The question as to whether Hamlet is crazy is a matter of personal interpretation. Critics take sides on this issue with great vehemence. Further, a modern audience cannot possibly ascertain what Shakespeare intended, since no one from his time is alive to interpret Shakespeare’s production. Modern productions are always interpretations of the play, and each director, or each reader will form unique conclusions.

What can be considered is a modern analysis of Shakespeare’s character, taken outside of his play. Were we to meet a Hamlet, or read of one in the newspaper, it would be hard to conclude that Hamlet was sane. This may be interpretation in a vacuum, and is more clinical diagnosis that actual literary interpretation.

One must question anyone closely who sees his late father taking a walk, as Hamlet does in the beginning of Shakespeare’s play. As Dickens points out in The Christmas Carol, if Hamlet’s father were not dead, there would be nothing remarkable about him taking a stroll late at night. Since he is dead, and since Hamlet was not, prior to this, in the habit of perceiving spirits, it does make sense to question his sanity a little.

Part of the question of whether Hamlet is crazy is made problematic by the fact that Hamlet deliberately decides to act crazy on purpose. By seeming crazy, he can put his mother and stepfather off the track of thinking he is trying to expose his uncle as a murderer. So there is part intent to appear crazier than he perhaps is.

However, we must consider what Hamlet does. First, he sees his dead father, perhaps a delusion. Second, he considers suicide. He also sends his friends off to die, is at least in part responsible for Ophelia’s death, and murders Polonius by accident. Lastly, he kills his stepfather/uncle.

From these actions alone, we must consider whether these qualify as insanity. Clearly they do. One could perhaps discount the murder by accident. However, suicidality is a mark of insanity, and Hamlet is clearly laboring under severe depression and guilt. His world has been turned upside down by revelation of facts by his dead father. Everything he has perceived as good and correct in the world, like his love for Ophelia, and his relationship with his mother are suddenly in questionable flux.

We also have to evaluate the last part. Hamlet kills his stepfather. Is this vengeance or craziness? Or is vengeance part madness? People who are sane look for means to apply justice that do not end up killing themselves, and the majority of their family. When someone kills, the term sane is generally lacking as a description of his actions.

Some critics argue that Hamlet begins as sane, but by “playing crazy” he becomes so. Others see Hamlet as simply playing crazy the whole time. However, when Hamlet’s behavior crosses the line into murder, play-acting clearly doesn’t quite describe Hamlet’s behavior. He is certainly inwardly tortured by his reflections on the death of his father, and suspicions about his mother. From his mother’s behavior he infers that all women are untrustworthy, a rather nutty response, though perhaps understandable in a fairly young man.

If we define crazy by modern standards, then Hamlet clearly fits the bill. Though it was a convention of characters to soliloquize, we must also view his long soliloquies to no one as acts of madness too. There is also the question of whether Hamlet’s discussion with his dead father is even truthful or real. Perhaps the whole drama is the act of a person with a dangerous paranoid delusion? Perhaps Hamlet’s uncle was nice guy, and only Hamlet believes he is evil. He is certainly fixated on Claudius, which is often the case with people with delusions of persecution.

Yet despite the conclusions a modern audience might draw, some critics suggest we read the play as a product of the time it was written. Seeing a ghost, plotting violent vengeance, and certainly violent secessions to thrones were part of the reality of Shakespeare’s world. Thus Hamlet is perhaps more mad today, than a 17th century audience would have viewed him.