ABSTRACT
This chapter takes into account the effects of psychiatric deinstitutionalisation, attitudes and approaches of royalty regarding their distance from the public, and changing performance trends of Hamlet’s “madness” along with terminology used in theatre reviews and wider performance criticism to describe Hamlet’s “princeliness” and his “madness”. The culmination of all of the attributes creates an idealised image of a prince which is an unrealistic level of expectation to place on any person. These Hamlets formed some part of an ideal of royalty and it is notable that these actors did not engage with clinical definitions of mental illness in their performances of Hamlet’s “madness”. The immediacy of the issue of mental illness during the Broadmoor performance of Daniels’ Hamlet reduced the possibilities of romanticising Hamlet’s “madness,” a resistance to previous performance traditions, a shift from which actors and the director benefitted.
