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Insanity in 'Hamlet'

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Should insanity be considered a curse or a blessing in disguise? In the play, Hamlet, by Shakespeare, there are many characters whose intentions were all masked by lies and deception. The character, King Claudius, often comes to mind since he was the one to spark the future sequence of events filled with violence and death that would occur in the play by killing King Hamlet; however, Prince Hamlet’s questionable character and sanity are often over-looked. Hamlet portrays his mental stability as rapidly faltering in order to seek the revenge of his father’s death. The need for revenge led to Hamlet’s idea to deceive those around him by seeming insane. The way Hamlet sacrificed his reputation and pretended to be insane ultimately lead to his true insanity and final act of revenge.
Hamlet’s supposed insanity was due to two motives. The main motive for his act was his plan to seek revenge for the murder of his father. Hamlet deliberately began to be distant and unstable in order to deceive those around him. He intended those around him to see him as vulnerable, therefore causing many people to underestimate his intelligence, and this underestimation gave Hamlet the opportunity to continue on and pursue his plan without the immediate suspicion of his family or peers. This idea receives support through the idea of the author of “Mechanics of Madness in Hamlet”, Shweta Bali, who claims that Hamlet used his false insanity as “ a tool or veneer to act irrationally and assert his

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