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Madness

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52 views2 pages

Madness

Uploaded by

poosauce
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Theme of madness.

Use dramatic stuff and the word audience

Context + definitions

Essay structure

Primary quotes

I,IV 73-4 Horatio: ‘what if it tempt you toward the flood, my lord, and there assume some other horrible
form which might deprive your sovereignty of reason and draw you into madness’ – first mention of
madness as hamlet proposes following the ghost of his dead father. Sovereignty links to idea of body
politic with the king or price as the body’s head.

III,I,150-161 Ophelia: ‘O what a noble mind is here o’erthrown Now see what noble and most sovereign
reason like sweet bells jangled out of tune and harsh’. - Links to quote above, body politics again.

I,V,132 Horatio: ‘These are but wild and whirling words, my lord’. – His foreshadowing from first quote
seems to have come true. Some productions play hamlet as mad from this point on.

1,V,169-170 Hamlet: ‘As I perchance hereafter shall think meet To put an antic disposition on’. – Jonathan
slinger 2013 RSC production portrayed as mad well before this quote. Shakespeare influenced by Lucius
Junius Brutus (pretended to be stupid to avenge). Brutus mentioned in Henry V which Shakespeare
wrote immediately before hamlet in 1599. Also in old Nordic story ‘amleth’ means ‘stupid’.

II,II,93-94 Polonius: ‘Mad call I it, for to define true madness, what is’t but to be nothing else but mad?’ –
Shakespeare intentionally making madness more ambivalent? Giving points of view from Horatio,
Ophelia, Polonius (this one is very circular) and yet portraying hamlets madness to audience in many
contradicting ways.

III,I164-165 Claudius: ‘Nor what he spake, though it lacked form a little, was not like madness.’ Hamlet: ‘I
essentially am not in madness, but mad in craft’. – Claudius doesn’t think Hamlet is mad. Hamlet reveals
this to his mother later. Dramatic tension of Gertrudes choice to disagree with Claudius and say that ham
is mad. Many dramatic questions to audience.

V,II226-35 Hamlet: ‘was’t Hamlet wrong’d Laertes? Never Hamlet…’ – Hamlet stepping outside of himself
to Laertes at Ophelia’s grave to blame his own madness for what his killing of Polonius.

III,I 150-161 Hamlet: ‘what should such fellows as I do crawling between earth and heaven? We are
arrant knaves all, believe none of us.’ – Hamlet expressing his disembodied state in the only way he can.
Ie madness.

IV,V84-85 Claudius: ‘Poor Ophelia, divided from herself and her fair judgement’. – Claudius after
witnessing ophlias collapse.
Critical quotes

17th

Jeremy collier on Ophelia: ‘such people out to be kept in dark rooms and with company. To show them,
or let the loose, is somewhat unreasonable.

Chateaubriand on Hamlet: ‘that tragedy of maniacs, that Royal Bedlam, in which every character is
either crazed or criminal, in which feigned madness is added to real madness and in which the grave
itself furnishes the stage with the skill of a fool’.

Henry Mackenzie: ‘Hamlets distraction is always subject to the control of his reason and subservient to
the accomplishment of his designs.’

18th

Geroge Farren: ‘Whether Hamlet ought not to be found lunatic or insane can never be legally
determined’

J.C Bucknill: Hamlet exemplifies what he called a ‘reasoning melancholic.’

19th-20th

Carol Thomas Neely on Ophelia: ‘a dark double who acts out what is repressed in Hamlet’

Carol Thomas Neely on Ophelia: ‘Insane, Ophelia breaks from the subjection of a vehemently patriarchal
society and makes public display, in her verses, of the body she has been taught to suppress.’

Lillian Feder on Shakespeare: ‘Madness appears in Shakespeare’s work as a level of psychic experience
that produces an enlargement of perception and understanding for the persona or character and hence
for the audience.’

Michel Foucault on Hamlet: ‘trapped in a space of indecision’

Performance history

Alternative interpretations

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