ABSTRACT

There are some references to madness in Hamlet, and many more in William Shakespeare's other plays. American English thus contains two classes of slang terms for mental illness—one professional, the other popular; each of these classes contains hundreds of words, doing essentially the same work Shakespeare accomplished with just a handful. When Macbeth enters the scene and demands that the doctor cure his wife, Shakespeare has the doctor say exactly the opposite of what—ever since the early 1800s, but especially since Sophie Freud's day—psychiatrists have been taught to think and say. Realizing that his elders are trying to incriminate him as insane and hence irrational, Hamlet warns Guildenstern that two can play at that game as well as one—that irrationality may be a disguise and hence a form of calculated rationality. The theme of madness, though it appears only toward the end of Macbeth, constitutes an extraordinarily powerful element of the tragedy.