Quotes & Sayings About Hamlet Going Insane

It would be insane to call Hamlet a loser, though he has lost and I think that is the lesson of tragedy. — Alain De Botton

Together, cotton and slavery would ensure that there would be no war. Since southerners did not want an armed conflict, it could only come as a result of northern aggression. But northerners would be insane to attempt to challenge the South militarily. Alexander Stephens, soon to become Vice-President of the Confederacy, was not an ardent secessionist. But he struck the same note as the most extreme secessionist when he declared that there was "not a flourishing village or hamlet in the North, to say nothing of their towns and cities, that does not owe its prosperity to Southern cotton". Moreover "England, with her millions of people and billions upon billions of pounds sterling, could not survive six months without it". — John Ashworth

I read the miserable story of the play in which she was the one true loving soul. It obviously described the spread of an epidemic brain fever which, like typhoid, was perhaps caused by seepings from the palace graveyard into the Elsinore water supply. From an inconspicuous start among sentries on the battlements the infection spread through prince, king, prime minister and courtiers causing hallucinations, logomania and paranoia resulting in insane suspicions and murderous impulses. I imagined myself entering the palace quite early in the drama with all the executive powers of an efficient public health officer. The main carriers of the disease (Claudius, Polonius and the obviously incurable Hamlet) would he quarantined in separate wards. A fresh water supply and efficient modern plumbing would soon set the Danish state right and Ophelia, seeing this gruff Scottish doctor pointing her people toward a clean and healthy future, would be powerless to withhold her love. — Alasdair Gray