THE MADNESS OF HAMLET

Otago Witness, Issue 3001, 20 September 1911, Page 81

THE MADNESS OF HAMLET

_ «> A PAPER READ BEFORE THE, ASH BURTON SHAKESPEARE CLUB By Dr W. J. Mtjllin. "Tell me true, are you not mad, indeed, or do you but counterfeit?" says the Clown in "Twelfth Night" to Malyolio ; and this is the scope of our inouiry in the paper I present to you to-night. Was Hamlet mad, indeed, or did he but counterfeit? Before we decide the question we must first settle what we mean by madness. "To define true madness," says Polonius, "what is't but to be nothing else but mad!'' and when we endeavour to define more particularly we find that we can do no better than the Chancellor. Here is a definition of insanity by a high authority: —"Insanity may be defined as consisting in morbid conditions of the brain, the result of defective formation or altered nutrition of its substance, induced by local or general morbid pro cesses, and characterised especially by non-development, obliteration, or impairment, or perversion of one or more of its psychical functions." Another authority says, more vaguely, but also more luminously:—"The first question is, What is meant by insanity? I shall try to show clearly . . . that no standard of sanity as fixed by Nature can under any circumstances be considered definitely to exist. .Sanity and insanity, as recognised by the doctor, and, in fact, by the general public, must be but terms of convenience. No person is perfectly sane in all his faculties, any more than he is perfectly healthy in body. A man, in fact, must be considered sane or insane in relation to himself," and we might add, in relation to his age, country, and environment. Views and actions which are normal and healthy in a Maori or a Red Indian would be looked upon as stark insanity in an educated European. The legal definition of insanity, after all, embodies the com-mon-sense view of the average man. Insanity is defined from the legal point of view as "such a mental condition as, either from the. existence of delusions, or from incapacity to distinguish between right and wrong with regard to any matter under action, does away with individual responsibility." Leaving scientific and legal definitions aside, we may say that a man is mad when his mental processes, intellectual and moral, become so abnormal that they can no longer by recognised by the average man as based on reason. What, then, can we find from the play as to the reasonableness of Hamlet's mental and moral reasoning, and of the actions which are the outcome of that reasoning? We find in the play a young man of 30 years of age, a dreamer, a student, his one wish to return to the Universitv of Wittenberg. His father has lately died, and his mother has shocked his sense of propriety and shamed th« memory of his father by a hasty marriage with the younger brother of her late husband. In Hamlet, grief and disgust have induced a condition of melancholy closely approaching to the state which doctors call melan-

cholia. "How weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable seem to me all the uses, of this world!" mlight be the cry of any melancholic, save that Hamlet really has ample cause for disgust with life, whereas the viictim of melancholia generally finds hie grievances in his own disordered imagination. On this moody, disappointed, studious, analytical young man there falls like a thunderbolt the revelation of his uncle's crime and bis mother's previous fall from virtue. This revelation imposes on him, as a sacred, obligation, the duty of revenge. His own inclination, the custom of his country and of the age he lives in, all unit© in pointing to the slaying of his uncle as a most imperative and sacred duty; and as such he accepts it. _ But though he laccepts it, the burden is too heavy for him to bear. His keen analytical mind is much better adapted for reasoning out a course of action than for carrying it into effect. At the close of tftie ghost scene a hysterical reaction takes place, and he salutes his friends, Horatio and, Marcellus, with wild gaiety, and reveals to them' under solemn promise of secrecy that "there's not a villain dwelling in-all Denmark but he's an arrant knave." Be even addresses his father's ghost in a jocular manner as "Old Truepenny." This mood soon passes into _ a graver and more worthy one, and he dismisses his friends in a noble and dignified speech, first warning them of the part he intends to play : . . . how strange and odd eoe'er I bear myself As I perchance hereafter shall think meet Tb put an antie disposition on. So far we cannot pronounce. Hamlet insane. He sees a ghost, but so does the sane and sceptical Horatio and. the unimaginative soldiers on the platform. The reappearance of departed spirits would be devoutly believed in by all persons at the supposed period of history in which the play is drawn, and by most persons at the time when Shakespeare wrote. Macbeth, in a condition of mental exaltation or ecstasy, sees the ghost of Banquo; but that apparition is seen by none else in the hall, not even by the guilty Lady Macbeth. Later in the play the ghost is seen by Hamlet, but not by his mother, who is present in the same scene. This appears to be an accidental variation on the part of the author. If throughout the play Hamlet had seen a ghost which was invisible to all others, we would suppose that the author intended to represent him as insane, and the spirit as the "very coinage of the brain" : This bo ;i Jess creation,, ecstasy, Is very cuiming in. But, as Hamlet demonstrates to his mother, it is not ''ecstasy," or, as we would call it, "mania," in his case. Ecstasy! My pulee, as yours, doth temperately keep time, And makes as healthful music. It is not madness, . Thait I have uttered; bring me to the test And I the matter will Teword; which madness , Would- gambol from. And he was Tight. Whatever was amiss in Hamlet's mental processes, he certainly dad not suffer from delusional insanity. Now let us examine in detail the remaining passages where the words and actions of Hamlet would seem to indicate an abnormal and morbid mental state. •In Act i, scene 2, Ave get a glimpse of his melancholy, but it does not appear to be an insane melancholy or melancholia.- He cross-examines Bernardo and Marcellus in a most businesslike and rational manner, asks for time, place, the duration and description of the apparition. In scenes 4 and 5 his excitement at the appearance and message of the ghost are such as we would expect from such an apparition. His wild and whirling words at the end of the scene are, as we have said above, a hysterical reaction after the horror of the revelation. In Act ii we find that everybody is beginning to look on him as mad. Polonius believes him to be mad for love, and Ophelia (with a woman's readiness to ascribe "all thoughts, all passions, all delights" to the one great cause) is not ill pleased to say, "Truly, I do fear it." She describes his appearance, going into a world of feminine detail about his clothes, "his doublet all unbraced, no hat upon. his head, his stockings fonl'd, ungartered and down gyved to his ankle; pale as his shirt, his knees knocking together." Hamlet has evidently come with the horror of his ghostly visitation fresh upon him, to try if he can secure that strength and moral support from his love which his own distracted mind cannot give him. The weak and amiable girl cannot give him what she does not herself possess, so with a long sight of disappointment he leaves her. In the next scene the pendulum swings back. His freakish mood returns, and he chaffs Polonius about his old age, his weak hands, and his plentiful lack of wit. Another change, and his active mind is off on- an ingenious scheme. "The play's the thing." He begins to think out a plot to expose his uncle. But first he relieves his mind with the most perfect description of the melancholic state that has ever been penned: —"I have of late (but wherefore I know not) lost all my mirth, foregone all customs of exercises ; and, indeed, it gees so heavily with my disposition that this goodly frame, the earth, seems to me a sterile promontory ; this most excellent canopy, the air, lock you, this brave o'erhanging firmament., this ma.jestical roof fitted with golden fire, why, it appeareth no other thing to me than a foul and pestilent congregation of vapours. What a piece of work is man ! How noble in reason! how infinite in faculty! in form and moving, how express and admirable! in action, how like an angel! in apprehension, how like a god! the beauty of the world! the paragon of animals! and yet, to me, what is this quintessence of dust? Man delights, not me; no, nor woman neither." Act 111, scene 1: Hamlet is by this time really on the borderland of insanity. He accuses himself of imaginary faults —

