Hamlet and Madness
Madness in Revenge Drama by Shakespeare and His Contemporaries
A comparison with revenge dramas like "The Spanish Tragedy" and "Antonio's Revenge" can help elucidate the vexed question of Hamlet's madness.
The question of Hamlet’s madness has been discusses by scholars for many years, with various arguments put forward as to whether Hamlet is pretending to be madness, or whether he is pushed over the edge of sanity by the events of the play. Is his “antic disposition” entirely assumed in an attempt to “by indirections find directions out”, or has his pose become all too real?
In dealing with the issue of Hamlet’s “antic disposition”, we can draw on a long tradition of madness in revenge tragedy. Shakespeare didn’t come up with the idea of a mad revenger, after all: Hieronimo in The Spanish Tragedy seems to go mad and Antonio in Antonio’s Revenge fakes it in order to further this plans. Madness and revenge are a long established partnership in Renaissance drama.
In fact the drama critics Hallett and Hallett called their landmark study of the conventions of revenge drama The Revenger’s Madness. In the book they argue that madness is the often the only way out for characters who, like Hamlet, are caught between conflicting demands that cannot be resolved. Madness removes the moral quandary and permits the energetic actions that revengers, and revenge tragedy, rely upon.
Madness can be a more tactical matter, as well. Characters such as the hero of Antonio’s Revenge hide in the disguise of an idiot in order that no one will suspect them of laying plans for revenge. The freedom of the fool to do and say things that others cannot is a commonplace in Renaissance literature – the most obvious example in Shakespeare would be the Fool in King Lear, who is permitted to mock and criticise the king.
A similar freedom is sometimes allowed to the “malcontent”, a character type who rails against the corruption and license of the court, whilst being treated with various degrees of toleration by those in it. Bosola in The Duchess of Malfi, and Malevole in The Malcontent both fall into this category – and the latter is in fact the deposed Duke Altofronto in disguise.
When Hamlet’s “noble mind” is apparently “o’erthrown”, he takes his place amongst a gallery of manic revengers that started with the first English revenge drama, The Spanish Tragedy. Comparing Hamlet with his equivalents in these other plays will not provide a simple answer as to whether he is “faking it” or really mad, but it does make us aware of how much more complicated the question is than it may at first appear.
