“King Lear”, centres itself on the division of a kingdom between three daughters of Lear. Before they are gifted with any land they must first orally acclaim and quantify their love for their father. This leads to the banishment of Cordelia the one honest and loving daughter of Lear and the rise of, and eventual take over by, Lear’s remaining and sycophantic offspring. Lear goes mad as his daughters reveal their true natures and ingratitude, turning him away from their homes. This plot is mirrored by the subplot of Gloucester’s sons. On of whom, Edgar, is forced to flee and feign madness to prevent his capture or killing because of the deceptions of his overly ambitious brother, Edmund.
“Hamlet”, is an examination of the pain a son suffers when his father is murdered by his uncle. Shakespeare looks in detail, at the nature of procrastination and the torments that Hamlet suffers after his father’s ghost begs him for revenge. Hamlet is portrayed as a tragic hero; a character more sinned against than sinning. Despite his best efforts to act honourably, he is confused by his mother’s marriage to his uncle, lost as to what should be done regards the ghosts commands and tormented by his own lack of action. These troubles frequently manifest themselves in Hamlet through what appears to be madness. His sweetheart, Ophelia, is driven mad by the occurrences in Denmark, including Hamlet’s murder of her father, Polonius.
There are then, four characters who must be considered when discussing the importance of madness in these plays: King Lear, Edgar, Ophelia and Hamlet. “Madness” is an extraordinarily broad term, of which there are many forms. It is important to understand that distinctions can, and should, be made of the differences between madness in the two plays. The “madness” in King Lear has a tendency to portray itself as being symbolic of rifts that exist within the plot, filial bonds or changes in the personality of Lear himself. Whilst Lear obviously is “mad”, in that he goes insane I will argue that this is more appropriately viewed as a physical embodiment of dramatic progression than it is an inherent part of the personality of Lear himself. It also seems necessary to treat Edgar’s madness as firstly symbolic and secondly anything else, not least because his was an artificial madness. Hamlet’s insanity appears more fitting and more rooted to his character than either Edgar’s or Lear’s. It is thus distinguished from any madness in “King Lear”.
Madness, being the opposite of sanity and reason is symbolic of chaos, nothingness and disorder. Division as a theme is present from the beginning in the splitting of the kingdom, the division between the dukes, between daughters over Edmund, between the sons of Gloucester, between the King and his daughters, and also between the King and his sanity or reason. Ultimately all divisions come to this: the differences in values between old and young; the old standing for the honouring of elders and loyalty to allies and the young for an egotistical, self-consuming race to the top. Edgar and Cordelia are able to restore order as they promise a return to normality.
Crucial to understanding the intended implication of Lear’s madness is putting it into context. I concede that his madness was genuine insanity but he displays no tendency to this kind of thinking beforehand. Indeed on severing himself from Goneril he remarks “Ha! Let it be so: I have another daughter” and while he weeps and curses he shows no outward sign of losing his senses. King Lear remains articulate throughout his chastising of Goneril. It is only later, when disorder of the Kingdom is precipitated further with his being severed from both his daughters that the madness creeps in. And even then, it appears firstly as an anticipation of madness coupled or sat closely beside some comment on disorder, breaking or a lacking.
II iv 216 “I prithee daughter, do not make me mad
I will not trouble thee, my child; farewell
We’ll no more meet, no more see each other”
II iv 282 “I have full cause of weeping,
But this heart
Shall break into a hundred thousand flaws,
Or ere I’ll weep. O fool! I shall go mad!
III iv 11 “When the mind is free
The body’s delicate; this tempest in my mind
Doth from my senses take all feeling else
Save what beats there- filial ingratitude”
The above is testament to the main clash; that of differing generational views and power. However, there is another imbalance: that of the injustice after this midway turning point in the play. The Mock trial that Lear conducts after taking shelter from the storm helps him to mitigate his wrath and attempts to restore order, which is synonymous with sanity. It is also a move away from his desire for revenge and a movement towards a more moderated Lear. As such it is likely an expression of betterment in Lear.
Perhaps the greatest symbol if chaos is nothing, loss of identity plays a central role in this extended metaphor. Again we find that those who are subject to this expression of disorder also suffer madness.
