FAQ

1. Hamlet is angry with his mother's decision to marry Claudius so soon after her husband's death. Hamlet feels his mother has shamelessly betrayed her loyalty to his father. One of the less obvious themes of the play is that Hamlet harbors feelings of misogyny towards the women in his life, including his lover, Ophelia. Tormented, Hamlet's anger over his father's death manifests itself in his ill treatment of Ophelia & his mother. Hamlet's words to Ophelia, "get thee to a nunnery!" are his way of telling her to enter a house of prostitution (which is what a "nunnery", in 17th century slang, really was. It was not a convent, as many assume.)

Hamlet's state of mind is somewhere between sanity and insanity. His language is erratic and wild, but beneath his mad-sounding words often lie acute observations that show the sane mind working bitterly beneath the surface. Hamlet's decision to fake his madness is a sane one, taken to confuse his enemies and hide his intentions. Unfortunately, he mentally tortures those around him, causing chaos in their lives as well as his own.

Sometimes the role of Hamlet is played as if the character were really mad, but more often it is played (as Branagh, Olivier, and Richard Burton do) as if Hamlet were only pretending to be insane, as Shakespeare himself seems to indicate at the end of the Ghost Scene , where Hamlet asks his friend Horatio and the sentries Barnardo and Marcellus not to give him away if he decides to fake insanity.