Hamlet - madness

Question 1

David Leverenz

Ophelia

Answer 1

concludes Ophelia’s dramatic function in the play to be that
“everyone has used her: Polonius, to gain favor; Laertes, to belittle Hamlet;
Claudius, to spy on Hamlet; Hamlet, to express rage at Gertrude and Hamlet again, to
express his feigned madness with her as decoy”

Question 2

A.C. Bradley

Ophelia

Answer 2

consider the overwhelmed Ophelia to be still

“beautiful, sweet, lovable, pathetic, and dismissible”

Question 3

feminist critics interpret

Ophelia

Answer 3

interpret her madness to be “her liberation from silence,
obedience, and constraint or her absolute victimization by patriarchal oppression”
(Carol Thomas Neely 322).

Question 4

Hamlet

Sadness (melancholy)

Answer 4

sullied flesh would melt’
‘unprofitable to me all the uses of this world’

2.2.247
‘Denmark is a prison’

3.1.56-66
‘to be or not to be’
‘to die, to sleep […] end the heartache’

Question 5

Hamlet

Love Melancholy

Answer 5

2.1.104

‘he took me by the wrist and held me hard’

Question 6

Hamlet

Genuine Madness

Answer 6

2.2.58
‘The spirit that I have seen
May be the devil: and the devil hath power
To assume a pleasing shape; yea, and perhaps out of my weakness and my melancholy, As he is very potent with such spirits,
Abuses me to damn me’

1.4.9
Horatio (supposed educated sceptic) warns Hamlet that the Ghost could ‘deprive sovereignty and reason / And draw [him] into madness’

‘To put an antic disposition on’

Question 7

Ophelia

Madness from loss

Answer 7

4.5.25

‘(sings) He is dead and gone, lady, He is dead and gone’