Defense Attorney Get Hamlet Off the Hook

¶ … defense attorney get Hamlet off the hook for his crimes of passion on a plea of insanity? Certainly anyone who chats with ghosts on Danish parapets, misleads innocent young women, and stages theatricals to expose villainous relatives of "murder most foul" isn't playing with a full deck.

Or is this young Dane, instead, a poster child for the premise that bad things can happen to good people? Scholars have long debated the meaning behind Hamlet's infamous speech, "To be or not to be." Its context addresses the speaker's proclivity to straddle the fence until more facts are known. Is the ghost that of Hamlet's dead father? Or is it a demon sent to torment him in his suicidal state of depression? He recognizes the spirit is toying with his emotions.

Yet its message is consistent with his disdain for the status quo. Does he really see his father "in his mind's eye?" Or does he just regret they couldn't have spent more time together? His resentment of his mother's hasty marriage is evidenced in, "She married. O, most wicked speed, to post with such dexterity to incestuous sheets! It is not nor it cannot come to good: But break, my heart; for I must hold my tongue." Suppressed emotion gives way to ultimate violence.

Though this be madness yet there is method in it" hints that validation exists even in spurious circumstances. Ophelia herself expresses concern. Hamlet came to her, she said, "with a look so piteous in purport as if he had been loosed out of hell." She is warned to stay away from him. Lovestruck, she ignores it. In life, he brutally rebuffs her with the command, "Get thee to a nunnery," yet is saddened by her drowning.

How much of this man's heart can one truly trust? Is he capable of loving anyone? Hamlet's allusion to his own unbalanced state is reflected in, "I could...count myself a king of infinite space, were it not that I have bad dreams." Have such dreams.