Rachel Kegley

Ms. Hansen

Honors English 11

24 December 2012

Hamlet Source Analysis

Madness does not always suddenly appear. It was staged for Ophelia to be mad before the play ofHamlet had even begun. Although many people view Hamlet as being mad, one quickly overlooks Ophelia’s character and does not read between the lines of her insanity. While Ophelia was in an uncommon mental state, she lost her father. She was upset when she heard of his death, but she became furious when she learned that her love, Hamlet, was his killer. Ophelia was given the characteristic of being mad only to compare Hamlet’s madness with another character that he was very close to. Hamlet would only show signs of madness during a time when he would play mind games with someone. Hamlet was not actually crazy like Ophelia was. Both Hamlet and Ophelia had a healthy relationship with one of their parents during the play, giving both of them a reason to feel sad and betrayed when they did not have that parent anymore. Shakespeare created similarities and dissimilarities between Hamlet and Ophelia’s madness.

One may agree with the author of the article, Theodore Lidz, which Ophelia shows signs of madness throughout the entire play but the audience does not always catch the signals. Although Ophelia has always been mad, it was not her fault. Hamlet killed her father sending her into depression. Lidz also explains that Hamlet is not mad he just wants to get back what he lost, and the only way for him to do that is by killing his father’s killer. There are many times in which Ophelia demonstrates madness before it is confirmed, but the audience does not realize it until the end of Hamlet, when the story is put together. Ophelia shows beginning signs of her madness when she allows her father to manipulate her relationship with Hamlet. Lidz suggests that Ophelia is pregnant with Hamlet’s baby, and losing Hamlet would put her under a lot of emotional stress just like losing her father did. Ophelia foreshadows her death by singing about the previous events to bring her to the decision of her death. Ophelia committed suicide to take herself out of her own misery, showing a mental illness that was incurable at the time.

Hamlets Enemy: Madness and Myth in Hamlet

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Hamlet's Enemy: Madness and Myth in "Hamlet", 1975. Reprint International Universities Press Inc., 1990.

Lidz argues that Shakespeare dramatized Ophelia's madness to provide a countertheme to action surrounding Hamlet's own insanity. But whereas the playwright remains ambiguous about the reality of the prince's madness, the critic continues, he portrays Ophelia as classically insane. According to Lidz, Ophelia's descent into madness does not result from merely her father's murder, but rather his murder by Hamlet, whom she loves. As a result,Ophelia is placed in "the intolerable predicament of having to turn away from the person she loves and idealizes because that person is responsible for her father's murder."

Shakespeare carefully places Ophelia's madness in apposition to Hamlet's, illuminating the causes of each by making Ophelia's plight the female counterpart of Hamlet's dilemma. The action around Ophelia's insanity forms the countertheme to the action surrounding Hamlet's madness, balancing the plot and leading to Hamlet's death as well as to Ophelia's. Each dies more or less because there is nothing left for them but to desire death as an escape from an existence that has become intolerable.

Whereas Shakespeare is ambiguous about the reality of Hamlet's insanity and depicts him as on the border, fluctuating between sanity and madness, he portrays Ophelia as definitely, one might even say classically, insane. Even before she comes on stage, a gentleman gives us an excellent description of her condition. Would that psychiatric texts could describe as clearly!

She speaks much of her father; says she hears

There's tricks i' the world; and hems and beats her heart;

Spurns enviously at straws; speaks things in doubt,

That carry but half sense; her speech is nothing,

Yet the unshaped use of it doth move

The hearers to collection; they aim at it,

And botch the words up fit to their own thoughts;

Which, as her winks and nods and gestures yield them,

Indeed would make one think there might be thought,

Though nothing sure, yet much unhappily.

[IV. v. 4-13]

She does not storm, or 'take arms against a sea of troubles' [III. i. 58]; but rather, as a passive, obedient and very feminine person she is simply

poor Ophelia,

Divided from herself and her fair judgement,

Without the which we are pictures, or mere beasts.

[IV. v. 84-6]

She sings one ditty about her love who is dead and gone, as if referring to her father, then another about a girl abandoned because she let her valentine tumble her before being wed—a bawdy bit that has led some critics to consider that the sweet Ophelia might have been distraught because she had given in to Hamlet's 'unmaster'd importunity' [I. iii. 32] and was now pregnant, with marriage to Hamlet no longer possible. However, to most, including those in the play, who knew her best, the cause of Ophelia's madness seems apparent. Claudius says:

Oh, this' the poison of deep grief; it springs

All from her father's death.

[IV. v. 75-6]

And Laertes muses about his mad sister:

O heavens! is't possible a young maid's wits

Should be as mortal as an old man's life?

Nature is fine in love, and where 'tis fine

It sends some precious instance of itself

After the thing it loves.

