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Madness And Irrational Behavior In Shakespeares Hamlet Video

Video SparkNotes: Shakespeare's Hamlet Summary Madness And Irrational Behavior In Shakespeares Hamlet Madness And Irrational Behavior In Shakespeares Hamlet

Comments 0 The following was a college essay written by Zach Watters. It has been edited and approved by Ariel Hobbs.

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If you have a Theology essay that you would like published that received a grade of an A- or higher, please be sure to contact us. Furthermore, they all trace his madness to various species of melancholy. Winfried Schleiner, in his magisterial work, Melancholy, Genius, and Utopia in the Renaissance, aptly lays out the contemporary context, showing that a fierce scholarly and socio-political conversation raged over Shakespearew relationship between melancholy and genius, whether celestial, mundane, or diabolical.

According to Schleiner, the Renaissance speculated greatly on the relationship between melancholy and genius.

Madness And Irrational Behavior In Shakespeares Hamlet

Many contemporary medicinal, literary, and philosophical texts attempted to understand why melancholy is a precondition of genius. A generation prior to Shakespeare already witnessed increasing political scrutiny on the miraculous, and prophecy in particular. England passed laws prohibiting the circulation of prophecies, especially those with political content. In particular, he aimed at showing how the melancholic, the temperament Madness And Irrational Behavior In Shakespeares Hamlet acknowledged to be associated with prophecy, could not indeed possess any supernatural gift of divination, because the melancholic humor is earthy and heavy.

England was experiencing an even greater cultural and institutional skepticism towards spiritual phenomena. Disagreements were divided into three groups, between those who believed in the existence of witchcraft, those who believed that, though witchcraft existed, most cases of witchcraft were just diseased imagination, and those who believed that witchcraft was always due to imagination and credulity. The triumph of the naturalistic etiology for witchcraft, possession, and miracles had political implications, given that preternatural phenomena were mostly associated with Puritans and Catholics. That next step, however, towards skepticism in the biblical narrative was a natural move. While Hamlet was being written, the country was click here divided on its assessment of the preternatural and the prophetic.

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The institutional church, however, had officially decided that the miraculous no longer existed, and any kind of modern preternatural Shaoespeares should be explained through medical and natural means. The play courts the various contemporary diagnoses, fears, and suspicions of melancholy. One Renaissance voice to offer a more generous treatment of melancholy was Melanchthon. The Christian melancholic acknowledges the influence of the divine in daily action.]

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