Dr. Gray was a serious Shakespearian scholar.  He wrote the following essay while he was a student at Iowa Wesleyan University, today Iowa Wesleyan College.  Thanks to Lynn Ellsworth, Archivist of Iowa Wesleyan College for the following which appeared in the "Literary & Scientific" section of the college publication known as the  "Iowa Wesleyan" in 1887. 

THE SANITY OF HAMLET by W.R.G. 

Probably no question has ever been more discussed by literary critics, and with more varying views, than that affecting the sanity of that masterpiece of Shakespeare’s prolific genius, the unhappy Hamlet, prince of Denmark.  Many have been the arguments pro and con, and yet the text would seem to point conclusively to this:  that, though his mind was wrought to tremendous tension by the many conflicting emotions attendant upon the terrible nature of the secret lain upon him and the vengeance require at this hands for his fathers murder, thereby giving rise to those seeming vagaries and eccentricities of character which have been called madness, yet one clearly define purpose is visible throughout, and he must be regarded as assuming the outward aspect rather than being in reality mad.

At the onset we find Hamlet’s sense of morality and propriety greatly outraged by the hasty marriage of his mother wit his uncle within two months of his father’s death.  He keenly feels that she has not shown either the respect or affection due to the memory of that father, of whom he say:  “He was a man; take him for all in all, I shall not look upon his like again.  His delicate soul revolts at what he considers the indecent hast exhibited in this marriage, and he realizes, with almost a prophetic insight into the future that over shadowed and darkened his life, realizes intuitively, that “it is not, nor cannot come to good.”

Gentle, loving and thoughtful, kind to all about him, and with implicit faith in the goodness of humanity, his father’s death is a blow which sinks deep into his heart and changes the whole current of his life, turning what was before but the natural thoughtfulness of the student into a settled melancholy.  When his mother provoked that he should persist in wearing the livery of mourning.  In the midst of the rejoicing at the court of Denmark over her nuptials, reproaches him with the words, “all who live must die; why seems it then so particular with thee?”  We strike the keynote to his great grief in the exceedingly touching and beautiful reply:

“Seems, madam?  Nay it is I know not seems.
‘Tis not alone my inky cloak, good mother,
Nor customary with of solemn black
Nor windy separation of forced breath
No, nor the fruitful river of the eye
Nor the dejected ‘havior of the visage
Together with all modes, shows and forms of grief,
That can denote me truly.  Those indeed seem,
For they are actions that a man might play;
But I have that within which passeth show
These, but the trappings and suits of woe.”

Mingled with this sorrow “that passeth show,” is an extreme sensitiveness.  It touches him to the quick to have the subject mentioned in his presence.  When his friend Horatio tells him he came to attend his father’s funeral, it cuts like the surgeon’s knife, and he breaks forth bitterly.  “I pray there, fellow student, do not mock me; I think you came to attend my mother’s wedding.”  But up to this time, though sad and lonely, he is natural and unaffected.  When Horatio and Marcellas come to apprise him of the apparition they have seen the night before, he receives them kindly and cordially, and becomes a prince and a gentleman and even indulges in some of the old boyish mirth, saying “We’ll teach you to drink deep, ere you depart.”  But at the close of the interview he is filled with a vague foreboding of coming evil, and is haunted by an impatient desire for the night to come, that he may keep watch and with his own eyes behold whether there be truth in the words of which he has been told, and the dread and the wish find expression.  “I doubt some foul play.  Would the night were come.”

The night comes, and with it brings that apparition, “clad in complete steel, making night hideous,” and Hamlet receives from the lips of his father’s spirit, the knowledge of his uncle’s teacher and crime and takes upon himself that awful charge of avenging his father’s murder.  He solemnly consecrates himself to that purpose, making the resolution to remember nothing but the command laid upon him.

“Yea, from the tables of my memory
I’ll wipe away all trivial fond records,
All saws of books, all forms, all pressures past,
That youth and observation copied there,
And thy commandment all alone shall life
Within the book and volume of my brain,
Unmixed with baser matter.”

In swearing his companions to secrecy concerning what they have seen and heard, he reveals to us the plan he has resolved upon for the government of his future actions and gives proof of his subsequent sanity in that revelation.  Every subsequent action is in perfect harmony with that revealed plan.  That he as resolved to feign madness there can be doubt from the context:  “As I hereafter shall think meet to put an antic disposition on,” clearly denotes his intention to delude the king with the supposition of his insanity, that he may the more easily carry out his purpose.  But the task imposed upon him is too heavy for his nature.  He can thin, he can resolve, but he cannot act.  He lets the time slip by in moralizing upon the magnitude of the crime that he is to avert, rather than in taking active measure to consummate that vengeance, waiting until an opportunity may come and when the opportunity presents itself, he puts it by for a reason, that were it the true one, would be simply fiendish.  Coming upon his uncle in an attitude of prayer, he says:  “Now might I do it pat, not that he is praying,” but defers the hour of retribution until he can detect him in the commission of some iniquity that he may not only destroy his bodily frame but inflict eternal punishment upon his soul.  This is the reasoning by which he strives to deceive himself, but in reality he makes it an excuse for his inability to commit a murder, even though his life were pledged to that purpose.  He is constitutionally unfit for the commission of a crime, and the very thought of taking a life is repugnant to him, notwithstanding that it is the object of every thought.  His own knowledge of this weakness, and it may be, a premonition of his fate, finds utterance in that passionate cry of anguish:  “The time is out of join!  Oh, cursed spite!  That ever I was born to set it right.”

