The Images Of Insanity In Shakespeare's Hamlet

Shakespeare's tragedy Hamlet has been analyzed for centuries. Hamlet’s antic disposition has been the topic of many discussions for years, and will continue to be argued. Hamlet shows his antic disposition to those who he believes he cannot trust. However, there is one person with which Hamlet always stays true, Horatio. Although, many argue Hamlet to be deranged, through his thoughts, words, and actions Hamlet proves to only be crafting the image of insanity in an insane world.
Karín S. Coddon explores the political implications Hamlet's madness held for Renaissance spectators. Coddon links madness to rebellion (Rosenblum). In the world of Hamlet, everything is unacceptable to the modern understanding of royal lineage. Through a classic lineage
Hamlet’s thoughts are witnessed through his soliloquies. Hamlet says, “What’s Hecuba to him or he to Hecuba, That he should weep for her? What would he do Had he the motive and the cue for passion That I have? He would drown the stage with tears, And cleave the general ear with horrid speech, Make mad the guilty, and appal the free, Confound the ignorant, and amaze indeed The very faculties of eyes and ears” (Hamlet 2.2.
Rejected lovers were thought to be at risk of mental breakdown, and melancholy specifically was a weakness to which writers and intellectuals were susceptible to. Shakespeare was aware that passion could be readily confused with madness. In Hamlet, Polonius, misreading the causes of the Prince’s seeming lunacy from romantic rejection, offers a neat analysis of his illness that makes the relationship between love and madness very clear. After being rejected by Ophelia, Polonius explains that Hamlet, “Fell into a sadness, then into a fast, Thence to a watch, thence into a weakness, Thence to a lightness, and by this declension, Into the madness wherein he now raves” (Hamlet, 2.2.145-148). Polonius is wrong in this instance, but Shakespeare took seriously the view that excessive or unrequited love could lead to mental distraction. We might laugh at Polonius’s poor diagnosis of Hamlet, but there is nothing funny about his daughter Ophelia’s subsequent descent into madness and suicidal despair. Cruelly treated by Hamlet and shaken by her father’s death, Ophelia later appears on stage as a model of what early modern people understood to be a ‘distracted’ woman pushed into insanity by love, her seemingly meaningless chatter suggestive of disturbing sexual