William Shakespeare is well known as a sixteenth and seventeenth century playwright, with a lot of recognition going to him for his tragedies.  In the classic tragedy, start off the play well but end in a worse situation, often death.  This transition is caused by the character's tragic flaw, a shortcoming they have at the beginning of the play that surfaces and destroys them.  Many critics of the work Hamlet believe he, Hamlet, has a classic tragic flaw, but they are mistaken.  It is obvious that he actually becomes insane from the sight of his father's ghost and his mother's hasty remarriage.  Since Hamlet doesn't start the play insane, it could be said that he has no classic tragic flaw at all.
	It is a mainstream thought to believe that Hamlet was simply feigning his insanity, as Shakespeare seems to make clear.  Before that is discussed, there must be some way of telling if someone is mad or not.  Granted, there are a lot of trivial situations pointing to Hamlet's sanity, but none that cannot easily be crushed.  To take a turn in the topic, Webster's Dictionary defines the word mad as "mentally disturbed or deranged; insane; demented."  As a rule: if one "acts" insane during times of dire seriousness (when being mad would no further your goals or acting that way would be distasteful and just plain inappropriate at the time), then one must be mad.  Also, if there is a clear ambiguity between times of real and false insanity, then one must be insane.
	At the end of the first act, Hamlet meets his dead father's ghost.  It describes its dead as "Murder most foul, as in the best it is, but this most foul, 
him.  This and the fact that his mother remarries so quickly to Hamlet's uncle is what strange, and unnatural." [Hamlet, Act 1, Scene 5, Lines 33-4]  The ghost continues to curse the current king, Hamlet's uncle, and gives Hamlet the mission of killing causes his despair, not necessarily madness at this point.  "With the antic in Hamlet simultaneously appears with the antic in the ghost." [Stirling, p106]  This quote supports the idea that the ghost's vileness is associated with Hamlet's madness.
	In Act 2 Hamlet is still shocked by the sight of his dead father.  He gets the idea to feign madness in order to find out if the king is truly guilty.  Talking to Polonius, the king's associate and Hamlet's girlfriend's father, Polonius begins to realize that Hamlet is faking.  Polonius says "Though this be madness, yet there is a method in 't." [Act 2, Scene 2, Lines 223-4]  At this point of the play it is possible that he is not really mad; everyone seems to notice that he is perfectly sane.  Also at this point, Hamlet is trying vigorously to get the truth out with lines like "... there is a kind of confession in your looks which your modesties have not craft enough to color." [Act 2, Scene 2, Lines 301-3]  A good response to Act 2 is "During this period we presently learn that Hamlet's general behaviour has been so singular to attract observation; that he has manifested many signs of derangement of mind, some indicative of extreme distraction, and some which could not by their nature be feigned." [Conolly, p 62-3]
	The king gets suspicion that Hamlet is mad and trying to take him down and says "Madness is great ones must not (unwatched) go," [Act 3, Scene 1, 
Line 203] which in a sense is a threat.  A little later in the same scene Hamlet acts extremely hostile and demented towards Ophelia, even telling her to live in a nunnery.  She comments "O, what a noble mind is here o'erthrown!" [Act 3, Scene 1, Line 163] and "Now see (that) noble and most sovereign reason like sweet bells jangled, out of time and harsh." [Act 3, Scene 1, Lines 171-2]  This is the first obvious sign that Hamlet is truly mad.  "In English slang a nunnery was the nickname for a brothel.  To tell the woman he loved to go live in a brothel is not normal behavior, at least not for a prince." [Viles]  Hamlet's whole reason for faking his madness was to get the king and queen to admit their guilt, not to batter Ophelia.  As written by Conolly "For such feigning with Ophelia there could be no sane or reasonable motive: it could not further his revenge; it could not lead to his fulfilling his promise to his father's ghost." [Conolly, p 65]
	Later that act (Scene 5) Hamlet confronts his mother and attempts to make her to admit her guilt, which follows the "sane acting mad" thesis.  Although, his father's ghost reappears and "He alone sees his father's ghost in his mother's chamber.  Every other time the ghost appeared someone else has seen it.  During this scene he finally shows his madness, because his mother does not see the ghost." [washemad.htm]  In the same scene Hamlet finds someone listening to their conversation and stabs through the curtain.  "...had Polonius lived a few moments longer to hear Hamlet's disclaimer of madness, he would have sensed a mad ring to it, with which he had become quite familiar." [Stirling, p 93]
	Later we learn that Ophelia, Hamlet's love, commits suicide.  At the funeral, Hamlet ends up getting into a fight with Laertes, the brother of the mourned and son of Polonius (who Hamlet killed).  Hamlet claims "His madness is poor Hamlet's enemy." [Act 5, Scene 2, Line 253]  "...he [Hamlet] pleads diminished responsibility, and says his madness and not Hamlet himself was to blame.  But the worst thing Hamlet has done to Laertes is to murder Polonius, and he does that in a scene where he is swearing with the greatest vehemence that he is not mad." [Frye, p 85]  A good response to Frye is "The feigning scenes establish a norm, if it may be called that, of aberrant behavior ... and when Hamlet's actions and words in a nonfeigning situation become pointedly indistinguishable from those he elsewhere employs while feigning, a dramatically clear ambiguity results." [Stirling, p 198]  More wisdom from Stirling includes: "...the grave scene depicts the abandoned grief of a character who could no more sustain calculated feigning than he could avoid physical struggle with the chief mourner." [Stirling p 107]  It is obvious that Hamlet is really insane.
	As a result, it is true that Hamlet was mad, but didn't start that way.  "Hamlet incorporates his intimate disgust into the madness which is at once a disguise, a refuge, and a manifestation of despair." [Traversi, p93]  Thus, "The prince may at first have feigned madness; but, as he wantonly kills Polonius, and brutalized the innocent Ophelia, something akin to madness gradually overtakes him." [Quennell & Hamish, p114]  Off the subject of the work Hamlet, how about the live performances?  "In filmed interviews with a half-dozen of the leading 
Hamlets of out age ... all of the actors agreed that while Hamlet began by pretending to be mad, the pretense at some point gave away to real madness, at least for some time." [Miner & Rawson, p 163]
	With the discussion of Hamlet's madness going on for over three hundred years, there is enough supporting evidence that Hamlet is really mad.  It is possible that he was sane at first, but it is proven that he is ultimately insane, up to the point of his death.


Works Cited

Conolly, John.  A Study of Hamlet.  New York, NY: AMS Press Inc, 1973.
Frye, Northrop.  Northrop Frye in Shakespeare.  New Haven:  Yale University Press, 1986.
Hamlet's Madness!  Was he mad?.  [Online] Available 
	http://www.hamlet.edmonton.ab.ca/WASHEMAD.HTM, October 19th, 1998.
Miner, Margaret and Hugh Rawson.  A Dictionary of Quotations from Shakespeare. New York:  The
	Penguin Group, 1992.
Quennell, Peter and Hamish Johnson.  Who's Who in Shakespeare.  New York: Peter Quennell and
	Hamish Johnson, 1973.
Shakespeare, William.  Hamlet.  Oxford, NY:  Oxford University Press, 1995.
Stirling, Brents.  Unity in Shakespearean Tragedy.  New York:  Columbia University Press, 1956.
Traversi, D A.  An Approach to Shakespeare.  Garden City, NY:  Doubleday & Company Inc, 1956.
Viles, Samantha.  Hamlet's Madness.  [Online] Available
	http://www.cailab.mwsc.edu/listserv/submit/9.7.97-21.57.51.html, September 7th, 1997