I iv 200 “now thou art an O without a figure. I am better than thou are now; I am a Fool, thou art nothing”
Lear begins to doubt exactly who he is upon the insistence of his daughters that he dismiss some of his train. He begs of them to “reason not the need” and adds that “beggars are in the poorest things superfluous”. It is telling that on seeing Poor Tom he asks “Is man no more than this?” In short the rapid change in his needs forces him to consider what true “need” is.
III ii 70 “The art of our necessities is strange,
And can make vile things precious”
Madness here is of no more note than the inherent contradiction between “precious” and “vile”; “necessities” and “strange”; the storm or a King living out of doors.But rather they are all part of the same metaphor. An image of disorder, that reaches its climax with Lear’s realisation of the true qualities and needs of man. This is fittingly lulled back to normality and conclusion with the symbolic restoration of order in Lear’s mock court.
The examination of Edgar’s madness is much less difficult. He also suffers a loss of identity, and is caught up in the metaphor of madness as a result. The same expression of nothingness is continued “Edgar I nothing am”. Naturally he is also suffering the afflictions of injustice; he fled because of his brother’s wronging him. Edgar’s “madness” could be taken as a symbolic symptom of his family split. One thing is for certain, he is always sane.
The reason that assessment of Edgar can be brief is that he is a clumsy character, if a dynamic one. Lear we can relate to and understand. Even if he himself changes it is through a steady moving. There is some static to Lear, he begins royally and ends, after trials, equally royally. His movement starts with a flaw that is ages old. But Edgar moves too quickly through a multiplicity of roles for the audience to have a fix on Who He Is! Edgar the wronged son, Edgar the madman, Edgar the prodigal son, Edgar the vengeful killer, Edgar the champion of the play. Should a scene of Lear’s be removed, given knowledge of his character, the audience could follow well enough what had happened. If the same were done to Edgar almost nothing of him would make sense. Edgar is not so much a rounded character as a sequence of roles.
Madness in “Hamlet” is less of a fundamental extension of a metaphor to produce a unity and consistency in events and more an aspect of Hamlet’s character. Before comment on madness it is crucial to understand two things about Hamlet himself.
Firstly, what was his hamartia? Looking to the colourful images and moving speeches with regard to things that are truly much less grand provides some clue. When actors appear he becomes fascinated with the idea of summoning emotion and guilt stricken over not avenging his father’s murder. He refuses to kill Claudius when he is praying, lest he go to heaven. A simple conversation with his friends Rosencrantz and Guildenstern turns into a marvelling at his own depression christening man a “quintessence of the dust” &c. Hamlet’s flaw then, is that he has no concept of a balance between reality itself and contemplation over it. He is and becomes more and more trapped behind his own thoughts. The longer he ponders them, the more ornamental they become, the deeper he becomes absorbed in them and the further he becomes from attachment to them or their associated realities. This aspect of Hamlet’s character has doubtless contributed to his preservation in that it has allowed him to be held up for centauries as someone with great imagination and fascination for life generally. Yet Hamlet is by no means a character that can be relied on to make a decision in a limited amount of time. Since his absorption in contemplation is the cause of procrastination it must be concluded that this is Hamlet’s flaw. As Coleridge put it Hamlet spent most of his time
“…giving substance to shadows, and throwing a mist over all common-place actualities. It is the nature of thought to be indefinite…”
and therefore promote inaction.
The Second that must be considered: what is the nature of Hamlet, aside from his flaws, more generally as a person? There is no shortage of evidence for Hamlet’s sadness
I ii “These indeed seem,
For they are actions that am man might play;
But I have that within which passeth show,
These are but the trappings and the suites of woe”
I ii “But break, my heart, for I must hold my tongue”
&c.
And even in his grief he is not short of the wit that is later to characterise what is known as his madness.
I ii “A little more than kin, and less than kind”
I ii “I am too much in the Sun”
This line is very close to Hamlet’s denunciation of being Claudius’s son.
However, of more note is the distortion of noticeably human characteristics that are present in Hamlet. It is not uncommon that, when anticipating great stress or fear, a person might change the subject; talk of lesser, trivial almost irrelevant matters, if only to ease the tension within himself. It is with this in mind that Shakespeare begins I iv with commentary on the coldness of the air, an asking of the time, remarking on Claudius’s swagger &c. All this time the audience and characters anxiously await the appearance of the ghost of Hamlet’s father.
Hamlet’s madness must be considered by taking these two together, Hamlet’s hamartia and the factor of this natural wandering of thoughts.