[IV. v. 160-64]

The comment is accentuated by Ophelia's chant:

They bore him barefaced on the bier;

Hey non nonny, nonny, hey nonny;

And on his grave rain'd many a tear.—

[IV. v. 165-67]

The gentle Ophelia, it seems, cannot absorb her father's murder. However, it is not her father's murder that has driven her mad but, rather, his murder byHamlet, the person she loves and upon whose love she has placed her hopes. Now, she can never marry him, and worse still, she has an obligation to hate him; indeed she must feel hatred toward him for depriving her of her beloved father, her original love. Shakespeare, then, has not only placedOphelia's insanity in apposition to Hamlet's but has emphasized the same crucial human frailty as the cause of the emotional disturbance in both the hero and heroine.

As we have seen, Hamlet mourns for his father, but his melancholy is induced by his bitterness against his mother because of her hasty marriage to his uncle; and his anguish and rage against his mother become intolerable when he learns that she has been untrue to his father. Hamlet is tormented by his desire to take vengeance against his mother, the person who had once been closest and most dear to him. He manages to control his matricidal impulsions, but his mother is lost to him as a love object. He struggles to regain her by imploring her to renounce her sexual life with Claudius and return to him and become faithful to his father's memory. At the very moment when Hamlet believes he may have succeeded, he inadvertently kills Polonius bringing new woes on himself and sealing Ophelia's fate.

Ophelia, like Hamlet, mourns for her father, but his death is not a sufficient reason for her to lose her sanity. She, too, is in the intolerable predicament of having to turn away from the person she loves and idealizes because that person is responsible for her father's murder. Her father is dead, and Hamlet, as his slayer, is barred to her affections. She can no longer transfer her attachment from her father to Hamlet. Her entire orientation to the future has suddenly been destroyed.

Both Hamlet and Ophelia, then, are faced by the sudden and irretrievable loss of a love object because of that person's unforgivable behavior in killing, actually or symbolically, a beloved parent whose death requires vengeance. Shakespeare clearly saw how such situations could engender a violently confused emotional state and lead a person to feel that the world was empty and worthless and those who inhabit it perfidious and deceitful. Life becomes intolerable; the sufferer escapes the dilemma by abandoning rationality and when that fails, by abandoning life itself.

Now, the reader might not think that Polonius, a man already in his dotage, a spying busybody whom Hamlet considered a tedious old fool, could be so important to Ophelia. Indeed, one might similarly wonder why Hamlet should be so concerned about the deceitful and wanton Gertrude. Oedipal attachments do not, as we know from countless patients, involve a rational evaluation of the parent. If raised with reasonable parental care, the boy has a deep attachment to his mother, and the girl to her father. Ophelia's attachment to Polonius is accentuated by her motherless state. As a widower, Polonius may have been overly protective of his daughter and especially affectionate to her; and Ophelia, as commonly happens in such situations, may have felt free to fantasy that she could become a replacement for her mother in her father's life, and thus form a particularly intense attachment to him. Similarly, Hamlet is fatherless, but his situation differed from Ophelia's as he had lost his father much more recently. Nevertheless, as we have noted, his father's death could lead to a recrudescence of Hamlet's old attachment to his mother as well as a heightening of his identification with his father. He could then feel that his mother's infidelity to his father was also an infidelity to him.

Ophelia, we should note, is already under considerable emotional stress at the time her father is killed. The vacillations in Hamlet's attitude and behavior toward her could not but be extremely unsettling to the very young woman who idolized and idealized him. She is, one day, his most beloved, who must never doubt his love [II. ii. 116-24]; shortly thereafter, she is the object of his venom and the recipient of his malignant curse; and then, on the same day, she finds him bantering salaciously with her. She cannot know that Hamlet's attitude toward her reflects his disillusionment in his mother. To her, Hamlet's inconstancy can only mean deceitfulness or madness. Ophelia finds him mad, and, hopefully, mad because she has been forced to reject him. Hamlet slays Polonius by mistake; he had not, like Claudius, committed a premeditated murder for his own advancement. We must even consider that were Hamlet not so out of control, he might still beg Ophelia's forgiveness for his error. However, that is not the way the play was written, or could have been written.

Source Citation:

Lidz, Theodore. "Hamlets Enemy: Madness and Myth in Hamlet." EXPLORING Shakespeare. Online ed. Detroit: Gale, 2003.Discovering Collection. Gale. Independent School District 191. 23 Dec. 2012 <http://find.galegroup.com/srcx/infomark.do?&source=gale&srcprod=DISC&userGroupName=mnkburnsv&prodId=DC&tabID=T001&docId=EJ2115503856&type=retrieve&contentSet=GSRC&version=1.0>.

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