet is an adventure story
of the highest quality, a tale of the psychological trials of a man who is
isolated from the society he must live in, and a portrait of a family driven to
bloody and gruesome murder by one man?s lust for power (King, 1). In his
essay ?Hamlet: A Riddle in Greatness?, Louis Kronenberger states that ?even
on the surface, Hamlet remains among the greatest of unsolved psychological
mysteries, and the one that has been provided with the most solutions? (1).