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has undermined his reason, and thoughts beyond the reaches of his soul have agitated him beyond cure. His affections are in disorder, and the disorder will increase; so that he will become by turns suspicious and malicious, impulsive and reflective, pensive and facetious, and undergo all the transformations of the most afflicting of human maladies.

[Page 56.] From the time of the interview with the Ghost to the end of the play, Hamlet's conversation scarcely ever regains the composure and power of which it was previously capable. There is an appreciable change; often more brilliancy, but always less coherence; so that almost on all occasions his conversation is marred by flightiness, and by cynical disdain, both of himself and others, until nearly at the conclusion, when the agitations of life are ended, and he is dying. Then, indeed, in his brief and last conversation with Horatio, the consciousness of approaching death prevails over all temporal and minor influences, and his expressions are affectionate and noble.

[Page 74.] It [Hamlet's letter] was probably written before his abrupt visit to Ophelia in her chamber, and might have been the last she had received from him, written after his dreadful scene with the Ghost, and wrung from him as a kind of remonstrance, consequent on the doubt of his truth and honor implied by the repulsion of his letters following immediately after that shock. . . . . Except as the production of a disordered mind, there is no meaning in it; but it is perfectly consistent with what is observed in letters written every day by persons partially insane, both in and out of asylums, who labor under impulses to express in writing the sentiments occupying the imagination, but find the effort too much for them, and become be wildered, and unable to command words sufficiently emphatic to represent them.

In Hamlet's distraction, his thoughts have almost quitted the night-scene on the platform; and in his complicated distress they have turned chiefly to Ophelia. There is considerable risk of error in commenting on the precise application of many words used two centuries before our time, but even the accidental substitution of the word beautified, which Polonius condemns as a vile phrase, for the word beautiful, is not at all unlike the literal errors occurring often in madmen's letters; the writers aim at force, and are not satisfied with ordinary words. Altogether, the style of the letter has so singular a resemblance to that of insane persons of an intellectual character, but disturbed by insanity, as almost to justify the supposition that Shakespeare had met with some such letter in the curious case-books of his son-in-law, Dr Hall, of Stratford-upon-Avon.

[Page 77.] This garrulity (Polonius's) details to us the order of the symptoms already partly indicated in the action of the play, and might have been copied from the clinical notes of a student of medical disorders. We recognize all the phenomena of an attack of mental disorder consequent on a sudden and sorrowful shock; first, the loss of all habitual interest in surrounding things; then, indifference to food, incapacity for customary and natural sleep; and then a weaker stage of fitful tears and levity, the mirth so strangely mixed with extremest grief;' and then subsidence into a chronic state in which the faculties are generally deranged. These are occur rences often noticed in pathological experience, and even in the sequence mentioned.

[Page 85.] Hamlet knows, or suspects, that Rosencrantz and Guildenstern have been sent for to test the sanity of his understanding, and perhaps for ulterior objects which may concern him. He is not only desirous to ascertain the truth of this, but to impress them with a conviction that he has been acting a part. If he were feign

ing he would feign still; for if at first sight there was reason for feigning, the reason yet remains, and he would rather strive to send them back confirmed that his antic disposition was a real madness. But he is conscious that all is not well with him; he perceives that he is watched; perhaps he is apprehensive that this watching forebodes mischief to him, and he carefully endeavors to evade such an inconvenient consequence. This is an often-noticed tendency in cases of mental impairment, and this is not the only scene in which Hamlet manifests it.

[Page 88.] And even in this conversation with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, whilst he exhibits the acuteness with which an insane man will for a short time discourse, he also shows the unfitness of an infirm mind for consecutive conversation or continued exertion. Every incidental trifle produces interruption, and drives thought from its proposed course. He now proceeds to tell his friends why they were sent for, but with a wish to prove to them that no valid reason existed for it. He confesses peculiarities which have lately crept upon him; some which he is conscious must have been observed, but also some which have only been experienced by himself. In thus imparting himself, his expressions take the unhappy character of an uneasy and oppressed mind, to which every ordinary source of pleasure has become indifferent or presents itself in a morbid and joyless form. This is so precisely the condition exemplified in the greater number of melancholy patients that we can scarcely imagine it merely copied from observation, and feel inclined to refer the eloquent description to some painful experience of the great poet himself.

[Page 110.] In his conversation with Ophelia his words and his conduct are simply those of a man distempered. For feigning such contempt and cruel disregard as he thus expresses, and towards one for whom he had professed and had really felt a lover's affection, there is no reason and no excuse except the sad excuse that he is not in his perfect mind. To suppose him feigning is impossible. No man, however resolved to act a cruel part, could be supposed to listen to words of trust sincerely spoken by a gentle woman, diffidently addressing him, and returning him the gifts he had in happier hours presented to her with honeyed vows, without casting away all predetermined simulation, and clasping her to his heart.

[Page 115.] The diffusion of the element of tenderness over the whole of Hamlet's character, however skilfully effected on the stage, is an unauthorized departure from the delineation of his character by Shakespeare.

