Hamlet, Madness

[This is something I wrote way back and have just changed a little.}

As all of us know, except perhaps those of us who don't, in the opening scene of Hamlet, Marcellus, Barnardo and Horatio gather at night in fearful expectation of the arrival of the dead king's ghost, which has been appearing regularly of late, and it duly arrives. Upon the ghost's appearance, Marcellus says to Horatio: "Thou art a scholar; speak to it, Horatio." Which Horatio duly does, though he admits that the ghost "harrows me with fear and wonder." Most will agree though that Horatio would have been fully entitled to ask what particular difference his being a scholar made. It is doubtful the dead king's strange and recurring appearance was provoked by a special desire for learned discourse about some scholarly subject.

As for the ghost, when a scene or few later he speaks to his son, Hamlet, and incites bloody revenge on his murderous brother, his fears should have been raised as to his son’s prospects in executing the vengeful task when Hamlet’s startlingly immediate plan for killing the new king, utterly vague but for this point, is to decide to pretend to have gone mad. Hamlet's father should probably have asked what bloody good this would do.

Naturally Hamlet's subsequent mad behaviour achieves nothing but for driving the wholly innocent and cruelly treated Ophelia genuinely mad with confused grief, and onwards to a suicidal, pitiful death. What else Hamlet supposed this display of madness might achieve is anyone's guess.

If one were so crude as to reduce Shakespeare's most famed work to a moral, it would be that if when entrusting some important task to someone, their immediate instinctive suggestion towards completion of the task is to pretend to be insane, chances are you are backing a loser. More than likely he's simply looking for an opportunity, however inappropriate, to pretend to be mad, and doesn't merit much trust.

Just one hopefully illuminating scenario comes to mind: Let’s say you’re fortunate enough to own a house and you’re now looking to build an extension onto it. You get onto a respected architect, ask what he or she can do for you, and the response is: “Oh yes, you’ve come to the right person. This is exactly my kind of territory. Architecture is what I do. But first, before we even think about designs and builders and all that kind of stuff, what I’m going to do for the foreseeable future is I’ll pretend to be mad. And we can see then where that leads us.” 

And, like a fool, you go along with this.