Hamlet Recklessness

To Be or Not to Be A madman is defined as a person who is extremely foolish and acts very recklessly. In the play The Tragedy of Hamlet by William Shakespeare, the trauma of the murder of King Hamlet plays a great deal in the mental instability of Hamlet. To start off the play Hamlet states, “O, that this is too too sullied flesh would melt, Thaw and resolve itself into a dew, Or that the Everlasting had not fixed His canon ‘gainst self-slaughter! O God, O God, How weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable Seem to me all the uses of this world!” (I,2,135-140). Hamlet suggests that he is contaminated with incestucious blood because his mother was so quickly remarry his uncle. Hamlet is depressed at the fact that he lost his father and his “uncle” is now his stepfather.
Hamlet also comes out and states his madness by saying, “How strange or odd some’er I bear myself (As I perchance hereafter shall think meet to put an antic disposition on.”(I,5,195-197). Hamlet says this when the ghost, of his father, comes out and says that Claudius was the reason he is dead. This is when Hamlet …show more content…
The ghost is telling Hamlet that if he does not get his revenge and kill Claudius then the ghost, or King Hamlet, will be doomed to suffer in Purgatory. Hamlet finds the ghost to be very suspicious after the ghost says this because, the good little Catholic Hamlet is knows that 1) the doctrine of Purgatory doesn’t say anything about murdering helping the souls go to heaven and 2) after the Reformation, Protestants rejected the idea of Purgatory as a “Catholic superstition”. This messes with Hamlets mind. It makes him ask himself if the ghost is real or if the ghost should be trusted. These questions that Hamlet is asking himself helps contribution to the “madman” theory that Hamlet is. It also give him somewhat of an excuse as to why he is acting the way he is