[Page 123.] This advice to the Players includes directions so judicious and admirable as to seem to add to the difficulty of comprehending the real condition of Hamlet's mind. Such variations of mood and manner of discourse present nothing new to those whose painful duty it is to live with the insane. Hamlet has his days of calmness and his days of excitement, and the presence of different persons affects him differently, and sometimes excessively,-of some to contempt and anger, some to ridicule, and some to quieter reflection. In the first interview with the Players, Polonius is present, upon whom he exercises his customary jokes; the second interview is with the Players only, who know nothing of his suspected malady or of the designs he entertains, and to converse with them is agreeable to him, and even in some degree restorative of mental composure. . . . For a time the Players make him almost forget the wretchedness, the thought of which has unsettled his reason. [Page 126] When the King and Queen, &c., enter with flourishes of trumpet immediately after Hamlet's conversation with Horatio, it must be confessed that Hamlet instantly betrays, or appears at once to feign, an extravagance of manner and language at variance even with the deportment just maintained with Horatio.

The real promptings of malady seem at this particular time to be mingled with a wildness affected in order to bewilder the company or to deceive the King and the court; but the affected wildness is further stimulated by the ungovernable excitement of a brain too unfeignedly disordered to be made the subservient instrument of a wish merely to seem to be disordered. Part of the wild talk of the Prince seems to be only put on to tease or to insult the King or Polonius, but from this he soon passes on to expressions and conduct plainly dictated by a mind which, however cunning, he cannot control.

[Page 128.] Throughout the whole of the play-scene there is the same vein of craziness in Hamlet's language and deportment. Except his previous conduct to Ophelia, there is nothing more offensive in Hamlet's expressions than those which he indulges while speaking to her in this scene. Malady, and not feigning, has appeared to change the refined Prince into an indelicate mocker, who addresses a young lady in terms coarser than he would have employed if his controlling respect had not been obscured and his habitual courtesy gone from his mind. In this disordered state he has no apparent remembrance of his former repulse of her loving behavior, nor of his denial of having ever loved her, and he has equally forgotten his violent conduct and language, as insane persons alone do, and do so remarkably. Nor is what he says or does consistent with a rational anxiety, however intense, to watch the success of a device to which he attached, when shaping it, a great importance as the means of solving a serious question, and of dissipating a horrible suspicion, and thus determining his future course of action. All his actions and all his words are those of a distempered man, unmindful of the respects and proprieties of life. He never becomes composed; never recovers himself. He goes on jesting with Ophelia, as if incapable of deeper matter, and when the performance of the Players has affrighted the King and sent all the noble audience away, and he is left with Horatio alone, before whom he has no motive for maintaining an antic disposition, he still talks wildly. Since the sad night of his interview with his father's ghost he has, in some quieter hour, entrusted Horatio with the whole revelation made to him; but now, even with Horatio, he speaks as strangely as he formerly did with Horatio and Marcellus together, immediately after that unearthly discourse, and when he was surfeited with horrors. As no gravity then resulted from that interview, so no gravity now results from his conviction that the Ghost was a true ghost, the tale of the mur. der true, and his uncle the murderer. He takes no counsel with his friend. He exclaims that he will take the ghost's word for a thousand pounds,' just as recklessly as he had said, 'It is an honest ghost, that let me tell you.' His words are now, as they were then, wild and hurling. No resolution springs up in his mind; it is all disordered and unbalanced. He quotes doggerel verses, and calls for the recorders.

Just when he is in this unsettled humor, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern approach ; they come to him, sent by the Queen. Their presence chafes him, and in the short conversation with them he assumes a contemptuous air, and baffles them with scoffing words, which amusingly and precisely resemble the expressions of certain persons partially insane, who delight in the power of exercising a cultivated intellect in bewildering plain people. This acuteness in putting their questioners out of countenance, and averting their unwelcome inquiries, is well known to those expe rienced in the ways of the insane, and, although not combined with consistent and reasonable actions, is often extremely embarrassing to the inexperienced.

[Page 139.] The speech of Hamlet upon finding the King praying is the speech

of a man uttering maniacal exaggerations of feeling. Such exaggerations of anger or ferocity are occasionally recognized in the ravings of the mad,-of no other persons, however enraged or depraved. The speech, it is also to be observed, has no listeners; there is nobody by to feign to. The terrible words are the dictation of a mind so metamorphosed by disorder that all healthy and natural feelings, all goodness and mercy, have been forcibly driven out of it.