It is often maintained that Hamlet feigned his madness in order to achieve certain aims. But what aims? It seems unlikely that it was to allow him to kill Claudius since all of his soliloquies are preoccupied with either his lack of murderous passion or the permanency of death. It cannot be to leave him free of blame for the murder of Polonius as this is indeed a “rash and bloody deed”, one not premeditated and done believing that Polonius is Claudius. It cannot be to shun Ophelia as this is more a symptom of than motive for madness. Hamlet’s poetry to Ophelia is testament to as much. If it were to be maintained that this was a pretending of a sycophantic Hamlet to ease the burden of pressure from Claudius and his mother then this hardly seems to stand up to examination either. The easiest thing for Hamlet to do would be to feign happiness and seem to conform, to bend his will, to mould his heart, to concede and accept openly (as Claudius demands) that his father lost a father, that father lost, lost his and that he was being unmanly. To feign illness through sorrow would surely be the action furthest removed from one intended to ease parental pressures. Indeed, inventing afflictions such as these for reasons such as these, or any other, would go against the very grain of Hamlet himself. The main part of his contention throughout is that of superficiality, falsehood and lies.
I v 108 “That one may smile and smile and be a villain”
A suggestion that Hamlet would attempt to overthrow superficiality with a guise of superficiality seems to have more than a whiff of hypocrisy about it.
Too often the above are propped up in their entirety with a misunderstanding of the line II ii “I am but mad north north-west”
It would be a grave error of judgement to infer from this that Hamlet was “faking it”, not least because this is a concession of inconsistency, not control. More frustrating still is the dismissal of all of the above as mere irregularity. Or as Coleridge put it
“The seeming inconsistencies in the conduct and character of Hamlet have long exercised the conjectural ingenuity of critics; and, as we are always loth to suppose that the cause of defective apprehension is in ourselves, the mystery has been too commonly explained by the very easy process of setting it down as in fact inexplicable, and by resolving the phenomenon into a misgrowth or lusus of the capricious and irregular genius of Shakspere. The shallow and stupid arrogance of these vulgar and indolent decisions I would fain do my best to expose.”
Such suggestions as above are ridiculous not least because they have their bases in conjecture outside of the script. They require that we treat Hamlet as a real person instead of a character in a play, shaped and formed in his completeness by what Shakespeare wished to prove.
Nor does it appear that madness is the only way in which inconsistencies in Hamlet’s character in terms of decisiveness can be explained. Hamlet is at his most accurate when he is given little time to himself. Indeed, his only real action is taken when in the company of others. His bravery with the ghost initially fuelled largely by his friends who are present, his slaughter of Polonius takes place in front of the Queen and his final killing of the King in front of an audience. Outside of this the most Hamlet ever arrives at is a mood to do something or a feeling that he probably should. He is thus, regular.
That is what Hamlet’s madness is not. What it is can be justifiably claimed to arise somewhere between his own flaw and the strangeness of the extremities of the human mind. Hamlet was obviously distressed as he was placed in a situation entirely opposite to what his mannerisms made him fit for. The man who was always lost in his thoughts was forced to make quick decisions concerning the death of his dear father. Judgments that he could foresee would almost certainly conclude in the general sense of feeling that it was his duty to kill Claudius and usurp the throne. Naturally, the more time that Hamlet devoted to thinking on these matters the worse his state of mind became. This endless spiral continued until Hamlet was pushed to the very extremities of his mind and sanity. It is unlikely that he would have reached this point had he not this natural tendency to live more in his head than the real world.
