¶ … 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...

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…