Hamlet’s attitude toward Ophelia has perhaps oftenest been brought forward in support of the theory of unsoundness of mind.  The first intimation we have of his treatment of the pure and beautiful maiden, in her own narration to her father:

“He took me by the wrist and held me hard,
Then goes he to the length of all his arm
And, wit his other hand, thus o’er his brow
He falls to such perusal of my face,
As he would draw it.  Long stayed hi so;
At last, a little shaking of mine arm,
And thrice his head thus waving up and down,
He raised a sigh so piteous and profound
That it did seem to shatter all his bulk,
And end his being; that done, he lets me go
And with his head oe’r his shoulder turned
He seemed to find his way without his eyes
For out of doors he went without their help,
And, to the last, bended their light on me”

This has been urged in support of the theory of the insanity of Hamlet, but if viewed in its true light, is capable of a very different interpretation.  With his soul almost bursting with the contending feelings that struggled within him, he wished for a companion in whom he might confer and who would be equal to aid in the task he had to do.  For this companion he turns to the seat and gentle Ophelia, in the efficacy of whose prayers he had great faith.  But after looking into her very soul he sees that she is not equal to the fearful responsibility to which he would make her a partner.  Good, and pure, and beautiful, she was too weak and frail to be thrown into such a whirlpool of human passions and woe as engulfed him, and so, with that “sigh so piteous and profound,” he realizes that he alone must fight the battle with fate, that he alone must bear the sorrow and the guilt, and not lay the weight of his burden upon one weaker than himself and drag her down in the destruction that threatened him.  He feigns a frenzy in order to eradicate any fondness she may have for him, and showers upon her those bitter invectives, which so wound her confiding heart, though it costs him a bitter pang to utter them.  He took his means to alienate her love for him.  It was the sublimity of self-sacrifice, and not the purposeless wanderings of a diseased brain.

As to Hamlet’s own love for Ophelia, who can doubt it that reads those passionate words uttered by the side of her grave: I love the fair Ophelia.  Forty thousand brothers, with all their show for love, could not make up my sum.”

But through all this pretended madness, how the giant intellect of the man shines out.  Who could be more conclusive of a mind perfect in all its parts than that magnificent outburst?

What a piece of work is man?  How noble in reason?  How infinite in faculties!  in form and moving, how express and admirable!  in action how like an angel? In apprehension, how like a god! The beauty of the world! The paragon of animals.”

Again, in the closet scene with his mother Hamlet vindicates his soundness of intellect:

“My pulse, as yours, doth temperately keep time and keeps a healthful music.  It is not madness that I have uttered.  Bring me to the test, and I the matter will reword, which madness would gambol from.”

The only time that Hamlet can reasonably be accused of madness is for a moment at the grave of Ophelia.  Returning to Denmark, after escaping the snare spread for him by the enmity of his uncle, the first news that greets him on his arrival, is the death of her whom we must believe that the loved with almost the same idolatrous love bestowed upon his father.  Coming, as it does, upon a mind already wrought to its utmost tension b the weight of woe laid upon it, the shock is temporarily more than he can bear, and he breaks forth into those extravagant and passionate utterances which so enrage Laertes.  But before the final catastrophe, which ends at once his sorrow and his life, he has regained a quiet resignation, born of that blind and absolute belief in fate which characterizes him from first to last.  Speaking of the consuming trial of skill which is to end so fatally alike for the guilty and the innocent, we see this faith of destiny.

“There is a special providence in the fall of a sparrow.  If it be now it is not to come.  If it be not now, yet it will come.  The readiness is all.”

And with these words, he goes to his fate, only accomplishing the vengeance imposed upon him, at the moment of his own death.  Thoughtful, meditative, melancholy, impulsive, driven almost to the verge of madness by conflicting emotions of grief for his father’s loss, love for Ophelia, hatred and contempt for his uncle, loss of faith in mankind, doubt as to the innocence or guilt of his mother, and with a deed required of him for which he was unfitted by his very greatness, Hamlet nevertheless retained the full use of his intellectual powers to the end of his brief and troubled career.