It seems best to agree that Hamlet’s madness occurs from much the same place and in much the same fashion as did his changing the subject while awaiting his father’s ghost. While his state of extreme unrest was doubtless caused by his hamartia, his madness is how he deals with this stress. In Hamlet Shakespeare examines the bare bones of humanity by examining a man on the edge. Contemplation of triviality earlier is to mirror hysteria later. Always the change in subject or behaviour is in direct proportion to the magnitude of stress suffered. Hamlet is in much greater stress at the end of the play than he was at the beginning. It is as a result of this that his behaviour of displacement becomes very much more obvious the more the play progresses. It is not so much that Hamlet is not in control of what he is thinking or doing but rather that he has a need to behave strangely and perhaps even disgracefully in order to deal with his pain and anguish. That said, I would maintain that this is a kind of madness in itself. However, it appears to be the only way in which Hamlet can be freed from some of the pain and horror (mostly of his imagination, but partly of his surroundings) if not of all the strangeness. Coleridge put it better when he said
“Indeed, paradoxical as it may appear, the terrible by a law of the human mind always touches on the verge of the ludicrous. Both arise from the perception of something out of the common order of things - something, in fact, out of its place; and if from this we can abstract danger, the uncommonness will alone remain, and the sense of the ridiculous be excited. The close alliance of these opposites - they are not contraries - appears from the circumstance, that laughter is equally the expression of extreme anguish and horror as of joy: as there are tears of sorrow and tears of joy, so is there a laugh of terror and a laugh of merriment. These complex causes will naturally have produced in Hamlet the disposition to escape from his own feelings of the overwhelming and supernatural by a wild transition to the ludicrous, - a sort of cunning bravado, bordering on the flights of delirium. For you may, perhaps, observe that Hamlet's wildness is but half false; he plays that subtle trick of pretending to act only when he is very near really being what he acts.”.
The madness of Ophelia, on the other hand, is genuine, if her character does suffer a little of the problems of Edgar’s. In Greek Ωφελεiα (Ofeleia) means a benefit - normally of food. Ophelia’s character is, indeed, consumed for the benefit of others, and they do owe her very much.
Ophelia is a character introduced and defined more by what other characters say of her than what she she says. She is hounded by Hamlet and his exclamations on the brevity of female love and her female sexuality she is told by her father to hide herself form Hamlet. Ophelia’s response is “I shall obey my Lord”. Or even, perhaps the most telling expression of the uncertainty of her character, when Hamlet behaves shamefully at the play by lying on her lap she exclaims “I think nothing my Lord”.
The elusive nature of Ophelia’s character perhaps says more about the men who surround her than it does about her. Perhaps the impression is meant to be that she and her character are consumed by the other characters. Certainly the audience’s impression of her character is formed out those men’s misconceptions of her or projections on to her. And yet, she will doubtless remain the character that can be written about most subjectively because she has no true substance to her.
It is with this in mind that it must be concluded that what can be taken from her madness is much less obvious and much less certain than what can be said about Hamlet’s madness. Since it cannot be said with certainty where Ophelia’s character began, and no real sense of her direction is given the very cause and nature of her madness takes on some of the subjectivity in which her entire character is cloaked.
However, it would be easiest and most defensible to say that she was driven mad by the man she loved killing her father. But because of her character little more can be said on her madness. It certainly does not seem to have the code or “wit” of Hamlet’s madness. No one would have said of Ophelia “How pregnant sometimes her replies are”. Instead, if there was to be a claim that there was logic to her madness always it would have to be based on childhood honesty creeping through cracks in the decorum that madness would not maintain.
To conclude, there are varying degrees of importance of madness between plays. This is largely due to the different roles that madness plays in “King Lear” and “Hamlet”.
“King Lear” contains madness more akin to the personality of the play and its themes and images than to Lear personally. While Lear is undoubtedly insane his insanity is symbolic of the disorder within the play. Madness is no more important in this play than any other symbol of disorder; the storm, the division of the Kingdom, a family turning on itself, a King living in the wild &c. All together are symbolic of the only true rift in the play, that of the difference in values of the generations.
The madness of Edgar lacks the depth and purpose of Lear’s as it is unclear exactly what Edgar’s true nature is as a result of him playing so many characters. Certainly his madness is part of the same idea of chaos as Lear’s and it is played off of Lear to excellent dramatic effect.
Hamlet’s madness is arguably real, and certainly plays more of a role in telling us about his character than Lear’s does. This madness is caused by a mind driven to the limits of endurance. Hamlet’s madness is a kind of hysteria that allows him to be relieved of the pains of his stresses if not their unusualness. These stresses themselves were caused not truly by the actualities of Hamlet’s reality but rather by his imaginings and contemplations. In this way Hamlet’s madness is a product of his own fatal flaw.
Ophelia’s madness is the most baffling of all, her character being the most indeterminable, subtle or even obscure. It is likely that Ophelia could be used as a mirror to ourselves if she was examined in any great depth, or at least that we would see what we wanted to. That perhaps is the epitaph of Ophelia. In being constructed entirely of the obvious flaws in other character’s misconceptions, on examining her, the critique might itself be a fiction.