Melancholy and Madness: Shakespeare’s Hamlet

Olivia Thorne

William Shakespeare’s 1600 play Hamlet is a tragedy of murder, revenge, heartbreak and madness based on the 1200 Norse legend, Amleth. The protagonist, Hamlet Prince of Denmark, fascinates psychoanalytical critics due to his decision to feign madness and his performance of mental unrest. He does this so that he may plot his murderous revenge against his fratricidal uncle unsuspectingly, yet Samuel Johnson concludes that:

Of the feigned madness of Hamlet there appears no adequate cause, for he does nothing which he might not have done with the reputation of sanity.

Despite his performed madness, Prince Hamlet is a character suffering from ‘melancholy’, a Galenic term revived by Renaissance physicians theorising that the imbalance of one’s ‘humours’ caused ‘melancholia’ or what we would now to consider to be depression. According to Robert Cawdrey’s dictionary published in 1604, the Table Alphabeticall, ‘melancholie’ is ‘black choler, a humour of solitariness, or sadness’. Hamlet’s melancholy is captured expertly by painter William Morris Hunt in his 1864 portrait Hamlet. Hamlet is depicted in all black, casting his eyes downward in an expression of sorrow while his arms are in a folded pose as though to suggest his ‘solitariness’. Hunt also employs pathetic fallacy in the dark and gloomy clouds above his head, reflecting Hamlet’s mood of anger and despair. Of interest to psychoanalytical critics also, is the character of Ophelia who becomes mad after the death of her father and her rejection by Hamlet. The presentation of Hamlet’s melancholy, and his feigned madness contrasts with Ophelia’s madness which becomes so uncontrollable that it eventually drives her to suicide. This essay intends to explore Shakespeare’s presentation of madness in Hamlet, dealing specifically with Hamlet’s performance of madness and Ophelia’s exhibition of madness in the ways in which they reflect and contrast with one another.

Perhaps one of the earliest works exploring mental health issues is Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy written in 1621. This Early Modern work was Burtons’ analysis of ‘melancholy’, exploring the causes and symptoms of the ‘disease’. In his work, Burton frequently uses the word term ‘madness’, such as in his section ‘Cure of Despair’ in which he writes:

If a man put desperate hands upon himself, by occasion of madness or melancholy, if he have given testimony before of his regeneration, in regard he doth this not so much out of his will, as ex vi morbi, we must make the best construction of it...all fools and madmen go directly to heaven.

While Burton’s work was published approximately twenty years after Shakespeare wrote Hamlet, it is useful insight into how mental illness was viewed in the Renaissance period, and how ‘melancholy’ was seen to be cause for or related to ‘madness’. In Hamlet, the term ‘mad’ and its variants are employed twenty-six times, and ‘melancholy’ is used twice. For this reason, this essay will also use the term ‘mad’ or ‘madness’ when discussing the mental illness, real and feigned, of Hamlet and Ophelia.

The first thing to acknowledge when discussing madness in Hamlet is that Hamlet feigns his madness. Despite Hamlet’s madness being performed, it is still comparable with Ophelia’s genuine display of madness due to the other characters’ readiness to believe both are true despite their different manifestations. Hamlet does so successfully, as Polonius says to Hamlet’s mother that:

POLONIUS. Your noble son is mad. Mad I call it, for to define true madness, what is’t but to be nothing else but mad?
The excessive repetition of the word ‘mad’ reflects Polonius’s absolute certainty that Hamlet is in fact mad, and he continues to inform the King and Queen that the cause of his madness is his daughter Ophelia’s rejection of Hamlet. Polonius supposes that:

POLONIUS. He, repulsed, a short tale to make, fell into a sadness, then into a fast, thence to a watch, thence into a weakness, thence to a lightness, and by this declension into the madness wherein he now raves, and we all wail for.

Polonius’s hypothesis reflects the Renaissance belief that unrequited love or ‘love melancholy’, as Burton writes, could cause what we would now consider to be clinical depression. Burton suggests this in his work:

No cord nor cable can so forcibly draw, or hold so fast, as love can do with a twined thread.
It is clear that Hamlet’s intended audience believe it to be possible that he is ‘raving’ and ‘weak’ with madness due to ‘love melancholy’ for Ophelia.

Hamlet’s ‘performance’ of madness involves intelligent wit and rhetoric woven into his ‘ravings’ to the other characters. During his interaction with Polonius in Act Two Scene Two, he delivers a humorous speech in which he makes fun of old age and in turn of Polonius on the lines:

The satirical slave says here that old men have grey beards, that their faces are wrinkled...and that they have a plentiful lack of wit, together with weak hams. All which, sir, though I most powerfully and potently believe, yet I hold it not honest to have it thus set down. For you yourself, sir, should be old as I am if, like a crab, you could go backward.

