Perhaps the world's most famous mental patient, Hamlet and his sanity have been argued over by countless learned scholars for hundreds of years. By direct examination of the text, I will look at the evidence supporting or dispelling each argument and come to my own conclusion.
Hamlet is obviously experiencing grief and despair right from the beginning of the play, with the death of his father and his uncle's seizure of the throne and hasty marriage to Hamlet's mother. We can observe his great grief bordering on irrational suicidal tendencies as early as Act II Sc II, where he gives his first soliloquy. He cries:.
O that this too too solid flesh would melt,.
Thaw, and resolve itself into a dew!.
Or that the Everlasting had not fixed.
His canon 'gainst self-slaughter! (1.2.129-132).
Hamlet wants his flesh to dissolve into a dew, and wishes that God had not forbade suicides from going to heaven. This is also the first glimpse of another recurring theme in the play, that of Hamlet's obsession with the afterlife. This is one of the reasons that the ghost of his father has such an effect on him, which is a trigger for all the subsequent events in the play.
In Act I Sc 4, Hamlet says something that shows a complete contradictory in himself. The general gist of lines 25-40 is that if a person has one fault, no matter how virtuous they may be in other ways, they are soiled by "the stamp of one defect." This speech is quite ironic, because it is Hamlet's "one defect" (his hesitancy and inability to take action), regardless of his other qualities (such as honor and integrity), will be the main reason why the play ends so tragically.
Although we are supposed to suspect that "something is rotten in the state of.
Denmark," as Horatio puts it, from the start of the play, it is only when Hamlet talks with the ghost of his father in Act I Sc V that we realize the full extent of his uncle's treachery.