Madness Flashcards
(5 cards)
Hamlet’s Madness - Claudius - 4.1
4.1 “his liberty is full of threats to all…this mad young man…like the owner of some foul disease”
Hamlet’s obvious assumption of madness
“I’ll wipe away all trivial fond records…I have sworn’t… I perchance hereafter shall think meet to put an antic disposition on”
“Lord Hamlet, with his doublet all unbraced; No hat upon his head; his stockings fouled, Ungartered, and down-gyvèd to his ankle; Pale as his shirt; his knees knocking each other; And with a look so piteous in purport As if he had been loosèd out of hell”
“words, words, words”
“though this be madness, yet there is method in’t”
“my uncle-father and aunt-mother are deceived… I am but mad north-north-west”
“And can you by no drift of conference Get from him why he puts on this confusion, Grating so harshly all his days of quiet With turbulent and dangerous lunacy?”
Guildenstern: “a crafty madness”…
Claudius:”what he spake, though it lacked form a little, Was not like madness.”
POLONIUS’s doubt (and also him ordering Gertrude around!!!): “Tell him his pranks have been too broad to bear with”
“that i essentially am not in madness, but mad in craft”
Hamlet using his madness to criticize and insult others
Calls Polonius “a fishmonger…that great baby” and criticises “old men”
Using madness to directly challenge R+G: “You were sent for, and there is a kind of confession in your looks which your modesties have not craft enough to color. I know the good king and queen have sent for you.”
Exposes Polonius’s sycophancy: saying the “yonder cloud” looks like “a camel…a weasel…a whale”
“Farewell, dear mother…Thy loving father…mand and wife is one flesh, and so my mother”
In his letter to Claudius: “high and mighty…naked” = REBIRTH
Mocking Osric: tis very cold…it is indifferent cold…it is very sultry and hot”
Where Hamlet may genuinely be seen to be mad (as in an abandonment of reason)
Horatio claims “he waxes desperate with imagination” and speaks “but wild and whirling words” even before assuming an antic disposition
Genuine madness apparent in Act1Scene5 with mad repetition of “Swear by my sword”
Claudius A2S2 “Hamlet’s transformation —so call it Since nor th’ exterior nor the inward man Resembles that it was. ”
“God has given you one face and you make yourselves another….it hath made me mad…we will have no more marriages”
Comparison to before: Oh, what a noble mind is here o’erthrown!— The courtier’s, soldier’s, scholar’s, eye, tongue, sword… noble and most sovereign reason…That unmatched form and feature of blown youth Blasted with ecstasy.”
Gertrude sees only “th’incorporal air…this is the very coinage of your brain; this bodiless creation ecstasy is very cunning in”
“I am punished with a sore distraction…Was ‘t Hamlet wronged Laertes? Never Hamlet….His madness…his madness is poor Hamlet’s enemy…[the murder was not] a purposed evil”
Impassioned madness: grappling in grave “woo’t weep? woo’t fight? woo’t fast?”
his question “what is the reason that you use me thus?” implies he has blanked out the madness of before?…”his grief did put me into a towering passion”
Ophelia’s madness and how it provides a foil for Hamlet
The Gentleman describes her as “distract. Her mood will needs be pitied…beats her heart and spurns enviously at straws …her speech is nothing.’
Claudius: ‘poor Ophelia divided from herself and her fair judgement’