"I am viery proud, revengeful, and ambitious," and "What should such fellows as I do, crawling between heaven and earth 1" His troubles are driving him, as Rosalind says, "from a mad humour ol love to a living humour of madness." Hifl sense of the evil that is in the world and of his own inadequacy to cope with it liaises an extreme irritability that vents itself on, the nearest object—in this scene the harmless and innocent Ophelia. And yet, in spite of his unreasonable irritability, he is not actually mad, as the clever Claudius recognises. Love! his affections do not that way tend, Nor wtua-t he spake, though it lacked form a little, "Was not like madness. There's something In his soul O'er which his melancholy sits on hood. Act iii, seen© 2: Hamlet's melancholy is always lightened when his active brain can busy itself with some ingenious scheme. As the time comes for the play, to expose the guilt of his uncle, his spirits rise, he falls to "chaffing" Polonius again, and becomes quite improperly broad in his remarks to Ophelia. But when she replies, "You are merry, my lord!" the irony of the situation brings him down again, and provokes the bitter, "0, God, youir only jigmaker!" His freakish mood persists to near the end of the scene (see the lines "A very, very—pajock") ; but suppressed excitement, under the influence of which he prepares to meet his mother ("Now could I drink hot blood"). Act iii, scene 4: He kills Polondus by a pass through the arras, supposing him to be the King. Hamlet has set himself the task of killing his uncle, but his soul recoils from the brutality of the act, and he fi"<Ui himself unable to kill him in cold Vo< He has the opportunity when the King was praying, but, "thinking too precisely on the event," seizes .an ingenious excuse for delay. In how different a manner the simple normal man, as shown in the character of Laertes, faces the same problem. When Laertes is told that Hamlet has slain his father he at once announces his cheerful willingness to "cut his throat in the church" ; and, indeed, undertakes to kill his enemy by treachery without the sign of any scruple whatsoever. Hamlet, the scholar, the man of thought, can only kill on the impulse of the moment, when his blood is up. If he does not do so at once, he begins to reason the matter out, and reasons away all his resolution. Act iv: The pretence of madness im gradually dropped by Hamlet as the climax approaches. The melancholy and weakness of will * which have hampered him are less and less in evidence. He extricates -himself with promptness arid skill from his threatened fate on the voyage to England, and returns with th« full purpose of carrying out his revenge. His old "humour of madness" returns on hiim at the grave, when something hollow in Laertes's heroics disgusts him, and for.. til? moment he really fancies that he actually loved Ophelia more than forty thousand brothers. He is not happy. How can be he happy? "Thou would'st not think how ill all's here about my heart," and yet he can say finely when troubled by presentiment: "We defy augury. If it be how, 'tis not to come ; if it be not to come, it will be now; if it be not now, yet it will come; the readiness is all • since no man has ought of what he leaveSj what ia't. to leave betimes?" Before facing Laertes in. the last scene he makes his madness bis excuse for what has gone before; and, indeed, looking back on the troublous events of the previous'two months, the. appearance of the ghost, the killing of Polqniiis, the madness and death of Ophelia, he may well have wondered how much was solid fact and how much the web of his disordered imagination. But he does not this tima draw back frqm his duty. "In thee ther* is not half an hour of life," he is told; and he uses the short interval before him to do the duty for which all through the play he has triecL to ner\ e himself. ~ What is our verdict? A melancholy, scholarly, introspective youth has imposed on him a duty for which he was not fitted natiuire. For the purpose of revenge insanity, an assumption which '»nea iv "niies almost a reality by reason of the mental disturbance caused by warring impulses in his brain. He was a "borderland case," as mental specialists term it. Was he ever- insane according to the- legal meandng of the word? I think noti. His perception of right and wrong was clear and distinct. He suffered from no delusions, and was certainly responsible for his actions. His natural melancholy at times reached such a pitch as to .become morbid, but at the last his' willpower carried out what he had planned, and swift, death cut short his mental troubles. "The rest is silence." ;■■ ■'.';. '■■■-'*