Hamlet remarks that if Polonius could age backwards in the manner in which a crab walks, he may reach the same age as him. This is noted by Polonius in an [aside]. Polonius ironically notes that ‘though this be madness yet there is method in’t’. Despite this recognition, Polonius does not question whether Hamlet is feigning madness, rather that his mad ravings still contain some logic.

Ironically, Hamlet’s madness, while believed, does not have the desired effect on Claudius. Rather than allowing Hamlet to unsuspectingly devise a murder plot, his madness causes Claudius to be more watchful of him. This is evident at the end of Act Three, Scene One on the line:

CLAUDIUS. It shall be so. Madness in great ones must not unwatched go.

It is clear that Claudius also sees the ‘method’ in Hamlet’s ‘madness’ as being potentially dangerous. The melancholy or madness of Hamlet, while casting him as a ‘poor wretch’ in the eyes of his mother, is not seen to debilitate him of logical thought or the potential to be cunning and dangerous.

Hamlet’s madness stands in contrast with Ophelia’s who falls into despair after, according to John Draper, ‘[her] father, whom she loved so dearly, came to a sudden and shocking end’. When she appears in Act Four Scene One, the stage directions state: ‘Enter OPHELIA distracted’. The etymology of ‘distract’ derives from the Latin ‘distractus’ meaning to ‘draw in different directions’. This is reflected in Cawdrey’s Table Alphabeticall where he defines ‘distracted’ as being ‘drawne into diuerse parts’. Thus, as is stated by Maurice Charney, “distracted” and ‘mad’ are used synonymously by Elizabethan writers’ in the implication that the ‘distracted’ or ‘mad’ mind lacks clear direction and coherence. The term ‘distracted’ is used in the dialogue of Hamlet in Act One Scene Five after being visited by the ghost of his father. After the Ghost’s exit, Hamlet soliloquises:

HAMLET. Remember thee? Ay, poor ghost, while memory holds a seat in this distracted globe.

This line carries meta-theatrical meaning in the reference to The Globe Theatre in which the play was performed, as well as to the globular shape of Hamlet’s skull in which his mind is filled with melancholic thought causing him to question his sanity. Therefore, Ophelia’s ‘distracted’ entrance in Act Five points to her madness before she even begins her dialogue due to its connotations at this time.

Ophelia’s dialogue is almost entirely non-sensical and lacks the wit possessed by Hamlet throughout the play. Her ability to have logical conversation, and likely even thought, has eroded completely. In an almost infantile manner, she sings haunting melodies reflective of the death of her father such as when she sings:

OPHELIA. [Sings.] He is dead and gone, lady, He is dead and gone. At his head a green-grass turf, at his heels a stone.

Ophelia’s madness is a far cry from Hamlet’s performed madness, who possesses the ability to utilise language in witty and intelligent ways and is still be believed to be mad. Ophelia, on the other hand, lacks the ability to articulate or process her grief coherently and instead reverts to an infantile state in which she recites songs vaguely related to her sorrows.

In the world of the play, it is evident that it was believable that male madness could still facilitate wit and sense and that female madness was incoherent and passionate. This is reflective of contemporary opinion that melancholy, the ‘sadde and fearful’ humour according to Timothie Bright’s Treatise of Melancholy (1586) was associated with refinement and male intellect. Montaigne’s essay ‘Of Sorrow’ (1580) also suggests this as he writes that:

Generally the world, as a settled thing, is pleased to grace [sorrow] with a particular esteem.

This notion can also be detected in contemporary paintings of aristocratic men such as Melancholy Young Man by an Unknown Artist circa 1585. The subject, adorned in fine black clothing, casts his eyes down to the ground with a forlorn expression echoing Hunt’s 1864 painting of Hamlet. Pathetic fallacy is employed in the gloomy and grey clouds reflective of his melancholic mood. Despite his ‘sadde and fearful’ humour, there is still an air of dignity about the man as his distinguished helmet and gloves lie by his feet as well as his sword resting on his side to portray his potent, yet melancholic masculinity.

This refined melancholy was not awarded to women and is not awarded to Ophelia in Hamlet. Ophelia’s mental distress is not mere melancholy, but madness. The incoherence and disorder in her discourse is reflective of the belief that women were the more passionate sex, as is reflected in Burton’s work when he asserts:

Of sexes both, but men more often; yet women misaffected are far more violent, and grievously troubled.

This notion is also expressed by Ophelia’s brother Laertes as he weeps for his dead sister on the lines:

LAERTES. [Weeps.] When these are gone the woman will be out.

Laertes’s implication that tears are a feminine attribute, and that once he ceases crying ‘the woman will be out’ of him is testament to the belief that women were unable to control the passions of emotion.

