Personalized written essays - Hamlet – the psychological game The psychological dimension of the Shakespearean drama Hamlet remains undisputed by most literary critics. We explore various points of view on the topic in this essay. Strangely, in his essay “O'erdoing Termagant” Howard Felperin states that the wardrobe scene does NOT reveal the hero's state of mind in a notable way: Despite its nineteenth-century appeal to twentieth-century characterological critics century and for those psychoanalytic ones of the twentieth century, the cupboard scene tells us little about Hamlet's supposed state of mind. For much of the scene he speaks not at all like a son to his mother, but like a preacher to a sinner, not out of personal feeling but out of impersonal indignatio. (102-103) The psychological aspect of Hamlet that is shown most prominently is his melancholy. Lily B. Campbell in “Grief That Leads to Tragedy” explains: If my analysis is correct, then Hamlet becomes a study in the passion of grief. In Hamlet himself it is a passion that is not moderated by reason, a passion that does not yield to the consolations of philosophy. And being an intemperate and excessive pain, Hamlet's pain is therefore the pain that makes the memory fade, that makes reason fail to orient the will, that makes him guilty of indolence. . . . (95-96) His first soliloquy, about his mother, is rather depressing: Shall I remember? why, she clung to him, as if the increase of appetite were increased by what she fed: and yet, within a month - Let me not think - Frailty, thy name is woman! (1.2)Soon Horace and Marcellus……half of the sheet……Hakespeare, claims Vivante, “consciousness” is complete, definitive, evident, not a façade for more limited elements. Shakespeare “does not replace consciousness with the subconscious, the unconscious, the complexes, the instincts, the subliminal”. (11) Gunnar Bokland in “Judgment in Hamlet” explains Shakespeare's attraction to the psychological dimension of drama: In the tragedy of Hamlet Shakespeare is not concerned with the question of whether blood feud is justified or not; it is raised only once and very late by the protagonist (v,ii,63-70) and never taken seriously into consideration. The dramatic and psychological situation, rather than the moral question, is what seems to have attracted Shakespeare, and he chose to develop it, despite the difficult to digest and, at times, somewhat dark elements it might entail.. [. . .] . (118-19)