A look at Hamlet...

When reading William Shakespeare's, Hamlet, the reader is often faced with a very common question, "Has Hamlet lost his mind?" This question is brought up when the young prince is brought home from school, after the death of his father, the king of Denmark. When he returns, he finds that his mother has married his uncle, his dead father's brother, right after his father's funeral. Now, his uncle is the king of Denmark, and Hamlet resents this. When a guard tells him that he has seen the ghost of the king's spirit one night, Hamlet gets curious and decides to investigate for himself. When he meets the ghost, it tells him that Hamlet's uncle, plotted and murdered him, and stole his throne. Hamlet becomes enraged, but decides to find out for himself if this actually happened, thinking that this spirit might be the devil. As the story continues, Hamlet's character seems to lose more and more of his mind. Many readers would say that he is just acting, to scare the queen and his uncle into telling him the truth about his father's death. On the other hand, readers will say that when he killed Polonious, he didn't even skip a beat, meaning that he wasn't in the right state of mind to panic when he killed him. Also, after Hamlet killed Polonious, he stayed to talk to his mother, and told her that the ghost was in the room, but she couldn't see it. This makes the audience think that maybe Hamlet is just seeing things, and the revenge of his uncle taking the throne was going to his head. There are many situations through out the story that might make a reader lean to either side of the argument, but by the end of the story, it is never really known whether or not Hamlet has lost his mind. The story lets the audience decide whether or not the prince of Denmark had lost his mind over the death of his father, or that he was just waiting for the right time for his uncle to speak the truth.