[Page 141.] The wild impulses of the night, in Hamlet's interview with his mother, are still acting on Hamlet's distempered brain, and exclude the natural sorrow and remorse with which he would, if sane, have been affected on finding that he had slain an innocent old man, once the friend and favorite of his father. Every feeling seems incontestably perverted by sheer madness. Nor does he at all recover himself all through his subsequent interview with the Queen. His selfcommand is so utterly gone that he puts into words the bitterest and coarsest thoughts that have passed through his mind in his previous reflections on her marriage,thoughts natural in a mind angrily revolving what has strongly moved it, but of which a healthy mind would suppress or mitigate the expression. . . . . No sense of what he has done affects him; he turns fiercely on his mother, regardless of her natural horror at this wanton deed of blood. All through the interview with the Queen it is not a sorrowing, princely, respectful son earnestly and passionately remonstrating with his mother, but an impetuous madman forgetful of the proper object of his purposed revenge; forgetful of the admonition of that unearthly being, who, whilst exhorting him to revenge his murder, solemnly enjoined him not to contrive against his mother aught; and now so deprived of all self-control and healthful feeling as at the first to impress upon his mother's mind the idea that he has come to kill her; and then almost exclusively to abuse and insult her on the subject of her second marriage,-his first maddening grief.

[Page 143.] To the Queen's question, 'What have I done,' &c., her son's reply is but further reproach and insult on the subject, not of his father's murder, but of her second marriage. The terms of hatred which he employs show that morbid exaggeration on this subject which has so much to do with the explanation of his whole conduct. His personal abhorrence of his uncle is dwelt upon with revolting particularity, and as if his mother's acceptance of him was all that tortured his mind. His reproaches dwell most on her affections having been weaned from her late dignified lord, and even transferred, during his lifetime, to his more sensual brother.

[Page 146.] The figures he draws of his hated uncle provoke him still more; he forgets his mother as much as he has forgotten his father and his promise to his father's ghost, abandons himself to mere abuse of his uncle, and almost riots in a foul vocabulary.

[Page 155.] It is curious to observe that the arguments he adduces to disprove his mother's supposition. [that he is delirious] are precisely such as certain ingenious madmen delight to employ [Dr Conolly here confirms Dr Bucknill's assertion that this test which Hamlet proposes to his mother only applies to cases of acute mania. See p. 209.]

[Page 199.] If Hamlet is feigning here, our view of his character must become low indeed. In the open grave before him lies the body of the fair Ophelia, of her whom once he certainly loved, with whose death he has only just become acquainted; and which death, if he has been feigning, he must know was partly the result of his murder of her aged father, and partly of his unfeeling treatment of herself. Her

distracted brother leaps into her grave, and if IIamlet feigns he insults the brother's distraction, mimics it, outdoes it. The surer reading must be that the whole scene, at once so unexpected and so agitating, has driven the Prince from his lately re. gained tranquillity, and, acting on a brain yet strongly disposed to excitement, has overcome his self-control. If, instead of this, we are to assume that he takes this opportunity, already so colored with calamity, again to put an antic disposition on, and act the madman, with no conceivable object but insulting death and grief, we must be forced to the conclusion that Hamlet's real character was insensible and contemptible. It is impossible to entertain the supposition that Shakespeare would have made so worthless a moral being the principal personage of one of his noblest compositions, and have wasted his genius to adorn such singular moral deformity.

And this is the last paroxysm by which the mind of the unhappy Prince is shaken. After this he shows no more madness; it has left him again, as madness does after a reign of terror, we often know not how or why; its invasion and departure being equally mysterious, originating in causes lying too deep to be discerned and examined, among the equally hidden sources of feeling and thinking, and of sleep and waking, and of life and death. When in a subsequent interview with Laertes he makes a solemn apology to him, before their fatal fence commences, acknowledging that he has done him wrong, he ascribes what he did to a sore distraction,' even to a madness, which he affectingly alludes to as 'poor Hamlet's enemy.' This is the pitiable truth. To treat this serious avowal as a falsehood is what all our sympathies refuse us to permit.

DR KELLOGG (1860)

(Shakespeare's Delineations of Insanity, Imbecility, and Suicide, New York, 1866, p. 36.)-Shakespeare. . . . recognized what none of his critics, not conversant with medical psychology in its present advanced state, seem to have any conception of; namely, that there are cases of melancholic madness of a delicate shade, in which the reasoning faculties, the intellect proper, so far from being overcome, or even disordered, may, on the other hand, be rendered more active and vigorous, while the will, the moral feelings, the sentiments and affections, are the faculties which seem alone to suffer from the stroke of disease. Such a case he has given us in the character of Hamlet, with a fidelity to nature which continues more and more to excite our wonder and astonishment as our knowledge of this intricate subject advances.

[Page 44.] After the disappearance of the Ghost, the first words Hamlet utters give the clew to his mental and physical state, and it is quite evident that the cord, which has been stretched to its utmost tension, here snaps suddenly, and the consequences are immediately apparent, and are evinced throughout his whole subsequent career. Here enters the pathological element into his mind and disposition, and the working of the leaven of disease is soon apparent, for it changes completely and for ever his whole character. Up to this time we see no weakness, no vacillation, no want of energy, no infirmity of purpose. After this, all these characteristics are irrecoverably lost, and though some faculties of his great spirit seem comparatively untouched, others are completely paralyzed.

[Page 46.] The intimation that he conveys in this scene, that he may think it

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