Madness and Insanity in Shakespeares Hamlet - Hamlet, the Melancholy

Hamlet, the Melancholy Hero The reader/viewer finds in Shakespeares tragedy Hamlet that the protagonist is a melancholy type this quality remains with him from beginning to end of the tragedy. And this melancholy battler ordain be the subject-matter of this essay. Harry Levin explains in the General Introduction to The Riverside Shakespeare how the dramatist employs imaging in the play to enhance the melancholic dimension of the hero The sphere of Shakespeares images is so vast and rich in itself that it has been investigated and charted for clues to his personalised temperament. But though we can follow up associations of thought by his image-clusters, these are subordinated to his controlling purposes as a playwright. The imagery fulfills a morphologic and a thematic function, lin great power together a train of ideas or intercommunicate a scheme of values. It enhances the strain of melancholy in Hamlet by dwelling on sickness and decay. . . (14). The depressing aspect of the initial imagery of the drama is described by Marchette Chute in The Story Told in Hamlet The story opens in the cold and dark of a spend night in Denmark, while the guard is being changed on the battlements of the regal castle of Elsinore. For two nights in succession, just as the bell strikes the mo of one, a ghost has appeared on the battlements, a figure dressed in complete armor and with a face like that of the dead king of Denmark, Hamlets father (35). Horatio and Marcellus exit the ghost-ridden ramparts of Elsinore intending to enlist the aid of Hamlet. The prince is dismay by the oerhasty marriage of his mother to his uncle less than two months subsequently the funeral of Hamlets father. There is ... ...999. Rpt. from Introduction to Hamlet, Prince of Denmark. Ed. Philip Edwards. N. P. Cambridge University P., 1985. Levin, Harry. General Introduction. The Riverside Shakespeare. Ed. G. Blakemore Evans. capital of Massachusetts Houghton Mifflin Co., 1974. Mack , Maynard. The World of Hamlet. Yale Review. vol. 41 (1952) p. 502-23. Rpt. in Shakespeare Modern Essays in Criticism. Rev. ed. Ed. Leonard F. Dean. New York Oxford University P., 1967. Rosenberg, Marvin. Laertes An unbidden but Earnest Young Aristocrat. Readings on Hamlet. Ed. Don Nardo. San Diego Greenhaven Press, 1999. Rpt. from The Masks of Hamlet. Newark, NJ Univ. of Delaware P., 1992. Shakespeare, William. The calamity of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark. Massachusetts Institute of Technology. 1995. http//www.chemicool.com/Shakespeare/hamlet/full.html No line nos.