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).