 
                         20061125.00

     Hamlet's insanity has been the topic of much discussion
among critics.  Polonius explanation of Hamlet's madness as
the expression of unrequited love, reflects the shallowness
of the courtier's view of a world where convention stifles
passion.  It is often asserted that Hamlet was pretending
madness as a feint (cover) for plotting against the life of
Claudius, and this is what Claudius himself perhaps assumed.
However, Hamlet perceived in Claudius the king, and regicide
(the killing of the King) is in the world of Shakespeare (and
Macbeth) a far greater crime than killing an ordinary mortal.
That is why for Hamlet the threshold of regicide is so high
that he is capable of it only by accident (stabbing through a
curtain) or by proxy with a dagger poisoned by Claudius
himself.  Dying by his own hand, as it were, - the dagger
envenomed by him, - Claudius the cause of his own death,
virtually commits suicide. That Claudius' misdeed should be
the immediate cause for his demise is then the ultimate
validation of the "cosmos", of the political (and moral)
order of the universe.

     The interpretation of the German Romantics (Goethe) was
that Hamlet's madness was "real", and that it was the
breakdown of a mind overburdened with knowledge which it
could not assimilate.  But then, why was Hamlet so eminently
sane in his soliloquies?

     My own interpretation is that Hamlet's madness has above
all, literary reality.  Shakespeare is describing a Denmark
in political (and moral) turmoil, a world that has "gone
mad"; and this political insanity, public disorder, this
regicide and usurpation, is appropriately and perhaps
necessarily reflected in Hamlet's conversations with his
adversaries, i.e. with the King, with Polonius, with
Guildenstern and Rosencrantz, i.e. in his public utterances.
Hamlet's public mind is the mirror in which the chaos of the
state is reflected.  By the same token, Hamlet's private
mind, his confidences to Horatio, his dialogue with Gertrude
in private, and above all, his soliloquies, express the
rectitude and sanity of his individual existence.

                      * * * * *
Copyright 2006, Ernst Jochen Meyer
