Hamlet (Vol. 35) | P. J. Aldus (essay date 1977)
P. J. Aldus (essay date 1977)
SOURCE: "Madness," in Mousetrap: Structure and Meaning in Hamlet, 1977, pp. 209-19.
[In the following excerpt, Aldus investigates the madness of Hamlet on a mythical level, exploring his "poetic " madness as a projection of Shakespeare himself and the prince as a paranoid schizophrenic]
POLONIUS Though this be madness, yet there is method in't.
… a happiness that often madness hits on, which reason and sanity could not so prosperously be delivered of.
Hamlet embodies an involved combination of many identities, but the awkward, sometimes cumbersome terminologies used here for them (e.g., King/Polonius/ Hamlet) scarcely help gain response to mythic character and action. The reductio ad absurdum, however accurate the term might be, would be a composite name stretching its length a third of a page.
The usual alternative, each figure accepted by name as...
[The entire page is 4837 words long]
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