Shakespeare: C/D?

Hamlet is not a villain. And certainty and nihilism *are* his issues.

There are many key moments but one of them has to be the soliloquy just before the play within a play. He wonders if he is a coward and sees in himself a deficiency of feeling. Instead of righteous rage, he felt neurosis and self hatred in response to his father’s death; his grief took a more complicated form than he expected. Only after does he shift gears and say no, the ghost might have been a spirit who took advantage of my weakened mental state — basically a delusion. He doubts his sanity. He affirms that the play within a play is the right thing to do. He needs to verify what happened.

Meanwhile, in his “delay” he has done more damage than he knows. Ophelia has ready been traumatized by him, and she knows the madness isn’t an act. She sees that his personality has deteriorated and talks about it right after the “nunnery” encounter. He is not rooted in anything solid; he is a mass of rage and fear.

Basically, he is experiencing a mental health crisis. It doesn’t look like what he believes “madness” is. It is not losing his “reason,” it’s the fact that his rationalizations are spinning out in multiple directions, trying to keep up with his volatile mood.

It is doubt that makes him “mad.” And he resolves it in act 5 by embracing fate and an identity as a divinely ordained king — “hamlet the dane” — but this too is a tragic and partial solution. He couldn’t take doubt — maybe he couldn’t take modernity — so he embraced the traditional code, for a moment, but this world is dying and he knows it. The future belongs to the osrics he disdains — the rising bourgeoisie — not princes like himself.

When he tells laertes that his madness was “not him” it is supposed to come off wrong. It was him, the whole time, all of it. he was digging into himself, and the process was ugly.