Content area
Full Text
Correspondence to: Dr A B Shaw, 2 The Stables, Weeton Lane, Harewood, Leeds LS17 9LP, UK; ab.nr [email protected]
In the third scene of the play the ghost of his father tells Hamlet to avenge his murder. In the very last scene he does it. His delay causes seven unnecessary deaths. They are his own, his mother’s and that of the girl he loves: her father and her brother, and two fellow students also die. Without the delay there would be no play. But it is reasonable to assume that Shakespeare would have made a delay, which was dramatically necessary, psychologically credible as well. Critics have suggested many explanations of the delay in the last four centuries. None has gained universal acceptance.
I suggest that the explanation most consistent with the evidence is that Shakespeare has depicted a man with an acute depressive illness with obsessional features, unable to cope with a heavy responsibility. At the time, there was no concept of depressive illness and Shakespeare would have seen Hamlet’s melancholy as a character defect.
The great critic Bradley, almost a century ago, thought his irresolution was due to profound melancholy and advised readers to understand the play by reading an account of melancholia in a work on mental diseases.1
EVIDENCE FOR DEPRESSION
Hamlet is a creature of Shakespeare’s imagination, probably drawn from several sources. He is not an actual patient. Therefore clinical diagnosis must be tentative, but there is good evidence in the play for depressive illness. Depressive illness is characterised by low mood, anhedonia, negative beliefs, and reduced energy.2 Hamlet actually calls himself melancholic (II.ii.597)3 and the very first speech he makes in the play is devoted to a public statement of his melancholy.
But I have that within which passes show,
These but the trappings and the suits of woe. (I.ii.85–6)
He speaks of his anhedonia at length to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, saying that he has lost all his mirth and that man does not delight him. (II.ii.295–309).
How weary, stale, flat and unprofitable
Seem to me all the uses of this world! (I.ii.133–4)
He frequently expresses negative beliefs and pessimism. He calls Denmark a prison.(II.ii.243) His comments on women to Ophelia are bitter.(III.i.111–51) In the gravedigger scene he dwells...