The 2015 National Theatre Live production of Hamlet highlights the dignity robbed of Ophelia through her madness. When she enters the stage in Act Four Scene One, she has a large bald patch on her head as though she has torn out her own hair in psychological distress or self-harm. She is also barefoot, portraying her debilitated mental state through dishevelled appearance which is never the case for Hamlet. In the characters of Hamlet and Ophelia, Shakespeare presents distinguished male melancholy and, contrastingly, hysterical female madness.

Ophelia’s inability to verbalise coherent and ordered thought is reminiscent of the mental unravelling of Lady Macbeth in Shakespeare’s 1606 tragedy Macbeth. As with Ophelia, Lady Macbeth remains in the play only for a short time after her mind becomes ‘infected’. In Act Five Scene One, Lady Macbeth appears on stage with her senses ‘shut’ according to the Gentlewoman. She seems unaware of her surroundings and speaks in nonsensical fragmented sentences such as on the lines:

LADY. What, will these hands ne’er be clean? No more o’that, my lord, no more o’that. You mar all this with starting.

Lady Macbeth displays symptoms of what would now be considered as psychosis as she hallucinates the regicidal blood on her hands as well as the presence of her husband, ‘my Lord’. Both mad women, through incoherent and fragmented speech shed light on what ails them. While Lady Macbeth speaks of the hallucinatory blood on her hands, unaware of being overheard, Ophelia distractedly sings about her ‘dead and gone’ father. Unlike their male counterparts who, are awarded speeches and soliloquies of self-introspection, these mad women are left babbling. Without the tools to process or articulate their mental torment, Ophelia and Lady Macbeth leave the stage as women driven to suicide.

Shakespeare suggests that Ophelia regains a sense of dignity lost in her madness through death. Ophelia’s exit from the play, described by G.H. Lewes as ‘broken-hearted, dying in madness’, is suggested as being suicide. The Queen describes Ophelia’s death, telling how she ‘fell into the weeping brook’ in a manner almost like ekphrasis. The Queen states that:

QUEEN. Her clothes spread wide and mermaid-like awhile they bore her up, which time she chanted old tunes as one incapable of her own distress, or like a creature native and endued unto that element...her garments heavy with their drink pulled the poor wretch from her melodious lay to muddy death.

Worthy of note is how the Queen describes Ophelia as ‘the poor wretch’. This echoes her reference to Hamlet as ‘the poor wretch’ after being informed of his madness in Act One, signifying that she views Ophelia to be as mad as her son and pities her the same. Furthermore, the simile of Ophelia as being ‘like a creature’ native to water hints that her death was suicide, as it implies a sense of her willingness to sink into death. In her work on Hamlet, Gabrielle Dane suggests that:

Ophelia’s choice [suicide] might be seen as the only courageous death in Shakespeare’s bloody drama.

Ophelia’s off-stage and ethereal death described by the Queen is heavily contrasting to the bloody and violent deaths that many of the other characters are subjected to. This also reflects Burton’s sympathetic view of suicide, that ‘if a man put desperate hands upon himself’ they go directly to heaven.

This account of Ophelia’s final moments indulges in beautiful detail, casting her as an ethereal mermaid-like figure elegantly flowing with the water into death. Sir John Everett Millais captures this masterfully in his 1851 painting Ophelia. Ophelia is depicted in the moments before her death, as her garments keep her afloat on the water clutching a bouquet of flowers in her right hand with an expression of peaceful resignation. Significantly, her hair loosely floats around her head in the water as, on the Elizabethan stage, a woman with her hair down signified that she was mad. Millais’s painting depicts Ophelia’s dignity and beauty re-gained through death, as though the brook contains baptismal qualities. This depiction of Ophelia’s death implies that perhaps the mad Ophelia is better off in deceased dignity than living in undignified insanity.

In conclusion, Hamlet’s performance of madness and Ophelia’s exhibition of madness contrast with one another throughout the play. Shakespeare portrays Hamlet as the intellectual and learned melancholic man familiar to Elizabethan England and, contrastingly, Ophelia as the hysterical and mad woman also familiar to Elizabethan England. Ophelia’s madness ravages her very sense of self, as she becomes unable to even recognise her own brother in her final appearance on stage. This contrasts with Hamlet’s performance of madness, as he displays learned intellect throughout, as well as his melancholy granting his speech with a witty sardonic effect. The indignity of Ophelia’s madness, in her frenzied and non-sensical speech, seems only to be rectified by her suicide. Shakespeare ultimately depicts madness in Hamlet as having ‘method’ to it when exhibited in a male, as Hamlet manages to convince his intended audience of his madness. On the contrary, Ophelia’s genuine madness appears to be uncontrollable as it leaves her unintelligible, it destroys her identity, and it infantilises her to a demeaning degree. Ultimately, the play suggests that, in the case of the debased mad Ophelia, perhaps it is better ‘not to be’ than ‘to be’.