Chapter 5

One of the probable causes of the feigned madness of Hamlet has not been up to the present time indicated by critics. It has been said, “Hamlet acts the madman to hide his thought, like Brutus.” In fact, it is easy for apparent imbecility to hatch a great project; the supposed idiot can take aim deliberately. But the case of Brutus is not that of Hamlet. Hamlet acts the madman for his safety. Brutus screens his project, Hamlet his person. The manners of those tragic courts being known, from the moment that Hamlet, through the revelation of the ghost, is acquainted with the crime of Claudius, Hamlet is in danger. The superior historian within the poet is here manifested, and one feels the deep insight of Shakespeare into the ancient darkness of royalty. In the Middle Ages and in the Lower Empire, and even at earlier periods, woe unto him who found out a murder or a poisoning committed by a king! Ovid, according to Voltaire’s conjecture, was exiled from Rome for having seen something shameful in the house of Augustus. To know that the king was an assassin was a State crime. When it pleased the prince not to have had a witness, it was a matter involving one’s head to ignore everything. It was bad policy to have good eyes. A man suspected of suspicion was lost. He had but one refuge, —folly; to pass for “an innocent” He was despised, and that was all. Do you remember the advice that, in Æschylus, the Ocean gives to Prometheus: “To look a fool is the secret of the wise man.” When the Chamberlain Hugolin found the iron spit with which Edrick the Vendee had empaled Edmond II., “he hastened to put on madness,” says the Saxon Chronicle of 1016, and saved himself in that way. Heraclian of Nisibe, having discovered by chance that Rhinomete was a fratricide, had himself declared mad by the doctors, and succeeded in getting himself shut up for life in a cloister. He thus lived peaceably, growing old and waiting for death with a vacant stare. Hamlet runs the same peril, and has recourse to the same means. He gets himself declared mad like Heraclian, and puts on folly like Hugolin. This does not prevent the restless Claudius from twice making an effort to get rid of him, —in the middle of the drama by the axe or the dagger in England, and toward the conclusion by poison.