ENGLISH LITERATURE (CBSE/UGC NET)

Detailed explanation-1: -The interpretation which best fits the evidence best is that Hamlet was suffering from an acute depressive illness, with some obsessional features. He could not make a firm resolve to act. In Shakespeare’s time there was no concept of acute depressive illness, although melancholy was well known.

Detailed explanation-2: -Ophelia is depressed and goes mad because she is in love with Hamlet and he has gone mad – or so she thinks. Her father is also killed. Polonius is unhappy because his daughter is in love with Hamlet. Laertes is depressed because his father is killed by Hamlet.

Detailed explanation-3: -“that the Everlasting had not fixed/ His canon against self-slaughter” – Hamlet He is so depressed that he contemplates suicide, but won’t go through with it because it’s a sin. “Frailty, thy name is woman” – Hamlet, soliloquy.

Detailed explanation-4: -Hamlet’s grief for his father is profound and compounded by a sense of having to hide it. He’s also feeling an indifference that is a classic symptom of depression. Left alone, he exclaims, ‘How weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable / Seem to me all the uses of this world!’