Dr Erin Sullivan discusses 'What’s wrong with Hamlet?' – summary.

Shakespeare can be considered the greatest investigator of the feelings and of the human soul among the English poets. Between all the tragedies he wrote the most emblematic is that describing the madness of Hamlet. The most famous image of the tragedy sees the young Hamlet who is holding a skull, which is used by the character as a means of dialogue with himself, dialogue aimed at understanding the human mind. but the question that Renaissance and contemporary readers are asking themselves is: what's wrong with Hamlet? Hamlet makes its appearance in the second scene of the first act, scene in which Hamlet returns home to attend the funeral of his father and behaves strangely detached if not angry with the rest of the characters. The approach of his uncle, who became king in place of his father, disturbs him and his mother assumed that it is because of the recent bereavement. This last tries to distract him from the pain experienced, as in the Renaissance the pain was considered harmful from the point of view of mental and physical condition. The particularity of the durability of the pain of Hamlet was so not well seen. It is this peculiarity, this feature out of the ordinary, also understood as a kind of perversion that leads the reader to ask the question: what's wrong with Hamlet?