Pretend or Real?

Hamlet pretended to be crazy in Shakespeare's play with the goal of futhering his plans at revenge. Hamlet's actions and behavior towards Ophelia in Act 3, scene 1, makes me wonder if he eventually drove himself to insanity. His actions towards her seem out-of-the-blue and over-the-top; they were somewhat on the self-destructive side for Hamlet in the way that he was treating her. He rejects and insults her, and I feel like those are the worst possible two things he could have done. He was ruining things, if he was still pretending, for only the reason of making himself believable when he already had people fooled. I think he really did love Ophelia, and was mostly convinced when he said "I loved Ophelia. Forty thousand brothers could not with all their quantity of love make up my sum." He said this after Ophelia was already dead, and he could have had no reason other than love to say that. The fact that he does really love her begs to question how he could do anything to hurt her that really wasn't necessary. Hamlet actually announces that he is pretending to be crazy to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern so is it really possible that he actually is driven crazy? There is something in Hamlet's actions that makes me believe that he really is crazy. I just don't believe he would treat Ophelia like that if he was only in a pretend state of craziness. I think that he could have tried to be more real with her.

In my psychology class, we learned about the Stanford Prison Expiriment and I thought of this when reading the scene with Ophelia. In this experiment, volunteers signed up for an experiment, knowing ahead of time not what the expiriment was studying but what was going to happen. Some people were going to be chosen to be prison guards in a fake prison and some people were going to be chosen to be prisoners. The experiment was supposed to go for two weeks but had to be cut off before the end of one. When assigned their roles, at first, the volunteer subjects didn't get too into their roles. After a day, though, even though the people knew it was not real, they started to get really into their roles as prisoners or prison guards. The volunteer subjects were allowed to leave, too, like Hamlet was allowed to stop being crazy, but they didn't. After only two days, they were so into it, violence was breaking out, some men cried and tried to break out, and it really did not look like an experiment anymore, but the real thing. They had to stop early because it got so out of hand.

From the experiment, Stanford learned that when a person is burdened with a defining word (in the expiriment, "Prisoner 347", for example), or "crazy" in Hamlet, they cannot help but be consumed by the word they are telling themselves they are or that they are being told they are.Hamlet pretends to be crazy for long enough that I really think that it actually makes him crazy. I don't think, though, that he was pretending to be in love; he really did love Ophelia. It was his pretending to be crazy that drove him to actually being crazy that clouded and confused his love.