Geoffrey Domoracki

To be anything else but mad?

            There is, through Shakespeare’s Hamlet, a great deal of confusion surrounding the word ‘madness’. It is often used in sentences to denote an irrational insanity, and one is quick to imagine a lunatic in an asylum, unable to comprehend reality. This is also the Oxford English Dictionary’s second definition of madness: “Insanity; mental illness or impairment, esp. of a severe kind”. But, in the very same scenes, the word is often used to denote a sort of active exuberance, an overflowing of happiness. This coincides with the dictionary’s third definition, “Wild excitement or enthusiasm; ecstasy” And yet, the word is also used in a context of vengeance and anger, coinciding with the 4th definition, “Uncontrollable anger, rage, fury.” One may complain that these definitions are disjointed from the text, but I will walk through the various usages of ‘madness’ in Shakespeare’s Hamlet in order to elucidate the strategies of employment in conjunction with the overall themes of the play.
“What if it tempt you toward the flood, my lord? / Or to the dreadful summit of the cliff / That beetles o’er his base into the sea, / And there assume some horrible form / Which might deprive your sovereignty of reason / And draw you into madness?” (1. IV. 77-82)

            Here, Horatio uses the term madness to warn Hamlet against meddling with the ghost, since the superstitions and fears of the less-witted Horatio hold the threat of this irrational insanity over Hamlet. This is the dominant usage of the term by early observers of Hamlet, who witness his behavior and do not analyze the method behind it. Polonius speaks, “I will be brief: your son is mad: / Mad call I it; for, to define true madness, / What is’t but to be nothing else but mad?” (2. II. 99-101) This is the superficial view of madness, it separates the speaker from the mad person, as if to say I am a person and the other is lacking such personhood, that something is broken, the mind is corrupt.

            Yet such superficial views of madness do not seek to understand Hamlet’s act, and indeed they have fallen for his very bait, reinforcing the theme that Hamlet is alone in his rational depth, that Denmark is a superficial land, senseless, as if it were mad itself. Hamlet, though, is not insane wherein he lacks sovereignty, though he does have a madness of exuberance and activity. “How pregnant sometimes his replies are! A happiness / that often madness hits on, which reason and sanity / could not so prosperously be delivered of…” (2. II. 226-228) In such a light, perhaps witnessing the ghost did drive Hamlet to madness, understood as rigorous action. Hamlet would think his mother mad for marrying so quickly, but mad in this exuberance and activity rather than insanity. As such, Hamlet does act out his revenge, cloaking it in misdirections, just as his madness in revenge is cloaked in the madness of insanity. “Make you to ravel all this matter out, / That I am essentially not in madness, / But mad in craft…” (3. IV. 208-210) But the truth is; Hamlet is neither mad without reason, nor mad in craft, he is rational yet largely inactive, making both uses of ‘madness’ rather ironic in the play.